With what's going on with UrT HD, it would be good to set it up now and it will be ready when there will be more players. I don't think the lack of players is what we should focus on. Not enough matches? Count the PCW then. I'm sure it's possible to make a bot that would sync matches on a server. There's about 300 people in here, I'm sure it's enough of a sample to start with.
Making this game more competitive with statistics will force people to play seriously, to take their accounts seriously and think twice before they'll do something stupid.
"b) don't think that a game without any kind of matchmaking can have a reliable Elo-system - the rules and skill levels of different servers are far too different. "
I was talking about UZ. It has its own match making system + UrT has a competitive match frame (/ready, /timeout, etc).
"how do you want these numbers to raise if you keep calling every new player a banned returner without any proof ?"
What are you talking about? I don't understand. Oh and who cares about wasted accounts. It'll just be more entries in the database.
"Well, it's a good idea in theory, but to implement it would be no small feat, especially where a game is reaching the end of its current life-cycle. And players are becoming more interested in trolling the game and community, rather than playing it. Which would void the usefulness of such a feature. As with most ELO systems, people would just end up having too much of an effect on the ranking of others by negative means."
It will encourage the game to last. What we need is new features or new content that boosts the game. I suggesting something here. Yes there's a lack of players-everything-and-so-on but you won't bring all this back if you do nothing.
I'm telling you, people will stop being stupid if they are put in a serious frame. Add statistics and you'll see them concentrate more.
"I agree with dcdd's 2nd point also, and skill is not the only thing that makes a great team Smile If it did, whichever team i was part of would win every league, every year..... ;P"
Statistics and quantitative methods are there to define what's going on, not to influence it. So I'm not sure I got your point there.
"ELO is clearly not a good idea to rank teams. Because teams change, players change ... and we just don't have enought match to have a proper ELO ranking (a lucky team play 24 matchs a year ...)."
... And? Yes they change and so what? It's part of the ranking
. As I've said earlier, if there's not enough matches, you either add more matches or take PCWs into account.
Oh and btw, ELO system would count every UZ season lol. So for example if we start it, it will take into acocunt TS current season + future seasons + summer cup (TS matches only) + winter cup (TS only) and so on. Same with CTF and Bomb. I'm not against the idea to make it retroactive (add up all the previous seasons) but hats off to the guy who can do it.
EDIT: Just a few words to convince you more. UZ is the most famous league here. You guys have to create matches and organize them, I'm sure you should create another branch of your league to treat everything that's scores/stats related. It would be nice and great and I'm sure it will bring you more people. You complain about people not taking seriously because there's actually nothing to be taken seriously (no offence). There's actually not much of a difference between a PCW and a real match now... What would make it more competitive would be... For example, why don't you have playoffs for all the other divisions? 6 to 8 matches to play in a season and nothing else is sort of bad for the lower teams. ClanBase did it and it worked perfectly and trust me as an ex-CB admin and CB player it was taken seriously as hell. I would need more inputs from the teams in lower divisions about this but I think the playoffs should not only belong to 1st division teams.