"I can't join the game! It says I've already lost to someone on the Jackals!"
"Okay, try joining the Jackals instead."
"Can't join them either, says I already won against someone on the Cats!"''
(repeat ad nauseum)
People get frustrated because they can't figure out the proper teams. Then someone happens to lose two games and they suddenly can't play any games at all. So they reset and lose two more games, only to find you can only reset once a week. That's when a lot of people decide Takeskot is stupid and go back to planting cabbage.
That leaves the group of dedicated players, who manage to stick with Takeskot despite these initial barriers. Trouble is, because ATITD has such a small population and because of the initial barriers to play, this group is very small; the Egyptian Takeskot League hosts 54 people as of this writing, and of those we generally get a turnout of about 20-30 people per event. With four people per team, it's not long before all these people have played each other once. Throw in the vagaries of fluctuating attendance and the inevitable mixing of teams, and soon it becomes extremely hard to find one viable team setup for a game, let alone a number of games.
Our April 9th Takeskot Sunday event is a case in point: despite the presence of more than 20 people, we managed to play exactly one rank 1 game, and in order to do so we had to recruit one person's spouse and another person's mule to fill spots. Eight rank 2 players were at the event—theoretically enough for a game—and waited patiently for enough new rank 2 players to surface; they never did.
Another important anti-gaming stipulation is that you cannot play a person more than once in the same division. Say Andy plays Beth in a rank 1 Witagog game, and Beth wins. Andy is now off limits to Beth and vice versa, unless one of two things happens:
What's important here is that it's not enough for just Andy to reset, thus wiping his loss off the board; Beth will still show a win against Andy, and thus the two still cannot play each other in rank 1. There are obvious reasons why this restriction is in place; notably, it prevents Andy from taking a dive against Beth repeatedly and resetting after every loss, giving Beth the benefit of multiple victories while allowing Andy to continue as if he hadn't lost any games at all.
Where problems begin to surface is when this system, designed initially for 1v1 games, is expanded to govern team sports like Takeskot. Say Andy, Beth, Charles and Danielle form a team to play William, Xavier, Yvonne and Zephyr. For expediency, we'll refer to them by their first initials, and the team by the acronym that forms: ABCD vs. WXYZ. ABCD plays WXYZ in a rank 1 game, and ABCD wins. ABCD can no longer play against WXYZ, as expected. The same rules apply as before.
However, the next week, Zephyr has to walk his dog and Beth and Charles have a lunch date in RL (because they're in lurve, you see). Xavier decides he's had it with Takeskot and decides to start a school for mutants instead, and William is busy planting cabbages. (Yes, it's high drama in the land of Takeskot.) As a result, the remaining players decide they need to field new teams, with different players. They convince Eugene, Fran, George, Hennessey and Indra to play a game, and divide into teams:
| Hennessey Indra Fran Yvonne | Eugene George Andy Danielle |
All's good, right? ABCD isn't playing WXYZ; in fact, ABCD and WXYZ no longer exist as teams. Instead we've got Team HIFY and Team EGAD.
Hennessey joins the Cats.
Indra joins the Cats.
Fran joins the Cats.
Yvonne joins the Cats.
Eugene joins the Jackals.
George joins the Jackals.
...
...
...
"Hey Andy, what's the hold up? Join the game!"
"I can't join the game, it says I've already won against someone on the Cats."
Less than half of the players involved in this game were in the previous game, and yet none of them can play on the teams they've got. Eventually they rearrange the players so that they can play, by putting Yvonne on the same team as Andy and Danielle (thus negating the game they played against each other; you can play with someone you've already won/lost against). But you can already see how the situation might get worse with more players and more games. Here's a real situation from the April 9th tournament:
| Lill | beaten Vilbert, RotHorseKid, AatonPulonich, Sander, kaayru, kuupid, NuAni, Sallah |
| Tweetiti | beaten TheMazeEcho, Psychodelica, Menna, Panyea, Lill, Latona, Cerys, BabyGrim |
| NuAni | |
| LadyGrim | |
| MrKarl | |
| Vilbert | beaten Cerys, Latona, Tweetiti, BabyGrim, kaayru, kuupid, NuAni, Sallah |
| Les | |
| AatonPulonich |
Eight people, some of whom have already reset and should have clean slates. Let's try to make teams, shall we?
Vilbert has already beaten Tweetiti and NuAni, so all three will have to be on the same team. Tweetiti has already beaten Lill, so she has to be on the same team as well. So Team 1 will be Vilbert, Tweetiti, NuAni and Lill. Let's turn to the second team. Les, LadyGrim and MrKarl don't show up on anyone's win list, so they can be on the second team. Then we add AatonPulonich and—hang on: looks like Lill beat him once. But if we swap anyone out of Team 1 to put Aaton in, we'll create a new conflict. Eight people; no game.
Instead of being so strict with the rule of only playing people once, eliminate the rule and put in its place a weighting system that determines the effect of a game on a person's overall rank. It takes into account the number of times you have played each person on the opposing team, and then reduces the weight of that game on a person's ranking accordingly.
For example, in the hypothetical ABCD vs. WXYZ example from earlier, that game would give everyone the full benefit or penalty because none of the players had faced each other before; in other words, the revised system acts the same way as the old system. But the second game, with HIFY vs. EGAD, would be scored differently.
There are two factors that can affect a game's weight on ranking: the number of people on the opposing team you've played before, and the number of times you've played an opponent before. This can actually be summed up in one number: number of prior plays = (number of prior plays against opponent A) + (number of prior plays against opponent B) + ... + (number of prior plays against opponent n), where n is the size of the team. (Not all Takeskot courts are four-player courts, but at the moment the other variable-player courts are all closed.) However, the two values can have different effects on a game's weighting; it might be decided that the number of already-played opponents is more important than the number of times you've played against any one opponent on the team, for example.
I leave these specific details up to someone else to hammer out, mainly because I don't claim to have the expertise to create a truly robust scoring system. But the key part of this proposal is the weighted system. If team ABCD continued to win against team WXYZ repeatedly, they should see sharply diminishing returns, of course. But the system shouldn't be so strict as to keep Team AEFG from playing HIJZ, just because player A has already played player Z once. With this change, scheduling and planning Takeskot matches immediately becomes much easier, at the expense of making it harder to calculate your own ranking. As ATITD already does this calculation for you (and could even display a projected weighting of any game before the match, if necessary), I see this as a trivial concern.
On behalf of all of us, I implore Teppy and the dev team to give this proposal some consideration, and most of all to do something—anything—to make Takeskot a friendlier game to play next telling. The current situation is untenable, and if it's allowed to continue into the next telling, I imagine a lot of people will give up Takeskot for good.