Is it just me or are there anyone who are also experienceing problems with GMR at the moment?

Submtting turns through the desktop client is failing;
opening up game page on the website is taking forever or not happening at all (therfore eliminating the possibility of submiting turns through the ebsite);
opening messages/comments to read or posting messages/comments is also taking forever.

New Result (soon to be updated on the new League site):

Theme 12 http://multiplayerrobot.com/Game#14745
Date finished: 23rd of July, 2015
Challenger: Adyyc
Winner: Ayubalugu
Losers: Adyyc, Nigilus Angelus, Woadax, raba.yuugi (left for valid RL reasons, no penalty, was not replaced by any player)

It was actually Rillithain, the founder of the GMR League, who updated the original site.

We will not be able to keep the original site as Rillithain is using it for other personal things. So we will use another site for sure.

Atlan and Ulr!k3 are more knowledgable than me on these matters, but let me summarize what I can: we tried 2 different free hosting that Atlan found, we will probably go with the faster one. Also we are looking at registering a domain name for the league, we will announce it here once ready.

@Hoagie your offer is very much appreciated, I will inform Atlan and Ulr!k3 and we can decide then.

@Kavalor thanks, we would be happy to get as many players involved as possible in the League, as part of admin team and/or as active players.

@Atlan OK, I think based on your explanation, I understand the logic behind keeping the total ratings constant in the system, even for 4FFA cases. I never thought about this from a probability perspective and I guess you are right, the probability of winning in 4FFA is 25%, so there should be a bigger reward and probability of losing is 75% so the loss should be smaller. So, when we get to implementing the new rating system, we would go with keeping total of ratings constant.

@Atlan About your question about Themes: Based on the existing League site, I think a description text and screenshots are a must, save file can be optional, but good to have.

About Elo ratng system: as we will have 1v1 and also FFAs, keeping the total rating points constant (of course constant value times the number of players) does not make sense to me. Maybe I do not understand fully how elo ratings work (I got no experience in it whatsoever).

For example in a duel game I understand this, winner gains X, loser loses same rating of X.

Even for a 2v2, I think this can work, the rating change can be calculated based on Team A's average and Team B's average.

However, in an FFA or a 3v3v3 situation, how can we implement this? Should the change of rating calculated based on the winners current rating vs the losers average rating (probably)? Even if we do that and find Y as the rating change that should be applied as a result of this game, the winner will get +Y, the losers will each get -Y, therefore messing up the total of all ratings in the system. If it was 4 FFA, the total of ratings in the system will decrease by 2Y (winner got +Y, 3 losers each got -Y).

A solution can be distributing the loss of rating among all the losers. With the same example of 4FFA, the winner gets +Y rating and losers each get -Y/3. However, I doubt that this would be fair. Losing and FFA game where you have higher number of players would be much less risky than losing a duel, in terms of losing rating. This also means that 1 win of a 4FFA gets you equivalent of 3 losses. I would not think that 3 loss followed by just 1 win should get you back to where you started (of course approximately, cause your rating change per game will differ based on your current rating and your opponents' in each game)

I would welcome explanations if I got it wrong or solutions to this issue I tried to explain.

Anyway, as we are setting up the new League site based on the old system (at least as a start), this is not an urgent issue now.

[FILLED] http://multiplayerrobot.com/Game#11781

Looking for 2 players, to take over Romans and Celts. Game is at turn 179. Both of these civs have never been in any war so far (AFAIK). Denmark and America had been at war with Mongolia for some time, Russia recently DoW ed on Denmark (and triggered America to DoW on Russia).

Scoreboard is:

932 Russia (Ayubalugu)
892 Brazil (Flaminghomer92)
695 Celts (AI) (this civ was played by Ondaderthad but had been under AI control for some time now)
593 Rome (AI) (it has been controlled by AI since I joined)
488 America (Sirius)
473 Mongolia (Alain)
435 Spain (Konohatensai)
331 Denmark (Skittleskirt)

EDIT: Rome taken, Celts still available

This is way beyond I expected for a start :-) It would be great to have all these features, but do we have the resources (time) to implement all? Unfortunately, I have no web development experience at all. I have coding experience, which is totally out of date now (back in the day coded in VB), but I think I can learn and handle not so complex tasks. Just you two let me know what part I can help with.

Having a different rating for different themes is a good idea but I think some themes should be grouped together as a game type. So instead of per theme rating, we should have a rating per game type (6FFA, 2vs2, 3vs3vs3 etc.)

Using the existing Themes, here are the Game Types I would group them as:

Duel: Theme 1, 7
2vs2: Theme 2, 13
3-5FFA: Theme 3, 5, 11
Duel OOC: Theme 9
3vs3vs3: Theme 14

Themes 6, 10, 15 were just "reuse a theme"
Theme 4 is a no longer used Peace game (no war is allowed), it should probably be a separate game type.
Theme 8 can be a Duel (if there were only 2 players) or 3-5FFA
Theme 12 is a 3-5 but Science Victory only, so not sure if it can be under the 3-5FFA game type.

Also, even if there are separate ratings per game type, we can still have an overall rating, that would be just a weighted (or simple) average of all other ratings.

BTW, I have recreated the existing data (Standings, Completed and In Progress Games) from the current League page, put them in a spreadsheet. I can share it through Google Docs or send you the xlsx.

Great news! Thanks to Hoagie's message, now we have 3 volunteers, Ayubalugu, Atlan and Ulr!k3 (who sent me a GMR message) to take over the administration of the League.

Recreating the scores spreadsheet should not be hard, but I am OK if the majority wants a fresh start.

The point system had always bothered me, win or lose your score change by just 1 point, regardless of your opponents or if it was a team game etc. If anyone is experienced in it, we can try to implement an Elo rating system or something similar.

Another feature that would be good to have is a way to report results by players themselves. However, this might require more effort than it is worth (use some forms on the site, have players log in through Steam etc.) and if we have a team of League admins, updating the results can be done by any of them and would not be delayed that much anyway.