Team tEaMlEsS

[An SQUERRILz]

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There is a significant proportion of inactive to active teams, and teamless to teamed players.
Some active players would also rather be teamless than join a 'poor' team for long periods of time. I can only guess the reasons might be
1) not wanting to commit to a 'poor' team for an unknown (wishfully short) length of time, considering their focus would be on leaving for the better
2) not wanting to be shamed by the team they're in
3) something vague about funmatches are fun

I liked the "official funmatch" idea but that league was never popular because GU official matches were more frequent at the time; and because no one believed or acknowledged its existence. The idea was that an FM could be official as long as at least one person on each team (so no switching) was registered in the official funmatch league. There were no teams because players had an individual zelo, and whenever they funmatched the system would assign individual rating changes depending on which team won and which team was a "statistically" stronger combination.

If that idea was too much work for something crazy, I wonder if teamless people could be considered a team with a rating, and be able to match as one.
PROS:
- more official matches and rating changes
CONS:
- more work reporting matches; space taken up on GU website
- Teamless' rating may not be meaningful, with such a large team. (Would you agree to official as Teamless or the real team if you know you'll lose? Or would you bother even if you won as Teamless? It depends on benefit to the real team; should playing Teamless have the same rate of change of zelo as real matches?)

Whether the idea is appropriate depends on whether people care about ratings; whether FMs are good the way they are now (or should some be treated more seriously/fairly, without player swaps); whether teamless people should get the table scraps of matches or be as good to go (if not more ready)...
Some people that are looking for teams may appreciate the idea, others not care for it. But like on BZMB, people will match as Green/Red simply because it is there. There is also the possibility of more than one 'garbage collected' team.

[Cobra_Fast]

This sounds very interesting, but I see some problems.
1) I could think of players "switching" to Teamless so they wouldnt have to face the consequences in case of a loss (that much).
2) Team Teamless would have extremely vaarying skill in their matches because Teamless would have a lot of new and some experienced players. Which would rather make it worse that better as the experienced players dont tend to pass on their knowledge to foreigners.
3) I, too, see the zelo rating problem. Matching Teamless could end you up anywhere at match score, so an actual team cannot calculate their chances against the enemy. So in case that this comes true, I'm definitely for half or a third of the zelo change it would do on Team vs Team.

However, I would keep the good old funmatch as it's something very important to the league. It's fun, it's people, it's talk, it's whats keeping the league alive. I would add matching Teamless as an additional opportunity.