For those that don’t know about it, I was also just pointed at this newer (but also old) thread which ended up discussing arena-style tournaments: Rumination on Tournament Systems
I’m still feeling like it’s interesting to integrate ladders and automatch, improving both in the process:
- Automate challenges in ladders by using automatch (and cull inactive players)
- Add ladder for live/blitz automatch games as well
- Add some visualization of how a ladder is changing over time
For correspondence, I think it would feel similar to ladders now, but with challenges happening automatically, and pauses happening via “vacation”.
For blitz, an automatch-based ladder would work out to something more arena-like in feel, I think. For live, perhaps a kind of slow-motion arena would work well too? But, need some mechanism other than “vacation” for pauses.