So MausGMR and I have been discussing having an Operation Pitchfork DFM tournament to get people working together as teams and for a fun thing to do as a group. He just sent me his organizations first draft on the subject today, so I'm going to share it here. Let me know what you guys think, and if we need to make any changes.

DFM is going live and Maus has been talking to the pitchfork guys about setting up a league.

The proposal is for a season system with teams participating on a win/loose/draw points system to decide the season winner. Each team will need to play a pre determined number of matches in a season, playing every other team at least once, and no team more than three times. Teams can have a number of pilots on the bench and can select who and what ships to field. In future seasons ship limits put in place.

Leading up to the start of a new season teams will need to register using the league registration forum at http://www.iavgaming.com/leagueforum , once the season has started teams can use the forum and chat facilities to arrange matches posting the results to their match once complete - the league rankings will then be updated by a league official to reflect the outcome.

The system will track who has played whom and what teams are outstanding, what ships were used as well as flagging teams that can no longer be played (however friendlies are still allowed, the results can be recorded but will not reflect on the teams standings)

Teams that do not complete the minimum required games by the close of the seasons will be disqualified from the standings, if a team is being awkward organiser a match complaints can be raised to the league referees and the awkward team may be disqualified for non-sporting behaviour. In the closing weeks if a team is a no-show this is automatically a loss.

Cheating accusations need to be backed up with video evidence, instant disqualification will take place and a ban from all future league activity


The initial season will be a calibrator using IAV's site to test the systems and rules - IAV will remove as much branding from league pages as possible, and not put any recruitment links in or canvas any existing affiliated players - The system and data will be maintained by league admins while system development and integration with the underlying website / forum system takes place

May be redundant given CIG's leader boards, but why not

I think it's an interesting idea, but seems like we'll need to wait till most ships are in the game so as to not alienate those who don't own a single seater. I know I personally won't train very hard in a ship I don't plan to own, but when my ships go live in DFM I'm likely to spend a lot of time customizing the HUD and other aspects specific to that ship.

I agree with Jonais.. It will be some time before my 350 will be flyable. However, 350 or not i'd love to take part.

This doesn't have to be a thing that happens right away. This just putting it on the table for an activity to consider when the multiplayer segment of it comes along far enough. As for leader boards, those are nice and everything, but I want to see people fielding teams for some friendly competitive rivalry. No really big prizes in mind except for the fun had by all right now.

Aye, as Benjamin said, it's more about pitchfork teams getting together and playing off against one another for mutual benefit.

Will help us come together a lot as a group also.

Fingers crossed for dogfighting tomorrow!

This is gonna be fun.

the best of the best make our elite unit?

So the Lobby system for Arena Commander still hasn't dropped yet, but when it does, I'm going to need some people to lend me a hand in organizing this competition. Anyone that has experience with building or managing competitive brackets and/or wrangling people together to organize them at all would be very, very helpful to me.

We've got a little time, so if people who want to assist with this when it does come down want to think out loud here about how they'd want to organize it, I wouldn't mind at all.

We're thinking about score system to use currently Ben.

We're still down for putting this together buddy. My engineer is waiting for plans atm so we can start putting something together.

Anything you'd like to see?

The exciting thing is seeing racing coming out as well. We could do a triathlon event. Make it a week long or something. Best scores from combined events.

For solo players, we've got racing, death matches, and Vanduul Swarm mode.

For Team Events, we could still do Racing, but then we can also add in Capture the Core and Vanduul Co-op mode. Best combined scores as well?

It would be nice to be able to take advantage of everything that CIG is giving us. But that may be a long term goal. Maybe to keep thing simple right now, we could just do something like a death-match competition, with a parallel racing competition as well. People could enter either/or.

Let me know what you think about this, and what you think we can get done.

Sounds great man, we can look into that for sure. I'll have a chat with my guys.

Ultimately I think it should all be possible because most game modes currently use a scoring system thats point based, so we just have people do entries for that alongside screenshots. Should be easy enough.

We're going to put our first focus on a team deathmatch league, just to get the basic one on the go. Stay tuned folks will have updates in the near future.

I do like the idea of the triathlon and other activities for people to take part in solo or in teams, that are scored, but I don't want us to take on too much in one go.

Will let you know how we get on.

Here's where we're at so far.

It's basic stuff but ultimately it doesn't have to be complicated for what we're wanting, at least for initial testing.

It's going to be a screenshot review, pre arranged matches through the forums, placed within a league bracket system based on signups.

We'll be doing some testing as soon as organised matches come through in the next few patches.

Watch this space

http://iavgaming.com/leagueforum

Awesome! Glad to see it. Hopefully the big patch drops smoothly for us all, and we can start testing the new lobby system out to see what we have to work with. I'm thinking this will be pretty fun.