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The FGM Combat Mission Ladder is Retired

Ithikial

FGM 2ND IN COMMAND
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I've been managing the FGM ladder since mid-2014 and over that time we've had one major change from a detailed game data collection through to a simple ELO point system. The game count steadily declined over the following years and we started to talk about dropping the club service back in 2019 (I think). We kept at it however just in case the game count picked up but the trend continued. Even the surprise Cold War release recently has had no real impact on the number of reported battles being lodged.

Just before Christmas I plugged in the latest battle results and noticed something. As shown by the 2021 game chart below, there's simply no longer any wide club use of the ladder service. It's for a handful of ladder die hards... okay... just Titan in 2021. :p I confirmed my suspicions with @Bootie and it was quickly agreed to drop the ladder once and for all at the end of the year. This isn't an attack in any way on the the handful of key ladder players, but there's simply no point in running a club wide service with over 350 active members but no more than seven people lodging 5 or more games in a full year.

So thanks everyone for lodging the battles over the years but for now we'll turn this off and dedicated our time to other pursuits. :D To 2022!

The graph...
FGM Player Game Count.png
 
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I understand. But you should leave the all time ladder up, however. An interesting piece of FGM lore.

Many of us found FGM by looking for a place to play CM.
 
It's a shame, I was trying to get more ladder games in lately, but I get it, it's a niche thing.
Thanks for all the work @Ithikial
 
Thankyou @Ithikial for your long efforts and patience with this. But it does seem mostly irrelevant now with those numbers.

Mots of my opponents prefer non-ladder matches, and TBH myself and my most recent opponent only did a ladder match to get the 2021 award...
 
I agree, understandable given the statistics. Although I also understand that those select few who played for the ladder will miss the feature.
I like the ladder reports forum section because it gives me room to make a record that the game took place and to write a short AAR. I also like reading short AARs written by others. Perhaps we could keep it there - "a short AAR section" - for people to record their games, whether they count towards a ladder or not.
 
The Few Good Men and The Blitz should merge. FGM has a more active forum with more modern software but The Blitz ladder is more active and is fully automated, as far as I can tell. Adding the 124/year or so FGM ladder games to the ~200/year Blitz games (modern and WW2 ladders combined*), gives you over 300 ladder games per year.

In the meantime there is no reason you can't log game results to the Blitz ladder and then write the AARs here.

*The Blitz has separate WW2 and Modern ladders, unfortunately. They should be merged.
 
Hi folks and thanks to @Ithikial for his opening post. Yes, the ladder has been discontinued.

I'd like to thank everyone who battled on it over the years but the work and time invested began to outweigh its effectiveness and so we have pulled the plug.

Thanks go to Ithikial for basically running this for the last few years... but its the first in a few changes that will be coming the way of the club in 2022.
 
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