Okay, can't sleep. (feh) So the following will be an attempt to explain this league a bit, and will no doubt wander into stream-of-consciousness territory. My apologies in advance.
So, Let me elaborate a bit on how the scheduling for this works. Anyone who either doesn't care about the details and just wants to play games... or anyone who REALLY doesn't grasp even a bit of number theory, might just pass this post by.
Part of the apparent problem that makes things look odd to players here... well, I can think of two things.
1> I'm sending each player each week ONLY their games, so they can't see the total 'shape' of a round, much less the whole 'wave' of 10 rounds.
2> We have only one duplication of maps within a division... but it's made worse by the two players in question having IDENTICAL SETTINGS, making it VERY hard to determine who supposedly has 'home advantage'. (Air Division, jgazaille/portace)
3> Game titles have not, for simplicity, specified just who was getting that advantage in a given game. I do NOT think I'll be adding that for this tournament, but if I keep this format for a future semi-repeat (The Platonic Solids? ...a number of other sets of 5, but many have religious overtones, or like the Discordian 'Pentabarf', have 'parts' which are far too long to make good division titles), I'll have to consider it. Or, if demand is sufficient, I'll find a way to shoehorn it in here for the next set of games.
So trust me, I understand the confusion.
Okay, when I set out to schedule this, I wanted something I THOUGHT would be simple... I wanted each player to have a fairly even number of games starting each week, and I wanted everyone to have at least one game at 'home' each week. I started by approaching this from the end of the 5 and 4-player games, and promptly ran into a deadlock of overlapping games with the same set of people, with one person in 3-player games constantly getting home advantage, or having no 'legal' game to schedule... So... I took a break, then thought of it another way.
Scheduling 1 5-, 2 4-, and 3 3-player games per set made 10 weeks, I knew that already... It also left 8 player "slots" that would NOT play in a given week. So to keep the number of games even, that would mean 3 players would miss 2 games (playing 4) and 2 would miss 1 (playing 5) each given week. I was on to something, but it didn't click until I also realized that I'd been looking at 10 unique PAIRS of 5 players (1v1 having been considered early on as an addition to the tournament, 20 1v1 games, 8 per player). Specifically, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-5, 2-3, 2-4, 2-5, 3-4, 3-5, 4-5.
I created 10 physical index cards with those headings, and it rapidly fell into place, so:
1> The players noted in that combination would be the ones to play 5 games in that week, missing a total of 2 games, 1 each... the two 4 player games.
2> As this meant each of the other three players would be missing TWO of the 3-player games, the only way to assure 'home' advantage to everyone was to give them the advantage in the one 3-player game they DID play.
3> This led to the 2 'noted' players that week needing to have the home advantage in the 4-player game they played.
Oddly, the 5-player games became somewhat irrelevant to the process, except for insuring that each player got to have the advantage in two, and only two, of them. These 10 games were randomized, and stuck onto the cards. What I should have done with them would be to randomize them separately for each division. *shrug*. As it is, in each division, when that division's week of (example) 2-4 comes up, player 3 has the advantage in the 5-player game, in addition to their 3-player game.
Week 1-2 (card 1) then reads:
1-2-3-4-5
2-3-4-5
1-3-4-5
1-2-3
1-2-4
1-2-5
With the bold numbers representing the 'home team' in that game. Given the above logic, the league's schedule is determinable by seeing either the 3- or the 4-player games in a division for any given round. Granted, it's not exactly a transparent process, but it IS logical and verifiable.
Once the 10 card were written, it was just a matter of feeding 1-10 to random.org 5 times for the divisions, and the league's schedule was set.
....................
Okay, I've explained things (hopefully), and given some thought while writing this (and lying in bed prior to this) to the thought of making an excel sheet that can handle the 360-game schedule for the first wave/round of the tournament... I don't like it, but it's a darn sight better check on my math and point totals than doing it manually, so I'll develop such a thing. Once it's done, It will go up somewhere it can be accessed by anyone interested in it.
Oh... and perhaps sadly, I DO really think like this... ESPECIALLY at one in the morning. *sigh*
