Next Roadmap: Wish #5 - A Better Competition Creator

Off-season is always a good time to take stock and look at the bigger picture. So where are we now with FML? The re-set seems to have been pretty successful; there are still some bugs but they're being ironed out, and if rumours are to be believed 3D is on the way in the next major update. So far so good. And then? I guess we will see another roadmap - setting out future developments over the coming months. But what will be in it? Well, over the next week I'll set out my top five ideas. Some - like today's - are completely my own, others are drawn from elsewhere in the community with my own suggestions added. So here we go with...

In at number 5 is a better competition creator.

Now, I know this is not most people's top priority. But competition creation is one of the life bloods of a gameworld - keeping people entertained when they have no official matches to play, and allowing for some of the user creativity that is part of what makes an MMO more engrossing than a bog-standard offline game.

So here are some of the things I think it would be good to see incorporated in a new improved competition creator:
- being able to have more than 8 stages to a competition: this can be quite limiting.
- being able to have all the teams from one stage of a tournament going through to the next stage. I've never understood why you can't do this.
- the ability to have teams from multiple previous stages of a tournament go through to a future stage. Say I want to have a repechage style tournament. The losers in the first round go in to a mini-tournament, the winners of which re-join the main tournament for the quarter-finals. Right now when I go to setup the quarter finals, I can select EITHER teams from the mini-tournament OR the winners of the first round, but not both. I'd like to be able to do this.
- related to this the ability to implement seeded non-knockout playoffs such as the McIntyre System used in Rugby League. This could give a fun new twist to tournaments.
- The ability to have group stage schedules in which teams also play sides in other groups like in an American sports system. For example, you might play the teams in your group twice, and teams in other groups once.
- More controversially, the ability for competition hosts to assign teams to groups manually. To avoid this being used unscrupulously by managers looking to give themselves a big advantage, after the groups had been assigned each manager in the competition would need to re-confirm their entry. But the ability to do this could allow for fun tourneys. Perhaps one with a group of Liverpool fans who play each other for the right to face the winner of a group of Manchester United fans for example.
- And finally, as a big fan of the gameworldone podcasts, it would be remiss of me not to mention multi-select! I only organise comps for fun, and it gets pretty annoying having to manually remove 30+ teams. I dread to think what it's like for an FA org. Sort it out SI ;)

Next time... Number 4!