descentchampions.org

Should VENDETTAS be made official??

What's a vendetta?

Where when you challenge someone to play a set of matches. Right now when you call someone out you only at allow to challenge them for one match and so on.

Hmm... okay, then what's "official"?

...I mean, you can still do this informally. So what would change? Rank drops if they don't do it?

http://descentchampions.org/how_works.php

Go down to challenges and review it. It would be pretty much the same thing but you would be required to play more than one match. I could see this being an issue with people which is why I said no. Keep it a side game like x's are a side game.

Vendettas are useful for a pilot who wants better chances of taking a higher ranking, since you get 3 opportunities instead of one, and generally one will be on your home level and one on theirs, then a random/neutral map. They're also good for unambiguously settling a previously anomalous score (e.g. Jediluke and I earlier). So some consequences of this could be that the tiers get a little more leaky, and streaks might be broken more frequently. Maybe, anyway.

In the thought of the potential for abuse, I propose there should be a stricter limit to how frequently they can be issued compared to standard challenges. The current rule is:
"You can't issue challenges to more than three pilots at a time, and only three pilots at a time can issue challenges to you. You can't challenge any given pilot more often than once every two weeks. If you issue a challenge and then play the match that same day, you still cannot re-issue a challenge to that same pilot until the full two weeks have passed."

Perhaps for vendettas it could only be one pilot at a time, with the same 2-week period (or less if we go with a shorter season)?

Also, I'm still torn as to whether I think this should be official or optional. I mean, I like vendettas and am happy to accept them, but I'm also sympathetic to those who might not want to be forced to play 3 games in a row with someone. I'm gonna sleep on it.

Whoa! Vendettas, if made official, would have nothing to do with official challenges. You offer the series. Your opponent is free to accept or decline -- though if he accepts, he does have to play all three games. Vendettas are for raising the stakes, for playing out a longer contest with someone. Challenges are different. Challenges exist so you can't run from anyone.

What's a vendetta? It comes from the old Descent ladder, the IDL. It's a three game series you play with another pilot. Where you play is up to you guys, though a lot of DCL vendettas look like "I pick, you pick, random". On DCL, there is no official support for them. No rules, no tracking on the site, nothing. It's just pilots who remember IDL doing what they used to do on IDL.

On IDL, at least, vendettas did a couple special things that you couldn't do just by playing a series of matches. The ladder enforced that you had to finish the series -- you couldn't play anyone else until you'd finished your three matches. There were medals and stats that keyed off of vendettas. And change in ranks keyed off of the result of the series as a whole. So you could lose the first game but win the next two, and keep your rank.

The question is whether we should support them in some way, and if so, how.

I, personally, have liked the freeform nature of them so far. But they're common enough that stats would be nice. So maybe it's time.

The summer of H8 was simply a series of vendettas of indeterminate length. It would have been really neat to have picked up (and issued!) a whole bunch of vendetta medals for that effort.

Yeah, I agree with Drak. Vendettas are not something you can 'officially challenge' someone to.

Vendetta's being official would be so that stats can exist and awards.