How are you guys doing the IH? I'm a fan of persistent teams since this is how my old basketball pickup group used to run for around 4 years straight. Basically only 2 teams exist (since GAF tops out at 10-11 available at any one time) and each team is composed of 5-8 GAF players with no ringers allowed unless the other team (all 5) agrees. Each team of 5 to 8 will have to be balanced as realistically even/fair as possible such that in an ideal season, each team will win 50% of all games.
Each team picks a name and their W-L record is tracked publicly on the thread. Additionally, either someone volunteers or each GAF player is responsible for tracking his individual W-L record. This is needed because one team might have 6 players online while the other only has 4. In cases like these, all players have to agree on who gets to play on the opposite team for that game, and in the spirit of keeping it competitive, if the team of 4 already has a rice-carry like Meeru they're not going to be gifted bzm just because the opposite team can't run 6 people. The point is to make each game as competitive as possible.
If after several games, it becomes clear that one team's makeup is always dominating the other, a swap of player(s) may be initiated and agreed upon by a majority vote. Games don't have to be planned, due to member availability, which is why we're fielding more than 5 for each team. Also it would be wise to find out when Meeru needs to work if you're the opposing team :3.
Thoughts on this? I play with so many different groups of people online that I rarely play with GAF but if we had this sort of structure I would definitely make this my priority. Having rounds of 5-10 games each or a placement-type first 3 matches might be a good idea to help balance the teams but its really fun if you play like this for several weeks and the stats start building up and you get to find out who contributes the most to his team's wins. This also gives a good incentive for a team to try TMM for practicing when the other team doesn't have enough online to play.