clans vs teams

I decided not to post this in feature requests since it's more in an effort to get a feel for this idea rather than request something yet.

As I mentioned here and observed in a few other messages, it might be hard to get all the players of a team out. There has been some talk of if a subset of players of a team are allied and win, that team would get a win. I do think teams as they are have a place in winbolo.net, but I also think this type of being part of a bigger group is really cool also.

Actually I haven't played quake or other real-time games enough to know the 'culture' of internet clans. Maybe some of you who have could comment.

Could people join more than one clan? I would think not, but it might suck being stuck in one clan.

Would single-player games count as a win towards your clan? Would there be a column for 2x2 wins? 3x3 wins? but what about 3x2 or 4x3 etc

Would people be more inclined in games to choose teams based on clans? would this result in uneven teams?

the idea has potential but there are some details to work out... comments?

-Canuck
http://andrewroth.ca

I will use Warcraft II as an example of clans.
We used to have a gaming league for Macintosh Warcraft II called Mac Gaming League. There was a nifty webpage setup(actually very similar to winbolo.net) where registered players were ranked. Being part of a clan was important, but not completely necessary. The games of Warcraft II and Winbolo are similar in one aspect; normally you will only play a max of 4 people at a time. For our clans, you might have 10-20 people actually in the clan, but of course not everyone was on at the same time. You would team up with your clan mates in team fights, and you might even go 1x1 against a clan mate sometimes for fun.

Extrapolating from that example, we can approach the concept of teams in winbolo in the same way. Lots of people can be in teams, but you don't always have to be on at the same time to play against another team. You can have 1x1 or 2x2(or higher, if you can get enough people on).

As for scoring, since it may be hard to have a significant # of team vs team games, thus leading to very low and limited team rankings, an alternative scoring method for teams might be used.
Teams themselves earn no points. Each team's points can be averaged from the scores of all of the team members. With such a method, team "rankings" are more dependent on the individual members of the team and their scores, and not on actual full team vs team competition.
Some problems which I personally don't like with simply averaging scores is that if you have 3 people w/ really high scores and a couple newbies join the team w/ low scores, it brings down the average of the whole team. Perhaps incorporating a weighted team scoring system to help counter the mathematical defects of averaging numbers would make this more fair.