How to run a league (Outpost Style)

Howdy folks, Dorksworth here. Today I’m going to talk to you about the way we run the Outpost League and why we think it’s the best way. Now that’s not to say that other ways are bad, but we found out very quickly that the “official” rules were not very practical when you’re trying to run a league alongside other real life commitments. So without further ado...

How to determine league standings
The official rules suggest using your team ranking as the primary factor for determining where you stand in the league. The problem that we see with that is purely on personal preference. It just doesn’t sit right with us that a team that is asset and cash rich should rank higher than a team that won more games.

Consequently, we run a league points system where you get:

• 3 points for a landslide win
• 2 points for a win of 1-6 strikes
• 1 point for a draw
• 1 point for a  loss of 1-6 strikes
• 0 points for a landslide loss

In the event of a tie on league points, we then consider other factors such as win:loss ratio and team rating.

One early concern we had was that this would reward high scoring teams too much, and ignore our more violence focused teams. However, we’ve found that this is simply not an issue, as a good slamming team should always focus on removing the enemy’s ability to strike. In conjunction with this, a striker team will find it progressively more difficult to win games as the league progresses due to taking losses.

MVP’s
Officially, you’re supposed to hold an eBay style bidding war for MVPs prior to each round of games. The problem with this is that it requires you to have all your coaches in one place at the same time. I don’t know about your league, but we run leagues of 12 or more people which last for months. It’s simply not practical to get everyone in one place at once.

One possible solution we worked with was the idea that you could put your bids in electronically, however we found that coaches at their computers are less inclined to communicate with their next opponent to work out their underdog bonus, so bids could only be made with real money. Consequently people were less than inclined to waste their precious money on one shot bonuses, and the MVP system was grossly underutilised.

The solution we have come up with relied on MVP’s only being unique on a match basis. So at the start of every game, when coaches are together and have worked out their team rankings and underdog bonus, at that point they then hold an open bidding war for MVPs, and that way they can use their underdog bonus in conjunction with their liquid cash.

Money
Again we run it slightly different from the official rules, we give out a flat appearance fee of at least 4mc (to potentially cover one cheap resurrection) plus:

• 3 dice for a landslide win
• 2 dice for a win of 1-6 strikes
• 1 dice for a draw
• 1 dice for a loss of 1-6 strikes
• 0 dice for a landslide loss

That way the money keeps on flowing, and teams that fall on hard times don’t end up turning into masses of free agents as they can generally afford to buy the odd new player here and there.

Friendlies
Whilst friendlies are encouraged, no friendly game can affect the league, so no tracking levels up, no earnings, no deaths or kills, and no league points. We find that this is much less complicated from an administrative perspective than trying to track the multitude of variables that can occur as a result of friendlies.

That just about covers it, in all other respects we play as per the official rules. I hope this helps some of you to set up your own leagues, if you have any questions or comments, please drop us a message below!