The Global Gaming League recently announced it will hold a qualifying ladder for America's Army which will hold large cash prizes for the winning team and runners up. This event works like no other before and attempts to use a challenging system where you challenge teams that are registered to the ladder both higher and lower ranked then you. The AGC's new point system is also like inventive and new, rewarding winners and activeness, while punishing inactive or unwilling teams.
The New Challenging System
This system is unique in the way that now teams can challenge other teams that are higher ranked, as it traditionally is with TWL, but you can now challenge lower ranked teams then yourself. This new system brings a large problem in how matches will be scheduled. Before I explain the problem let's look at the official rules according to the AGC website (http://www.armygamingchampionships.com)


And here is the rule about challenging down, the new rule that we are not used to working with:


Being able to challenge down does help activity, which the AGC promotes, but helps the better teams take advantage of lesser skilled teams. Another new aspect of this AGC is you can challenge up to 3 teams at a time, and challenge the same team 2 times every 7 days. These are all nice rules, but what do they mean? This means that the top team can challenge the teams with the lowest scores they are allowed to, win, then challenge them again if they are within the limitations. If this 'top team' I used in the preceding sentence is high skilled and the lower ones are weaker, this almost guarantees that the higher up team will win over and over, and keep their top spot.

Another way to say it is this way: Keep challenging the scrubby, newer teams, win, then challenge them again.

Another interesting thing about this is the challenging team gets to choose the 3 possible play dates for the match. This makes it more difficult for the team getting challenged, as they have no scheduling power for the match. It helps the challenging team play the calender game. The calender game? chose dates that will help manipulate matches around the "playing the same team twice in a week" rule.

The only way to avoid getting attacked by the top teams playing the challenging game is to have so little points that they are out of their grasp, which means you have no way to win this ladder.
The Point System
The new system the AGC put in place is fully managed by points. You earn points by winning and playing in matches that you have lost, but you lose some for not playing matches. Now this may seem harmless, but what does it really mean? This point system could mean mischievous activities between the higher up teams.

What could these activities be? I give two examples below. I use the following for the examples below:

Team A, ranked #1 with 1000 points
Team B, ranked #2 with 800 points
Team C, ranked #5 with 450 points
Team D, ranked #6 with 420 points

Example One
Team A, way superior to team C, challenges them. Team C, knowing they will get whooped decline and only lose 25 points. Team A says let's challenge them again, see of they decline again and we can challenge team D, which would thereafter be moved up to #5 (therefore putting them inside #1's challenge range). Either team C declines and team 1 gets a new challenge, or they get to play and whop team C and get 100 points.

Now of course, this is a isolated case, and chances of this happening are slim, but still possible.

Example Two
Another thing that can happen is that team A can be challenged by another good team, let's say B, and just decline after 3 days, wasting B team's time, in fears of losing and giving them 100 points. Little manipulation games like this can happen in this system, and is why losing 25 points when declining a challenge is not enough of a penalty and there needs to be a time delay between challenging one team twice in a row.

Very mischievous indeed.
Lack of Anti Cheat
A competition for money that uses no additional anti cheat program? That, is just asking for trouble. I predict for big trouble to arise unless something to be done quickly about cheating in matches. With all the money the army is throwing into prizes, you would think they would have something a little more sophisticated then punkbuster to handle cheaters. CDC would have been a perfect for AGC especially since it's been added recently to the public market. They could have also cooperated with CEVO to use their anti cheat client, or at least test it this event so that it would progressively get better, and eventually be ready for when AA's first season launches on CEVO.

America's Army already has serious enough problems with cheaters, giving out money will just encourage them to try harder. Without introducing any anti cheat, we could even say that AA is inviting cheaters with large prizes and weak AC.
Closing Notes
The point of this article isn't to bash the AGC/GGL, but to open people's eyes. If you're going to dish out 1000's of dollars at least organize it so it makes sense and works. The organizers of this event obviously did not do the work that was needed and if nothing gets changed quickly, this event's ladder will be trash. The U.S. Army has put about 2 million dollars into this event (not only AA) and it's being thrown away by poor planning. I hope all U.S. taxpayers have fun playing in this, because it sure it costing them.

Good luck to all teams participating.

Story Submitted By: h0b0