Rather than a knockout event, which would only retain the interest of those teams still participating, I think a true league based competition might work like this........
All teams that wished to take part would have to indicate their interest up front and nominate their "home" circuit. ( maybe initially limited to original Papyrus tracks, but I see no reason why it could not be any circuit from the track database).
No two teams could have the same "home" circuit, so it would be on a first registered basis getting the choice, this requires a central common database which also comes into play later...
I'm guessing that we might allow a maximum of 8 teams entered ( although if succesful it might appeal to more and spread across the globe?)in which case we could introduce more divisions?
Each team would have to race every other team twice ...home and away, and scoring points as at present towards a league table.
Yep I was thinking along the same lines but when you start to work out the numbers it gets a bit scary. 8 teams mean there will be 7 home races and 7 away races. So each team will do 14 rounds. So the number of races in total to import into the results table will be (14 * 8 )/2 (because there will be 2 teams in each race). This makes a total of 56 races. That is too much for one person to organize so each league would have to be responsible for organizing their own fixtures and simply providing the results in the form of a GPLRA Export and GPL HTML Export to be imported into the results system. Moderating the races would be at the discretion of the individual league admins.
Here is the ( maybe !) clever bit, the main organiser (UKGPL?) would only set the opening date and the closing dates of the "season" which, assuming there were 8 teams would mean 16 races to be accommodated. It would be up to the individual teams to organise their race schedules at any times to suit themselves within that season, meaning that each team would have to arrange their own fixture list and submit the dates to a common database purely to give everyone an overview of activity.
That way the organising of venues and servers and dates would be evenly spread across all teams. Failure to succesfully arrange and complete a fixture would mean that those teams simply got a "no-score" at the end of the season.
If after a first season, which might take 6-8 months to complete, more leagues applied to join the fun I would suggest we limit the number of teams to a max of 8 per div and start a new division dividing the number of teams equally.
Yep if we go for it we should make it the 2010 GPL World Series. The races to be completed between say March and November of 2010 at the discretion of the league admins.
Othere simple rules would have to be drawn up and maybe a moderators panel..one from each team....which would allow a panel of 6 independant mods to rule on any issues in a race??
I hope this makes sense???
Yes but I think the main organizer should start a thread on SpeedGeezers or RSC that all the participating league admins can join. That way it wouldn't be based on a forum owned by one of the individual leagues.