[EricH]

Originally Posted by lineskier

When you try to level the playing field between teams with no experience and teams with over a decade you run into issues. Its an idea I've been playing with but rather than leveling the playing field with the game, level it by making alliances of veteran teams and rookie teams, encouraging veteran teams to adopt rookie teams and help them learn.

They tried that in 2007. It was almost universally hated. The alliance generation algorithm that year separated teams into 3 groups by number, and assigned one team per group to each alliance. Playing against 1114 or 67 or teams of that nature for 3/4 of your matches or more (and never with them or with teams of their caliber) is not the most fun thing in the world, to put it mildly, and that's what happened at some of the smaller events. (The larger events had it easier, due to larger pools to draw from, but there were still a huge number of repeat opponents compared to, say, 2009 or 2010.) Also note that age and ability are not necessarily related; I can think of rookies that are more veteran in action than some of the veteran teams.

A better way would be to encourage veterans to adopt rookies and help them learn. There are a number of ways to do this; the simplest is a pat on the back; a more expensive but more productive method would be to offer an extra discount on something. The hard part would be to convince the rookies that they need the help that the veterans offer...