For a long time, the ladder has run alongside the league for those that wanted to participate. However, as time as gone on, more and more people have focused on the league, and the ladder has steadily dwindled. We now have a situation where 1700 games have been played so far this month in the league, and only 6 games this month in the ladder. I'm not entirely clear on the reason, although maybe "people can play blitz whenever and wherever they want, why would they do it in the ASR" is a good possibility. If there is a good purpose for the ladder, then it seems worth keeping and promoting as its own thing. If there is not, it seems best to let it drop, focus on making the best out of the league instead, and developing new ideas such as the ASR school.

The pros of the ladder are that it is a side tournament that is for casual fun rather than serious games. The cons are that it has been criticised for not being in the spirit of the ASR (10 sec sudden death is not the most ideal study environment!) and people can play blitz wherever and whenever they want already.

So, this poll is simply:

a) Do we close the ladder and focus on the league (and, as we continue to develop the plans, the ASR school)
b) Do we keep it running anyway and try to have a plan for developing it to restore activity

What sort of focus does it take away from other asr plans?

The difficulty is simply managing time and space for it on the website, the KGS room, and the administrative areas. These aren't huge things in and of themselves, but I think we'd rather do fewer things well, than offer lots of ideas that aren't well developed or lack particular purpose. If we were to carry on with the ladder, we'd need to focus on making it something of additional value to the league, which we currently don't see it as being, so it would take some of the "how can we make the ASR better" energy - fine if people really want a good ladder system, but pointless if people are not interested in it

The ladder looks very good, but the fact that these are blitz games, it doesnt offer too much. This ladder should work for other kind of matchs, like rengo matchs, arrange teams, etc. this will add more value and will be very interesting for more people. This also is for study purposes, since 4 people will be commeting the match afterwards, this will bring together 4 ways of looking the game, and not just 2, as usual. This may also encourage team work and training buddys. Just more options to improve your strenght in the game.

Thanks, this is useful! Due to this poll, the ladder will be removed from tonight, but it may well come back if there is a useful value/format for it to be held with.

This thread is an excellent opportunity for people to throw around some fleshed out ideas if there are any?

I wonder if, some day, you will start to think about how you want the ASR to be and what's best to get there instead of makings polls for the 5% of the regular room-visitors who use this forum and use them to pretend to do what "the majority" wants...

14 ppl say they don't care about the ladder, so it's shut down, but since only 3 say they want to keep it it's the wish of majority.

Of course, we have huge numbers of plans for what we want it to be and how to get it there. We've made a number of decisions both with and without the support of polls from on here. However, although we have an idea of what we want the ASR to be, it's also important to us to get a gauge of what the users of the ASR want. The room is a very poor forum for getting a good level of opinions, as there is no history of the chat there and we never have 50% of the regulars in the room at any one point. Even when we do, the chat there is of a vocal minority. 17 opinions on this poll is hardly a majority, nor even a vaguely good turnout, but it's better than we get anywhere else. If you have any suggestions to collect opinions of a larger proportion of ASR regular members, then suggest them!

If it was up to me, I'd shut down the ladder without a poll. It doesn't seem to be within the spirit of the ASR, it doesn't seem to achieve much any more, and it now represents under 0.5% of ASR games in a month. I'd rather get the server and script usage off the site unless it's going to offer something of particular value. For what it is worth, the 14 voters saying we should remove the ladder represent more people than the number of players who actually played a game in the ladder this month.

If you have something more constructive to add, we're all ears

ADDENDUM: Registering on this forum is not much effort, to make sure your opinions or feelings on ASR direction are heard. If people don't particularly feel the urge to do this, that's fine, but we will work off the data we have to do what we think is best for the ASR and its members. The more information we have, the better decisions we'll make, but that's partly up to people with an interest in the league not being apathetic