Power your own Ladder or Tournament with Google Spreadsheets

This article might be relevant for you, if you ...

• Organize Rivals tournaments (public or for your alliance)
• Want to run your own Custom Match (i.e. Equal Level) ladder within your alliance

In both cases, one of your challenges is to turn reported matches into new tournament or league standings easily. If you do a knock-out system, you can just use a tool like Challonge for this. But what if you have a more sophisticated tournament structure (e.g. group stages), or want to run a skill-based ladder (like the main ranked ladder in Rivals, but with equal levels)?

In these cases, Google Spreadsheets can be a powerful tool for you to save work, and create nicely layouted rankings.

Two case studies:

Rivals Team League (RTL) reporting and standings

RTL is a large team league with dozens of players and hundreds of matches played. It's a large effort for AwDaSea, who runs RTL, to track results and then update tables. To make his life easier, I created a way that he only needs to track the reported results in a spreadsheet, and it automatically updates into new standings and individual player stats.

• Here AwDaSea enters the results 
• The automatically updated group standings (also see image)
• The individual player stats tab, also automatically updated

We also tracked the chosen starting maps, and a simple additional pivot table allows us to check which map was chosen how often. Among the so far 105 picks that were actually played, the top maps were:

• 17% Rorschach 
• 15% Open Water
• 7% Three Lanes
• 6% Tug of War
• 6% Fighting Pit

Now you know which two maps you should be prepared for in tournaments! :)

Your own competitive ladder without levels

Custom Matches are great to train, and play without levels. One challenge about Custom Games is that not everybody is motivated, as you need to arrange them with your buddies, and clicking on the "Battle" buttom for the official ranked ladder is easier.

So, alliances think about how to make Custom Games more engaging and fun. Our first idea was our own league system, in which everyone plays a Best-of-5 against everyone else. This mostly went well, and this table could be used as a template if you want to run your own league. Congrats to Benedikt Ernst for winning season 1, btw!

But the downside of a league is that you have to chase down those that you didn't yet play against. And the most active custom game afficionados would like to play each other more often.

My new solution for this is to turn the league into a ladder. The differences:

1. Anybody can play anybody else how often they want. 0, 1 or 10 times in a week.
2. The spreadsheet automatically calculates a new rating based on the matches played
3. Reporting matches is easy, you just enter winner and loser names from a dropdown

What I use as a rating algorithm is ELO, which is also used in Chess. This ensures that the ratings (over time) are a reflection of player skill. And it ensures it doesn't matter whom you play. If you play the highly rated guy, you will risk less points but can gain many. If you play the lowly ranked guy, it's vice-versa.

Feel free to make copies of these spreadsheets if you want to look closer how they work (a part of the logic, especially in the RTL one, is in hidden tabs). If you need help to understand, reach out to me, you can find me at the offical Rivals discord and at our alliance discord under the nickname 'shuukit'.

Video of the day

Of course, it's gotta be a video from the Rivals Team League! This highly recommended matchup is:

Lopatka / CzechoSlovakia WolfDogs against Conrad / CrazyRussians.