Sounds quite a sensible idea to me - 4 month seasons gives people a decent length of time to get games in without being stupidly long (I think).

If this is implemented then every game I host during the winter season will have snow as the weather.

You could separately record results in a big table so that people can still see their overall ladder record, but just start counting for the ladder proper from scratch. not sure how much extra effort/room that would take. Maybe even just keep enough data for a overall wins/losses score for each player as well as a proper history like you have now for the current season.

That could be a good idea. However, I think I'd probably keep an archive of the table at the end of each season, then post the 'full' table in January or at the end of the Winter season or something.

Seasons for the ladder? Meh. What happened to the good old days where you meet someone online and get your arse creamed? Okay, poor taste there...

I'm actually all for the plans, because I haven't had time to accumulate a massive score, yet. Or sign up, for that matter

EoJ, that sounds like a really good idea.
But, I think two major reasons why the ladder goes through periods of stagnation are general inactivity of the members (I haven't offered a whole lot of ladder games, but, from counting the games on the results table, only 29 games have been played in total - not a whole lot, by any measure), which is gonna be really hard to fix, however, the seasonal ladders probably will encourage more activity. The second reason is Gamespy's sucky connection settings. I've pretty much given up trying to do online games with my friends, we mostly use hamachi, which, I think could be an excellent solution to the Gamespy problem, especially when combined with the XFIRE TWH clan.

Good idea EoJ. I'm all for it.

Nice to hear you'll be doing the same for Empire too, so I can give seasonly gunpowder spankings!

Getting a bit ahead of yourself there aren't you?

First of all thanks guys for making me feel welcome, and especially to Swamprat for teaching me a lesson at the weekend :-)

On the subject. Great idea.

Just a teensie weensie problem. A new release that happens on my birthday, in February. It may just divert peoples' attention away from MTW2 for a while. So Feb until May, may be a washout.

Any thoughts?

The RTW lot have suggested xfire, which I think is an excellent idea. Your thoughts?

Could you flesh out "suggested xfire" a little please?

Gaius has set up an xfire group thing, is the suggestion that we use it more or try or something more elaborate?

Yeah- we'd use the 'Total War Heaven Community' (and/or the 'HeavenGames' one) to play as a group. There are a fair few allready on- if everyone on the ladder used it all we have to do is remember the command for chatting.

Rght, I shall draw up a date for switchover within a few days- but rest assured you've got a couple of weeks yet, so keep playing

Yeah guys. Every point you pick up now will stand to you when the ladder is closed!