Can I post a cooperative challenge where there isn't a single winner?

Question

I've got an idea for a team based challenge, where entries will choose the team to participate on, and teams will compete against each other.

I don't want to get into the details much here, so let's keep it somewhat vague and high-level. If I can't determine a good way to pick a single winning entry, is this allowed? Which team wins will be strict and objective, but it won't be clear which single member was the best on the team.

Various suggestions have been proposed in chat to somewhat objectively identify a single clear winner, but in my opinion they would all either create a "gaming" condition or increase the runtime significantly. By "gaming", I mean that the win conditions for a single player could conflict with the winning conditions for the team.

I know the SE framework in general frowns on questions that can't garner a single objectively-best answer, but I believe this could be a good addition to the site. We don't see teamwork challenges here, and I think it would be a fun way to compete. It would be modeled most like a King of the Hill competition, but I think that either a change to the tag wiki or a new tag/genre altogether would be warranted.

Before writing the controller, I'd like to know whether this would be acceptable. If absolutely necessary, I could convert the challenge to a 1v1 round robin tournament, but I feel that would take away from the spirit of the challenge.

Answer 1

I don't see why not. Teamwork challenges look interesting, and they are a nice addition to the site. And about the issue with a winning answer, I don't think it really is an issue. It could be useful to know that for accepting an answer, but looking at the current king-of-the-hill questions, there are not that many questions that have an accepted answer. So if you state which team has won, and list the members, it is fine IMO.

There is just one issue that I can see: if you want to have an equal amount of members in a team, it might be that you cannot equally divide them (if there are 23 submissions, for example).

Answer 2

I'm also hoping to see cooperative King of the Hill questions. The approach I had first imagined was to pick the teams randomly and assign points to everyone on the winning team, and repeat for many different random combinations. This would lead to a clear winner, while still encouraging cooperation during each game.

Although I'd still like to see that approach too, having read about Geobits' approach I really want to see it in action. I would definitely support this and upvote such questions, as it encourages a longer term collaboration and totally different dynamics. Randomly assigned teams will require players who can adapt to any team, while fixed teams that players choose for themselves will allow tailoring solutions to a known team and a known opponent team. This will give a rich variety of different approaches that are not restricted to being generic. It also allows asymmetric challenges where the two teams have very different objectives.

I think this opens up lots of new possibilities and I really hope the site welcomes it.