Trial Rule Evaluation

[Pidpad]

From the information center:

Tie-breakers.

TD difference as the first tie-breaker

Least TDs conceded as the second tie-breaker

Random selection as third tie-breaker

The same as for bonus promotions.

What do we gain?

• Clarity on final positions
  
• Everyone knows what tie-breakers are used
  

What does it cost?

• No "live" table that's 100% trustworthy. BBmanager is down too often, lacks matches etc and the ingame standings doesn't use the same tie-breakers.
  
• Prize money go wherever the game decides, this can't be appealed.
  
• More work for admins (read Pidpad).
  

We'll try this for a season. If the increased workload isn't too annoying and it works out well we will keep the rule for the future.

[Pidpad]

My thoughts as the person who has to sort the tables:

*BBmanager doesn't always agree with the game which causes confusion (or my tables, for that matter. User error happens both ways :P).

*Way more timeconsuming than I initially though, I spend hours each matchday keeping the tables up to date (doing it all in one go after the season ends would be horrible).

So, to keep the above we (well, I) need a solution to dramatically cut down on the time I spend on this (especially as I'll actually be working as from the start of season 14).

Currently my solution is to go back to what the ingame tables say (unless there are cases where the scores shouldn't stand as is, there are 2-3 of them this season).

BBmanager then you ask? Too many inconsistencies and it's not always updated when a new matchday rolls on (or season ends, which is even more annoying). Results can also be manipulated so we'd need someone to verify things anyway which will only delay seeding (which I want to avoid).

[humbe]

I'd say highest priority is to keep administration simple, easy and minimal, so people actually can be bothered being administrators. In game stats sounds fine to me.

[Juriel]

Yeah, no use making too much of a hassle out of it.

[Anglakhel]

Why not only use it in disputed situations?

Or place Tier Admins in charge of doing the calculation and turning it into you by a certain date?

Personally, as someone who has been affected by the bug, I think there can be a simpler solution to try and maintain the competitive nature of the OCC.

It seems like you're outright rejecting options to make it require less work you and then arguing we can't have a clear standard and must accept the bug because it's too much work for you.

It takes many seasons to build a team and compete for Division 1. Some bad luck can easily derail a team for one or more seasons. However, allowing a bug to just decide the outcome, when it could be remedied, seems callous and cruel.

Most of the time, the rule won't be needed. But when it is needed, it's crucial that it be in place.

Please try and find a way to ease the workflow or delegate the responsibility.

[dode]

Is it a bug?

[Dreamy]

Like Microsoft says "It's a feature"

It's akin to rolling snake-eyes on the winning GFI - it doesn't happen often, and if you had made sure to be a square closer to begin with you wouldn't have been affected at all.

[Hawca]

Don't forget that admins put in there own time. Also pidpad, Doomy and Rayxxx do a hell of a lot more than stardard admins.

In a season I personally spend approx 2 hours a night with dealing with requests or competitions or dropping a fellow admin a call to sort issues.

That's on top of my league commitments and games, work and family. To say some one is doing some thing to make life easier is rude. Zephire still pays out of his own pocket to fund the forums we use and yet can't find the time to play in his creation.

Bugs in this game are minor in the grand picture of things and now and then they hinder and favour us.

[Anglakhel]

Is it a bug?

The bug is that the client is using TD +/- to sort rankings for Tie Breaks except it doesn't do so correctly when Admin results are involved.

The Rule was intended to give clear and transparent Tie Breaks to evaluate final rankings and allow for evaluation of the results in these rare circumstances. Or at least that was why I argued strongly for a ruling being made by the OCC.

[Anglakhel]

Don't forget that admins put in there own time. Also pidpad, Doomy and Rayxxx do a hell of a lot more than stardard admins.

In a season I personally spend approx 2 hours a night with dealing with requests or competitions or dropping a fellow admin a call to sort issues.

That's on top of my league commitments and games, work and family. To say some one is doing some thing to make life easier is rude. Zephire still pays out of his own pocket to fund the forums we use and yet can't find the time to play in his creation.

Bugs in this game are minor in the grand picture of things and now and then they hinder and favour us.

There is a fantastic team that donates a ton of time to make the OCC a well run league and a fun place to play Blood Bowl.

I apologize if I have not made clear now, or in the past, that I have a tremendous amount of respect and appreciation for how well the Directors and Admins run the league through their efforts.

However, I have raised points for discussion and debate now and in the past because I care about the OCC and I have opinions that I think are worth sharing. I have done my best to do so in a respectful manner.

I'm not disputing pidpad's claim that the Trial Rule, as implemented, is more work for pidpad than is reasonable. However, that doesn't mean that it isn't important or not worth finding another way to deal with the issue.

[dode]

The bug is that the client is using TD +/- to sort rankings for Tie Breaks except it doesn't do so correctly when Admin results are involved.

The Rule was intended to give clear and transparent Tie Breaks to evaluate final rankings and allow for evaluation of the results in these rare circumstances. Or at least that was why I argued strongly for a ruling being made by the OCC.

Again, is that a bug? It could easily be argued that a 1-0 real win is worth more than any adminned win. If there is a bug it is that the client does not display the tie breaker.

[Anglakhel]

Again, is that a bug? It could easily be argued that a 1-0 real win is worth more than any adminned win. If there is a bug it is that the client does not display the tie breaker.

If its design, it's bad design.

It potentially punishes a team for something that is not their fault.

If two teams are locked in a tight race, tied on points and tied on TD +/-, one team can be taken out of consideration by receiving an Admin Win. Their points suddenly don't matter because their opponent flaked out and didn't play against them.

This actually happened between two teams in another division in the same season the bug affected the Archons.

The lack of clear Tie Breaks and the inability to evaluate close cases undermines the competitive integrity of the league.

[Dreamy]

There is still the "easy" solution - don't end up in a position where you have to trust a "lucky tiebreak". You might as well say that it is unfair against Khemri teams that elves will always have better TD difference and thus normally win all tie breaks at the end of the season.

[Hawca]

Forgive me if I got it wrong. I understand it's not just the directors and the admins that make this league great.

At the end of the day we are blood bowl nuts like the coaches. We just have a role of helping run this league.

And as. Blood bowl fanatic I don't want bugs. I don't want problems nor does the next man or woman.

One thing I will say is where we can we will try sort something but at the same time finding a balance between time and result is key to that equation

[dode]

It potentially punishes a team for something that is not their fault.

Many things in BB do. If you want a direct comparison between an adminned and a played win, though, I say the played win is worth more. If it's that close then the person you are vying for that place with has at least equalled you in all other respects anyway. Why should he be punished for actually playing the game? Surely the system is better if it discourages taking an adminned win where possible?

[Pidpad]

Why not only use it in disputed situations?

Or place Tier Admins in charge of doing the calculation and turning it into you by a certain date?

Personally, as someone who has been affected by the bug, I think there can be a simpler solution to try and maintain the competitive nature of the OCC.

It seems like you're outright rejecting options to make it require less work you and then arguing we can't have a clear standard and must accept the bug because it's too much work for you.

It takes many seasons to build a team and compete for Division 1. Some bad luck can easily derail a team for one or more seasons. However, allowing a bug to just decide the outcome, when it could be remedied, seems callous and cruel.

Most of the time, the rule won't be needed. But when it is needed, it's crucial that it be in place.

Please try and find a way to ease the workflow or delegate the responsibility.

You severely underestimate the number of times it's needed. It's not only needed when two teams in the same division ends on the same amount of points, it's actually needed whenever two teams in the tier (well, place 4-7 in T3-T5, 3-7 in T2 and 4-10 in T6) end on the same amount of points.

If we are using it in the divisions we should use the same method in all instances, doing otherwise seems silly to me.

Having someone else do things and give me them by date X is rather bad. The experience I have of BBmanager being updated when I start seeding isn't the best. Can't say I'm eager to have to rely on others in this case. Yes, when it comes to this I am a control freak.

I'm not outright rejecting options, apart from the current method. If I were rejecting stuff outright this thread wouldn't exist. There would be a brief post in the Information Center saying that we wont use the rule. If someone is brilliant enough to come up with a solution that actually works and that I can live with (probably the hardest part to be honest) then we'll try that. However, mindlessly arguing isn't getting us anywhere.

Some "must haves" for the rule.

* Applied across all divisions and positions equally.

* Less work intense that what was tested this season.

[humbe]

I'm not 100% sure what this bug you're talking about is?.. Are adminned wins left out of TD difference?

How can someone know how a game that was adminned would have gone? Someone could claim that if they did get to play the game they woulda won it 10-0, or that if they did play the game, they woulda lost 0-10. No matter what you do with adminned games it won't be right, so someone will be able to feel this is unfair no matter what is done. So if it can't be done right, simple sounds the way to go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

And there's tons of other events out of a players control that will affect them. As for instance:

- Someone won because when he was facing the good coaches they're best players were out with MNG.

- Someone got to play a replacement team due to dropout giving them an easy win (or not giving them the easy win they should have had)

- Someone won because he got some easy victories due to game disconnections.

- Someone lost because they had a real life engagement they just had to attend, and didn't have time to play that week, or opponent couldn't play in the small window they possibly could play.

Even if it could be made right, I'd still vote for what makes life simple for the administrators. You're doing a hell of a job guys.

[thyrus88]

Give us a number pid, how many teams on average per season need the td diff and td conceeded stats?

If its less than 20 then in my head it will be an hour tops at the end of the season will allow u to get that data.

If your updating stats for 220 odd teams for 20 occasions i think its overkill and thats why ur finding it far too much for someone to do week on week.

Or am i missing the point here? :)

[danton]

I think that Humbe makes a valid point. If the client does not take into account admined results at all when calculating TD difference then that is an acceptable implementation of the rules. You get your 3 points and that is enough. Counting fictional TDs from an admined game is not really fair to the coaches who get their games played. Those TDs never happened, so why should they count?

Of course it sucks if an opponent of yours ducks a match and you needed to score TDs in order to have a better TD differential than a rival of yours at the end of the season. Rolling quad skulls sucks too, but shit happens in BB land! :lol:

Another thumbs up from me to the Admin crew! Thanks guys for dedicating so much time to making this the best BB league out there!

[Pidpad]

Give us a number pid, how many teams on average per season need the td diff and td conceeded stats?

If its less than 20 then in my head it will be an hour tops at the end of the season will allow u to get that data.

If your updating stats for 220 odd teams for 20 occasions i think its overkill and thats why ur finding it far too much for someone to do week on week.

Or am i missing the point here? :)

I just had a look at T2 after MD8

There's 7 teams across the tiers that are NOT tied with another team in the tier on points (the very top and the very bottom). 33 out of 40 teams are tied with someone within the tier on points. Far more than the 20 occasions suggested.

Sure, some can be eliminated as the teams wont be on the same position, but it should give you an idea.

I'd also like to have that information at hand before going to seeding the divisions as any interruptions makes mistakes so much more likely.

[humbe]

As a compromise, if one agree something other than in game is more fair, how about just evaluating that for tier 1 for winner and runner up awards, and then just leave all promotion and relegations to in game values?

Getting promoted aint that hard below tier 2. With 3 teams getting promoted, and usually extras due to dropouts there are plenty of opportunities. And even though it's a bit harder from tier 2, there's still plenty of opportunities to win by points, and if the only difference is adminned games, then it is uncertain who deserves it anyhow.

[Anglakhel]

Pidpad,

Would it be correct to say the most time consuming portion of this project is due to Ties related to Bonus Promotions across Divisions?

It seems like the number of Ties that have an impact within a Division, across an entire Tier, are significantly lower than the number of Ties across the entire Division for Bonus Promotions.

How are the newly defined Tie Breaks from the Trial Rule significantly increasing the amount of work required compared to the previous system you were using for Tie Breaks involving Bonus Promotions?

I'm trying to better understand the problem in the hopes of helping to find a more elegant solution.

[Pidpad]

The most time consuming part is collecting the stats. As the bonus promotions are involved in the majority of the ties they'll obviously use up more time.

In the past I've been using screenshots of the ingame tables for final standings and then added TD difference and TDs conceded from BBmanager.

The reasoning behind that is that as you can't really figure out if you're getting a bonus promotion or not trying to manipulate things would be pointless (no one has done that so far to my knowledge either). It's still a bit fiddly with BBmanager when replacement teams are concerned but there's usually not that many of them.

If we by some magic could have BBmanager be absolutely correct and updated the day the season ends we could use that. Checking all results at the end of the season so they're the same in BBmanager as ingame would take a while though (let's not mention how easy it would be to make a mistake after a while).

Question is though, do we have someone who's nuts enough to make that certain? I'm not that person (even if I do check BBmanager come end of season, but far from all results).

[Pidpad]

Put simply: If someone can convince me that I can trust BBmanager to 100% we'll use that (that's TD diff as first tie-breaker and an unknown second).

With BBmanager going down now and then it'll take some doing though :P

[Logain]

If problem is limited to / mainly tie breakers because of awarded matches, i agree with those saying we just make it a championship rule and use Cyanide.