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chaos

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I'd welcome any suggestions for how the B league(s) could be run. Judging about the amount signing up, if it keeps going, we may go with three B leagues.

Keep in mind with one big league, we'd have to double up teams and I don't think we want to get into Chi vs Chi etc. There's also some players in B who I think we be too good if they finished the regular season to play in the lower tier playoffs(ex. the lost points for several unplayed games and moved down in the standings.)

Please keep the ideas coming.

Some other random ideas:

1) A hockey challenge ladder (one for each system). If you're familiar with the concept from tennis, basically the same thing (google it if you're not). A ladder runs continuously, so interest would not stop down between leagues. I noticed very few posts on these forums in January, I guess because it was between Fall and Spring season.

This is especially good because new people will find this website randomly throughout the year. Most of the time, leagues are in session, or idle, so people can't really join up and get quickly hooked. They may forget and lose interest and never return. This happened to me twice before I got the email that leagues were forming. The ladder would provide an immediate way for people to start playing, get "confirmed", and become part of the forum. It would be a "sticky" feature in net parlance.

2) Idea 1 would create a player ranking. Since we know the player ranking, then teams could be distributed more fairly, like in a real pro sports draft. Among the players selected to play in a particular league, the worst player (according to the ladder or some other distribution) gets first choice, and so on. As opposed to the random selection we currently have. This is another way to make the competition within a league more equitable, without resorting to the more drastic idea that I had earlier.

Edited by gsguyotte
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This is an explanation of the basic idea of a ladder: http://www.greencourtsoftware.com/essays/clguide.html.

Basically, you can start a ladder by ordering people based on previous league results. You move up the ladder by beating people above you. The specifics can vary, but typically you can only challenge someone within X spots higher than yourself. If the lower player wins, they move up. In some versions they might swap spots on the ladder. To make it harder to climb, you can simply advance winners by 1 or 2 spots, and drop losers by the same. This is probably more appropriate for 15 minute hockey games - a single game doesn't tell you much about who is better. It should be calibrated so that you would have to beat someone fairly consistently to get past them. Lots of ways to do it.

Imagine a 50 team ladder, where you can challenge up to 20% (10 spots) ahead of you, with winners rising 2 and losers dropping 2 spots. If you then challenge the guy 10 spots ahead, and beat him solidly (4 out of 6), you would rise 4 and he would drop 4. So over the time of about a playoff series, you could pass him or get close to him depending on how often you were winning. Sounds about right - keeps the ladder pretty fluid but it takes time to make your name.

What ends up happening is a very natural ordering of the players in a short period of time. It's cool to be able to look at where you stand, and who is close to you, and be able to schedule a game that you know is going to be very competitive.

Edited by gsguyotte
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Have you ever considered running a league where each person plays "as themselves", rather than married to a particular NHL franchise? When you actually play your scheduled opponent, you can simply select any NHL 94 team that you would like to play as. I guess you might get some Chi vs. Chi games that way too, but it would also eliminate unfairness based on team selection. The results would be more about "who's the best player", as opposed to being biased by how good or bad your team was. Just an idea.

I noticed among the 30! signups for SNES, there are 12 different top team requests. So I think you could pretty easily partition leagues to minimize the number of games where both players choose the same team, if you knew everyone's preference. And besides, would anyone really be upset by a few Chi vs. Chi? I mean, that's a pure battle, best player wins. Zero game bias.

This would also allow for larger leagues, since the biggest problem with those huge leagues currently is that whoever is playing with the worst 5 teams basically have little to no chance. Now you could have a large, fully competitive league.

There's been a few separate leagues ran(juiced league, capitalism league), where equal player ratings were given to essentially eliminate any bias between coaches regardless of the team they selected. The classic league is different. When Evan started the league, every coach has been assigned a different team. The playoff formats and regular season games have varied from season to season but assigning different teams has not. Not to say we couldn't do it differently but it's been the one fixture of the league that has remained constant.

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Some other random ideas:

1) A hockey challenge ladder (one for each system). If you're familiar with the concept from tennis, basically the same thing (google it if you're not). A ladder runs continuously, so interest would not stop down between leagues. I noticed very few posts on these forums in January, I guess because it was between Fall and Spring season.

This is especially good because new people will find this website randomly throughout the year. Most of the time, leagues are in session, or idle, so people can't really join up and get quickly hooked. They may forget and lose interest and never return. This happened to me twice before I got the email that leagues were forming. The ladder would provide an immediate way for people to start playing, get "confirmed", and become part of the forum. It would be a "sticky" feature in net parlance.

2) Idea 1 would create a player ranking. Since we know the player ranking, then teams could be distributed more fairly, like in a real pro sports draft. Among the players selected to play in a particular league, the worst player (according to the ladder or some other distribution) gets first choice, and so on. As opposed to the random selection we currently have. This is another way to make the competition within a league more equitable, without resorting to the more drastic idea that I had earlier.

This is an explanation of the basic idea of a ladder: http://www.greencourtsoftware.com/essays/clguide.html.

Basically, you can start a ladder by ordering people based on previous league results. You move up the ladder by beating people above you. The specifics can vary, but typically you can only challenge someone within X spots higher than yourself. If the lower player wins, they move up. In some versions they might swap spots on the ladder. To make it harder to climb, you can simply advance winners by 1 or 2 spots, and drop losers by the same. This is probably more appropriate for 15 minute hockey games - a single game doesn't tell you much about who is better. It should be calibrated so that you would have to beat someone fairly consistently to get past them. Lots of ways to do it.

Imagine a 50 team ladder, where you can challenge up to 20% (10 spots) ahead of you, with winners rising 2 and losers dropping 2 spots. If you then challenge the guy 10 spots ahead, and beat him solidly (4 out of 6), you would rise 4 and he would drop 4. So over the time of about a playoff series, you could pass him or get close to him depending on how often you were winning. Sounds about right - keeps the ladder pretty fluid but it takes time to make your name.

What ends up happening is a very natural ordering of the players in a short period of time. It's cool to be able to look at where you stand, and who is close to you, and be able to schedule a game that you know is going to be very competitive.

The ladder idea is definitely a good idea. I know jeff started something a little different where he set up best of 7 and whoever won was the "belt holder" and anyone could challenge until he was defeated, then there would be a new champion. It's in the "one-night event" forum. Perhaps this conversation could be continued in another thread as it is beyond what I'm looking for with the GENS B league.

Thanks for the ideas bud!

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Have you ever considered running a league where each person plays "as themselves", rather than married to a particular NHL franchise? When you actually play your scheduled opponent, you can simply select any NHL 94 team that you would like to play as. I guess you might get some Chi vs. Chi games that way too, but it would also eliminate unfairness based on team selection. The results would be more about "who's the best player", as opposed to being biased by how good or bad your team was. Just an idea.

I noticed among the 30! signups for SNES, there are 12 different top team requests. So I think you could pretty easily partition leagues to minimize the number of games where both players choose the same team, if you knew everyone's preference. And besides, would anyone really be upset by a few Chi vs. Chi? I mean, that's a pure battle, best player wins. Zero game bias.

This would also allow for larger leagues, since the biggest problem with those huge leagues currently is that whoever is playing with the worst 5 teams basically have little to no chance. Now you could have a large, fully competitive league.

Good idea, but I don't know how you would log scores on the site.

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I'd welcome any suggestions for how the B league(s) could be run. Judging about the amount signing up, if it keeps going, we may go with three B leagues.

Keep in mind with one big league, we'd have to double up teams and I don't think we want to get into Chi vs Chi etc. There's also some players in B who I think we be too good if they finished the regular season to play in the lower tier playoffs(ex. the lost points for several unplayed games and moved down in the standings.)

Please keep the ideas coming.

Back to the main point of how to run B leagues this spring. Now it's up to 42 signups for SNES. I think we possibly need to have 3 SNES leagues. I think the practical limit for league size is about 20. This is because there is a big drop-off in team ratings after 20. I think no one should ever have to play as ANA/FLA/NYI/OTT/SJ/TB unless they choose to.

Then I would just divvy up the veterans evenly into the 3 leagues, then fill with all the rooks like myself. At the moment, if all players get confirmed (still 14 left to do) we could have 3 leagues of 14, which would be fine. If a bunch of these 14 don't make it, I'd prefer two larger SNES leagues, again no bigger than 20.

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I think no one should ever have to play as ANA/FLA/NYI/OTT/SJ/TB unless they choose to.

i think this should sum it up for you grayto

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