Wulfyn wrote:You have stated that you don't accept my explanation of what broken means but you have made no attempt to demonstrate why my definition is flawed or what your alternative would be. You are just, so far, saying "I don't accept it". Right... why?
Let me lay this out for you since dode seems intent on hitting you intellectual softballs lest you get your sensitive bits bruised... it'll save time.
Your assertion is that CPOMB is "broken" because it creates a situation in which the match will be won by the first person to remove a piece, at which point the teams will take turns removing each other's pieces until one side runs out and loses. This is the foundation of your "it's random" complaint. So, ignoring the fact that it's not true and you have not support for the idea that it's true, lets just take a look at the basic idea.
Your claim, at best, only applies to CPOMB vs CPOMB
The complaint doesn't really explain why non-CPOMB teams quite regularly wipe the floor with CPOMB teams. Based on your theory of piece removal all non-CPOMB teams should lose every match against a CPOMB team. We know they don't. We being the rest of us, not you, apparently.
You're defining "broken" as "I don't find it fun"
Games of pure chance are not inherently broken - in fact, they're pretty widespread. People flip coins to decide things all time time.. kids play "rock, paper, scissors" despite there being no skill involved. Hell, they play "War" which is almost exactly the same thing as flipping a coin 52 times. Certainly they're not nuanced games, but they're not "broken"
You're ignoring the positioning aspect of Blood Bowl
You know which game involves every block removing the defending piece, but allows both players the ability to position their players to make or avoid hits on subsequent turns? Chess. According to your claims that makes chess the ultimate broken game of chance, not skill - chess blocks are even more likely to result in a casualty than the blocks thrown by the worst CPOMB team of all time.
Now, take a brief look at the idea that the ideas apply to Blood Bowl itself.
CPOMB vs CPOMB casualties average far below 11
Even if we skip running the full data (which we both know only dode and I will ever do, you'll just assume it supports your feelsies) we can head over to FUMBBL and check out the match results for well known CPOMB teams when they face other CPOMB teams....
BillBrasky's WMDs in the Box is quite well known among FUMBBLers. If we start at the bottom and work our way up (most recent matches) we find the most recent CPOMB games:
vs. Nurgle 4 cas caused vs. 3 cas taken
vs. Chaos 1 cas caused vs. 4 cas taken
vs. Chaos 4 cas caused vs. 3 cas taken
vs. Chaos 4 cas caused vs. 6 cas taken
vs. Nurgle 5 cas caused vs. 6 cas taken
And these are high TV Box teams... an environment where far, far more games are being played by a single team than you're ever likely to see in any other environment. Brasky's team has played 2,885 (!) games. Many coaches won't play that many games in their lifetime, much less with a single team.
Even high development CPOMB facing high development CPOMB is nowhere near being a coin flip, and it's not guaranteed piece removal like chess. We know this not only by knowing how Blood Bowl is played, but also from looking at actual Blood Bowl being played. There's no situation, theoretical or actual, where what you're suggesting is true.
That's probably why you're several pages into arguing game philosophy rather than supporting your actual assertions (aka mistakes).
adhansa wrote:It is just measuring the wrong thing.
Is it? What are we supposed to be measuring, and who has done that measuring to date? I mean... plenty of people piss and moan about CPOMB, but if nobody has ever named a metric or measured it then we know right off the bat they're basing their bitching on nothing but "feeling".
The people who wrote the rules used the 45-55% range as their balancing metric, so it is exactly the thing we should be looking at if we're asking if certain skills make a team "too good". If we can't see any significant positive effect in the area the game is balanced around then the relevant response becomes "too good
at what?, and why do we care?".
Imagine a professional hockey player who is an incredible juggler. He juggles during games with amazing panache. What we're saying is similar to us saying that he's "too good at juggling". We check and see that his team isn't winning more games then the teams that lack a top tier juggler.. and the juggling player isn't scoring more goals than non-jugglers... and then we ask "who the hell cares how good he is at juggling?" and we possibly tell the concessions stand to stop selling beer to the guy who declares the juggling to be "broken".
adhansa wrote:And if we don't have any relevant data should we then just asume that everything is hunkydory, no clouds on the sky, go on as usual? I have a little more trust in human logic than that.
No, you have a desperate hope that people will put faith in human intuition, because you're certainly not holding out for genuine logic. Logic says that if there is an obvious, relevant effect then it will be detectable in a way beyond you feeling "a disturbance in the force". If you're using your brain and logic to tell what is out of alignment, isn't right, etc... then it should be very easy to know what to measure. It's when you're feeling your way through with your intuition that you won't know what to measure because you're following a nebulous itch in your brain, not reason.