State of the NAFtion

[sann0638]

So ask for help. This IS volunteer work, no one expects you to do everything yourselves. Ask for help and delegate.

Not my job, I'm not elected!

[Lychanthrope]

So ask for help. This IS volunteer work, no one expects you to do everything yourselves. Ask for help and delegate.

Not my job, I'm not elected!

LOL I told Sann this about another project, and much to my shagrin, he asked and noone stepped forward. Go light on Sann he opened this comunication and has stayed positive when others got somewhat heated.

It is a volunteer org and you get to work with those that volunteer. I am a member even though I lost my job and my ability to attend tournaments about 5 years ago, ie I have not played a game since. But I hope to again soon and keep my membership going for that. I tell people here in the states that if you don't vote you don't get to bitch. Thete's a part of me that wants to say that about NAF membership. It is a free world, but I don't understand the large number of people that play BB, at any level (league, tournament, online) and don't join NAF. It's not expensive, it's a worldwide organization of the game you enjoy playing, so join in and get to know other geeks just like you. Unfortunately it seems to be all about what do I get. The loss of block dice seems to be a major problem. The dice are a gift not why you join in my opinon.

No attacks ment here, just frustration a the whole long drawn out mess. I'll go back to lurking, and keeping my NAF membership up.

[Blammaham]

My personal thoughts on the last few posts:
- can't see a world league being of interest to much people

I categorically disagree with this. In fact I think league play could be the key to keeping the NAF growing, especially outside of the tournament hot spots in the EU and eastern US. Take a look at the tournament map, large centers of population have tournaments but in countries where the population is spread out leagues rule the day. I think the appetite for a tool that "connects" leagues comes from the fact that the rule book (LRB6) is written for league play, not for tournament play and the game lends itself to leagues better than any game I've ever played.

I hear this from tournaments players all the time, "whats the point?" to which I answer, if you only play in tournaments you'd never understand the connection you can get to players that have built a real history on the pitch, earned skills, did amazing feats and won/lost big games. Getting a chance to play your favorite teams against league teams from other leagues has a massive appeal to almost everyone I play Blood Bowl with, 42 guys in a structured league that has been running for fifteen years.

Another beauty from guys who play only tournaments is "Whoa... too house ruley!" This always makes me laugh, seeing as tournaments are all heavily house ruled to the point that it alters the structure of the tactics of the game, for instance, show me where "resurrection" is in LRB6, you can't, it isn't, trust me, if you have a four skilled +1 ST Wardancer, leaping into the Chaos Dwarf cage you need to really think twice if it is worth it, a tournament player never faces this aspect of the game, that Wardancer is coming back for the next game no matter what "resurrection baby!". I'm not ragging on tournaments, I like them, but for the NAF to essentially turn their back on league play, like they have for the last ten years, may come home to roost now that the "dice business model" has gone. With all the different sets of rules the "house rules" argument goes right out the window.

How the NAF goes about doing this would be anyone's guess, but it could be done and have the positive effect on league play that the great work the NAF has done on the tournament front. Swiss style 1.1 million tournaments have done very well with the leadership of the NAF, I think, with the right direction, the same could be done for league play and bring the NAF to new levels of membership never seen with the "just the dice" era. S.

[Darkson]

I'd be all for a World league, assuming all the info is verified and held on the NAF site. Would be cool to be able to play a league game against someone outside of my own league mates.

[sann0638]

Well, I've been wrong before... 1993, I think it was

[Blammaham]

I'd be all for a World league, assuming all the info is verified and held on the NAF site. Would be cool to be able to play a league game against someone outside of my own league mates.

Strangely enough I'm not so worried about cheating. It could happen, but it could happen in the tournament side of things too, in so much as rankings could be manipulated by a small group of unscrupulous coaches if they so desired.

A tool that could connect the DB of leagues would be a huge step forward. I don't even think rankings would be needed to make a world leauge work. Just my opinion though. S.

[Blammaham]

Well, I've been wrong before... 1993, I think it was

No mistakes last weekend? Hmmm.... S.

[Digger Goreman]

Only slightly tongue in cheek: If we had a national database, then we could go the logical step to having a fantasy-fantasy football league!

Lemme get on the phone to ESPN....

[sann0638]

Happens on Fumbbl already I think

[Gaixo]

We've done it in my league as well. Enjoyable, but quite a bit of effort.

[Warpstone]

The longstanding variant BB problem needs to be fixed and is top of my agenda, as discussed. Totally agree.

Different ways of viewing the current ranking framework (i.e. filters etc.) are always popular. The addition of the Coach Page, the race vs. race grid etc. are all interesting additions. Filters to view results in different ways e.g. over a period of time, against coaches of a particular nationality etc. are all great ideas. More of this can only be good.

I disagree that people should lose points for not playing with a particular race over a period. This is isn't the ATP / PGA rankings. If people don't want to play a team for a while then so be it. If people don't want to play tourneys for a while so be it. As much as this might 'crack down' on the hardcore guys who get a high ranking then never play that team again, it runs the risk of discouraging the casual player who might only play one or two tournaments a year. For me the rankings are an imperfect system, a bit of fun and a something else to chat about on forums or over a beer at a tourney. They're very important don't get me wrong (people love them!), but I think we should be aiming at something which enhances the tournament experience for everyone, not necessarily a perfect system to identify the very best coaches.

Apologies for only quoting 2 points of a rather detailed post, but I disagree with ranking based only on match results for the last 12 months, and rankings decaying over time.

I'm not sure how the tournament scene is in the rest of the world, but I think such a policy would render the ranking for a lot of people in Australia pretty much irrelevant.

Pippy and Olaf, regarding ranking degrading due to time: fair enough. I just wanted to point out though that I don't propose any particular flavour of ranking formula as the ONLY method of pulling a ranking from the NAF DB.

Rather, my emphasis is really just on recreating the DB with enough metadata to provide a vast range of contextual parameters going forward. The way I see it, the fundamental deficiency with the NAF DB is simply it's inability to sort between apples and bananas because it has no information with which to perceive a difference. Every data set is given equal weight even though most BB communities have their own favoured parameters. You just can't mix this up and weigh everything equally without creating a ton of noise in the system for anyone who wants to make the slightest criteria for discrimination (i.e. Dennis' example of LRB5 Khemri).

Only care about overall best strict LRB6 performance? There's a filter for that. Only want to see who is the most successful LRB5 Khemri coach of all time? There's a filter for that too (my hunch is Gken ).

I just figured a view using decay or annual-only rankings as the default parameters would be a nice way to dangle a carrot in front of coaches who are on the fence regarding attending more tournies. But sure, you could just as easily use something more conservative as your default ranking (i.e best all-time LRB6 rankings). At the very least, a yearly recap of prolific achievements is much easier to accomplish when someone like Mike is given the ability to quickly filter down to annual stats only.

What can NAF do with this? It's really up to their imagination. Maybe a simple post celebrating the best in 2013, or even a nice bit of swag (challenge coin!) for the annual top coach of each race? Heck you can even counter the UK-centric bias of the current leaderboard and make annual rankings based on ELO points gained per game! Ta-da. Suddenly someone from North America or Australia will have a shot at the leaderboard if the NAF sees fit to throw us this carrot.

Sadly, the only thing that is absolutely certain about the current DB is that meta-data from past tournaments regarding even variant rule sets is simply not available. You'd have to audit every record and probably re-enter tournament results with the meta-data we all now want to use to sort for criteria that appeal to us.

[sann0638]

Excellent post Warpstone, completely agree.

[Warpstone]

My suggestions for helping grow BB rather than just tournies.
Bring Leagues in. Start a location based list of Leagues(assuming this doesn't already exist).

i think a world sized league would be great. i mean a league where all bb players can play. If you play in this league against your local mates but once in a while you go in another country, you still could play your team against foreigners. Even we could imagine some international tourneys using those teams. You grow up your team locally and face the rest of the world in an event. This of course need to be structurize to avoid cherrypicking and abuse, but this could be really a big IRL bonus for NAF members.

QFT!

I always pick up this weird sentiment from tourny-only players that leagues are somehow rife with cheating or too capricious to setup. This is of course quite amusing because I'm sure you could probably say the same about tournies before NAF provided support and development for this facet of the game.

The current structure of NAF is so tournament-centric that it strikes coaches in leagues as completely lopsided priority-wise. Yet the only reason that more resources are not devoted to promoting league play seems to be just executive fiat.

Several people have stated NAF exists for the good of the entire game, but I doubt league coaches, let alone online players feel that's true. Again, I don't think it's criminal that NAF is nearly entirely devoted to tournaments. But then, it would really help those of us weighing the organizations merits if someone from the top could simply be honest with us about their plans for supporting large and underrepresented communities within the game.

[Kikurasis]

a nice bit of swag (challenge coin!) for the annual top coach of each race

This. A million times this. I'm not going to advocate for anything in particular, but the Cyanide WC that was run a year and a bit ago had tickets for it that were given to Dode in FOL (an open league format). When he decided to give one ticket to each coach that was the highest ranking in their race for the season, it promoted *so* much race diversity that it was amazing.

You could even tailor the conditions and awards/rewards to each race. Playing a stunty team? Get a .500 record with 20+ games played in a year and you get something! Top ranked coach for Khemri? You get a skull trophy with engraving on it! The possibilities are endless.

[sann0638]

New website coming soon! http://talkfantasyfootball.org/viewtopi ... 20&t=38440