sann0638 wrote:- Who would a new set of rules affect (i.e. where would they be used)?
Ultimately it will only affect NAF members as they will be the only people who pick it up, so NAF Tournament and League players. There are still BB players who have no affiliation with the NAF and will continue to play which ever version they like. However, I do believe any new ruleset should be freely available to all to encourage it's adoption.
Cyanide will do what they want and while the NAF can reach out to them (share testing results etc) they have no control over them.
FUMBBL (as I understand it) is a recreation of the TT experience and would likely follow NAF example. That said, certain rules are easier to code and accommodate than others, so there may well be technical and workload restrictions.
I would like to see some thought given to the different BB environments. At a minimum this might be recommended optional rules suggested for long or perpetual leagues which have diffenent balancing issues to short league and tournament play.
sann0638 wrote:- Who should be on the BBRC?
A select few. And everybody else.
I do feel that it needs to be a small enough group of people that they can work effectively. There are plenty of candidates within the community, people with years of BB experience, people with games design experience, statistical analysis experience and raw enthusiasm. They can identify the areas of focus and develop new rules/tweaks for testing.
They would need to be supported by the NAF community as a whole. Leagues willing to adopt proposed rulesets to trial and report back on.
sann0638 wrote:- How should the rule changes be decided?
Initially, there would need to be an agreed aim as to what the BBRC should try and achieve, and I suspect this may well be the biggest stumbling block. There are many possible goals:
- Team balancing to bring all teams closer to 50% win ratio
- Skill balancing to improve the lesser picked skills and encourage diversity
- Re-writing/tweaking existing rules to remove ambiguity and errors
- Team reduction. Streamline rosters to remove multiple elf/undead/chaos teams
- Team expansion. Approve and create new rosters.
- Fix broken/boring/Timmy teams.
- Adjust gameplay to shift the balance towards the passing game
- Nerf ClawPOMB
- etc
I would suggest a good starting point would be to produce a new draft of the rulebook with rules clarifications as required and all 24 teams included. Following on from that, pick up from where the last BBRC left off and look at the CRP+ ruleset. This provides a certain level of continuity and reassurance, as the last BBRC broadly had the trust of the community.
Rather than having two rulesets (current and experimental), I would suggest a new ruleset issued each year (at the NAF Champs?) with the amendments approved by the BBRC. These rules would stand for all NAF events from release until the following NAF champs where the new edition would be released.
On this cycle, you would have update A in play for a year while the BBRC worked on update B. Once update B was released, they would move on to update C while also studying a year's worth of data from update A. And so on.
The advantage of this is ensuring a year's worth of data for each release, providing a two year cycle for evaluating but if something was quickly identified as unbalanced it could be rolled back in less than a year.
Long term, what the BBRC looks at and reviews would be down to community feedback. However, there would need to be a certain level of autonomy and leadership to recognise that the vocal comments aren't always the right comments.
