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I think the question to a large extent depends upon what you see as the goal of a season. Is the most important goal to ensure that the best team promotes? Is the most important goal to ensure that the playoffs are as exciting for everybody as possible? Is the most important goal to ensure that teams are not bored by a long offseason? Is the most important goal that every regular-season game is meaningful? Is the most important goal that teams who do well in the regular season get rewarded for their good play?

I think the most important goal is to ensure that teams are not bored by a long off-season. If you want people to continue playing, there has to be something to do. If they find that they can go a couple of weeks without logging in, they might go another few weeks, and then decide they can do without BB.

I think that you understood this, and this led you to compromise on the playoffs, with single game QF and SF, which reduces the chance of the best team promoting, and devalues the regular season.

I think that your mistake is to treat the playoffs as being goal oriented, toward choosing a single team to promote, and not look at it as an opportunity for a different format of competition. First, you are going to have to promote more than one team in 16. Otherwise you are going to have a horrible bot-buildup, and other teams are going to get frustrated at being stuck in a league and then losing a playoff game. Since you are going to have to promote more teams at least to replace bots, then I think the post-season should be more oriented towards ranking teams.

If you devote 3 weeks to this, you can have multiple 3-games series for the elite, using 3 dates per week, which will provide a more meaningful test, including team depth; while also having competition matches for other teams. There can be clear economic rewards for being among the elite. And the rankings for the other teams can be based on a combination of league and post-season play.

However, if we are getting both complaints that the playoffs are too long and complaints that the playoffs are too short, then we'll feel that the length is probably about right.

My complaint is that they are too variable.
0 games for 4 teams, 1 game for 4 teams, 2 games for 2 teams, 2-3 games for 2 teams, and 4-5 games for 2 teams. If you lay this out in order of place you have 4.5, 2, 1, 1, 0, 2.5, 2.5, 0

and because the reason they have so many teams make the playoffs

It is because they can make more money, and they haven't figured out a competition for the other teams.

I didn't propose anyhing like the NBA nor like a European-style soccer league. If anything it is more like the world championships in sports like hockey or basketball where teams continue to play for ranking even after league (group) play.

I personally really like your proposal. All teams play and don't have to set scrimages. Also, it keeps the playoffs short but interesting. I do not see a downside.

its not immediately clear whether there is going to be a bot build up problem.... depends on the avg number of users who leave per season...since 4 people get demoted and 1 gets promoted... bot clearance is potentially effective at the upper divisions where bot teams should quickly fall off of the pace....

i think that as teams improve this will continue to be the case... one possible fix to this is to reset the team when a team is marked inactive.. this would reduce the skill of those players back to baseline and there is no way they can survive for more than one season at that level.. they will quickly trickle down to the division where there are just newbies..

On the other hand that does require on order 2 seasons to really see that be effective (say for a D1 team to fall down to DIII), and if teams are going inactive by more than 3 per league per season in the upper divisions than i think this won't work.



Edited 10/10/2007 10:06:21 PM by BB-Forrest


Edited 10/10/2007 10:06:54 PM by BB-Forrest

in HT, the bot buildup is worst in those cases where there is only a 1/4 relegation. It is important to note that the qualification process will tend to select for bots in cases where a series has a large number of bots. That is, if the series has 4 bots, there is a pretty good chance that the bots will lose their qualifier and relegate.

The second consideration is not only the global amount of bots, but the local nature. There will be leagues with no bots, and leagues with 10 or 12 bots. It will take multiple seasons to clean out the league with 12 bot bots. And as currently set up, you can have one conference filled with bots, and the other having none. You might relegate a team from the Active 8 because they only beat 7 of 8 teams in the Bot 8, while some team in the Bot 8 might be saved because they beat so many as 1 of 8 teams in the Active 8.

I am not advocating qualifiers or any sort of intradivisional playoffs, but a simple, straightforward, and fair way to remove bots at the end of each season, and promote the most qualified active teams in their place.

Bots really have one purpose. They let people sign up at any time during the season. They shouldn't be considered much more than temporary place holders.

I was looking at HT-Cambodia. During the season, it finally filled up its series II.1. The team in first place wondered in its PA whether now that there were 8 teams, would they all promote to the first division together. It was perfectly reasonable assumption to make. I didn't want to tell him only one team would promote, and that 2 would actually relegate.

I'm suggesting that the playoffs be part of the method of determining which teams are promoted to replace the bots. The playoffs for the top 8, would:

(1) Determine which teams promote, regardless of bots above.
(2) Determine the teams which are most worthy of promoting if there are bot replacement opportunities.
(3) Introduce an interesting format that is consistent with real world BB (though just like we have a 22 game rather than an 82 game regular season, we have best of 3 rather than best of 7).
(4). Give a an economic bonus for finishing in the top 4.
(5) Give an incentive to winning more games, because of seeding, and the use of regular season record and playoff record for (2).
(6) Introduce more interaction between the two conferences, than simply 8 interconference games used in determining regular season records.

Competion for the bottom 8 would:

(1) Determine which teams relegate, or are least worthy of retention if there are a lot of bots in other leagues in the division.
(2) Filling the schedule, while the top 8 play a more intense competition.
(3) Providing games that the teams can be competitive at. If you have a chance to win each game it is more fun.
(4) Introduce more interaction between the two conferences.

Initially, it is going to be hard to build up rivalries. My team is on its 3rd owner this season. The most games by any current owner is 7, and it averages about 4, My 2nd game was against an owner that had his team a few hours before we played. If we are dispersed among 16 leagues it wouldn't matter.

Multi-game series will build rivalries.

If you want to build up rivalries, you might want to funnel leagues into a smaller set (eg. II.1 could be fed from III.1 to III.4), II.2 from III.5 to III.8. So when you promote, you might join some rivals from previous seasons. In HT, you see some of this between I and II, but rarely elsewhere. It was pretty much a freak that I promoted into the same D.IIII series both times. There might be negative factors with such a funneling process, if the different leagues become imbalanced competitively. Or maybe if a country only a few dozen teams, it might be better to stack them in 4 divisions with a lot of promotion from each divison to the next. If you have 1000s of teams, you need to use wide branches like the 1:4, but it might not be the best when there are fewer teams.

Bots don't add to the rivalries.

After a few seasons the bot cleanup will settle down. In the USA, I think there are about 50% bots in D.I to D.III, but even a seemingly huge number can be handled by on average promoting a second team from each league in a full D.IV. Or 4 teams from a 1/2 full D.IV which I think the USA has. So even in a somewhat extreme case, 12 teams would be retained in the D.IV series (with no relegation).

I've tried reading about your systems (the bot clean-out and playoffs). You catch me at the beginning but then start to confuse me. Is there any way to make your systems less complicated? I think I would favour them if they were easier to understand.

For the bot clean-out, it is probably simpler not to think about leagues too much and simply think of each division as being a box with with a bunch of active teams and some bots.

So for the USA you might have:

D.I: 12 Active and 3 Bots
D.II 31 Active and 33 Bots
D.III 140 active and 116 Bots
D.IV 420 active and 604 Bots
D.V 0 active and 4096 Bots

It doesn't really matter too much that in D.I, D.II, and D.III the bots are distributed among the leagues, and D.IV has many leagues with 16 teams, due to replacements, and other leagues with no active teams, because they have never been added.

Bot cleanout would be done as part of regular promotion and relegation. If you have a lot of bots in an upper division, then more active teams will be promoted from the lower division.

Promotion/relegation is done a pair of divisions at a time.

So let's start with I and II.

D.I: 12 Active and 3 Bots
D.II 31 Active and 33 Bots

4 active teams are guaranteed promotion from II (the 4 playoff winners). Since we have 3 bots in D.I, 1 active team would be relegated. The classification matches would determine the victim.

D.I: 16 Active and 0 Bots
D.II 28 Active and 36 Bots
D.III 140 active and 116 Bots

We now go to D.II and D.III.

16 active teams from D.III are guaranteed promotion. But since we have 36 bots, we have to have another 20 active teams promote. The playoffs would help identify the additional promoted teams. No active teams would be relegated from D.II. There is no reason to do so, when we are having to promote extra teams from below.

D.II 64 Active and 0 Bots
D.III 104 active and 152 Bots
D.IV 420 active and 604 Bots

Let's say that that there are 30 active playoff champions in D.IV. The leagues that are bot filled have a playoff just like any other league, it simply doesn't have any effect on promotion. We need 122 additional teams to promote from D.IV for a total of 152. Promoting 152 of 420 teams cuts prety deep into D.IV. But this is OK we want the top 336 active teams in D.111.

D.III 256 active and 0 Bots
D.IV 268 active and 756 Bots
D.V 0 active and 4096 Bots

And finally we do D.IV and D.V.

There are no active teams to promote from D.IV, so we don't bother swapping bots between the divisions.

D.IV 268 active and 756 Bots
D.V 0 active and 4096 Bots

Note that in this case, only one activer was relegated, the one team from D.I to D.II. No active team will ever relegate more than one division. But bots can relegate multiple division. In this case, 3 bots dropped from D.I to D.II to D.III to D.IV.

When BB is more mature, there will be fewer bots in the upper divisions, and there may be more active teams relegated.

Now let's think a little bit about the leagues within the divisions. There might be one league with 2 bots and 14 active teams, and another with 12 bots and 4 active teams. All 14 bots would relegate and be replaced by active teams. This would mean that 14 teams would be retained in one league. But that is OK, since with so many bots throughout the division, we can leave the solid leagues alone. And there would be 12 teams promoting into the other league. And that is OK too, since we are cleaning out the bots. We could try to balance the leagues by shifting teams, but that will break up rivalries.

Edited 10/12/2007 7:50:45 AM by jimrtex

Now the ideas about playoffs. It might be better to think of this being "post season" rather than "playoffs"

We want all teams to have some competition matches in the post season. And we want to provide some additional information that can be used for ranking teams for purposes of promotion or relegation. Ideally, we would want some inter-league competition to help determine ranking, but that probably isn't practical because of the number of leagues in most divisions. So we atuck with saying that team A that won 18 games in league III.3 is "better" than team B that won 17 games in league III.8, even though III.8 might have been a tougher league.

I am suggesting using the current playoff scheme for the top 8 teams in a league (4 from each conference), except all 3 rounds would be best of 3 series, and that the early rounds would have more inter-conference play. For example, in the 1st round the 1st place team in one conference would play the 4th place team in the opposite conference.

Right now, if a team loses in the 1st round of the playoffs, their season is over, except for scrimmages. I would have the losers in the 1st round play in the 2nd round, in a consolation semifinal. And as now, the winners of the 1st round would play in the championship semifinal.

Then in the 3rd round, the winners of the championship semifinals would play in the championship final, and the losers in the 3rd place series. The winners of the consolation semifinals would play in the consolation final, and the losers would play for 7th place.

If we need additional promoting teams, I would rank teams based on their record in the regular season and in the playoffs. If you did well in the regular season, and were 0-6 in the playoffs you will drop down in the rankings. If you are 14-10 in the regular season, but are 5-2 in the playoffs (only losing the championship series), you would move up some.

For the bottom 8 teams, 4 from each conference, I would use a different format. During the regular season, teams play conference foes twice, and teams in the other conference once. So at the end of the regular season, each of the bottom 8 teams has played 10 games against the other 7 teams. The post-season would have 4 inter-conference games for each team, so that combining the regular season and post-season, the bottom 8 would have played home-and-home against each of the other 7 teams for 14 games total. I would use these consolation league standings for purposes of determine which teams if any would be subject to relegation. It is possible that all 4 relegation targets would come from one of the 2 conferences, but this is OK since the teams from the two conferences have played each other 2 times.

I see your logic to all this... my concern is that from a players perspective that sometimes means the regular season didn't mean anything.. i'm not gonna get demoted because there are enough bots in my division so why should i care. Having every game matter I think is important.

For that reason I might be in favor of a system which does the promotion/demotion in the normal way... 1 up 4 down... and then does bot cleanout on top of that based upon some metric (post season tournament, regular season record, etc).

post season tournaments would take time, and the rest of the universe couldn't be playing games till it was done.. so it would add a lot of downtime into the site between seasons.. or it would have to be done in a highly accelerated manner which wouldn't give some owners time to set tactics etc... at least with the pace they are used to. We had complaints about the draft only being available to set for 1 week.. which is why its available for longer this season.

the worst thing you can do is create downtime for users OR make it necessary for them to login frequently.
Not everyone sits around logging in multiple times a day. Some people have jobs, kids, responsibilities that preclude them from logging in all the time....
So, I think the way the playoffs and promotion/relegation works is fine. Adding the extra scrimmage was ok too, didn't really matter to me.

Now, the way teams are slotted into the game on the other hand....oh wait, that's another thread...sorry. :)