FUMBBL :: Online Blood Bowl League

Pirog

Joined: Jul 13, 2006

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 17:28

Calcium,

And you would probably hurt it more than I would hurt you even if you played humans Smile

Frankenstein

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 18:06

Cloggy wrote:

The TS formula was already changed to accomodate the balance in B.

I think it works well enough now.

I would have to disagree. The TS-formula clearly favors teams such as chaos dwarves and khemri.

If your patient enough, it's even possible to become No. 1 in Ranked by playing nothing but orcs against newbie coaches (CR130-160). Although that is a problem of both TS- and CR- formula combined, admittedly.

With regard to the topic: I for one would would not want to make games harder for some races in order to encourage racial diversity.

Last edited by Frankenstein on %b %16, %2009 - %20:%Dec; edited 1 time in total

odi

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 19:34

I think in the beginning the scheduler used BBR too, so if you were only out to bash, you'd get harder games. This ofcourse caued an uproar Very Happy

Even though people could have kept their BBR quite neutral, by playing different races. Well, I dont mind, I like to see my AV7 teams bleed Very Happy

maysrill

Joined: Dec 29, 2008

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 20:02

BWR being more prominent would probably help some. If people took pride in it as a stat they might tend to play better winning races. Orcs of course do quite well for themselves, and dwarfs hold their own. Khemri and ogres are fairly awful at winning however. They get played more frequently because they are hard to get matches with in Ranked.

Elfbowl games are fairly easy to come across in Ranked, or even non-elfbowl games with elf teams. If you want to play other races and not wait hours, as people dodge you left and right, it's Box time.

Calthor

Joined: Jan 24, 2006

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 20:11

maysrill wrote:

If you want to play other races and not wait hours, as people dodge you left and right, it's Box time.

Aye. And I consider that a very good thing, personally. If someone wants to play the challenging Ogres or even Khemri (yes, both teams are able to bash hard, but really not that easy to play with at all, especially if the bashing is not that succesful) then they should find opponents, as that is something to be applauded. All teams need love, and the box loves all teams.

freak_in_a_frock

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 20:27

DukeTyrion wrote:

The good news is, the bashy races (Orc, Dwarf, Khemri) tend to race to 200TR and get stuck there. The other races Elves, Rats, Humans, Necro etc... seem to get battered often enough that they stay at 140-180 TR.

The net effect is, after a short build up, the bashy races are at a high enough TS where they only play each other, whilst the races that get their wings clipped semi-regularly have quite a varied schedule.

So, in a manner alot of the issue seems to resolve itself, although this is naturally not true for all cases.

DukeTyrion speaks the truth. It is a point i have raised repeatedly. Look at most elf teams in the box, and their stats will not show the same racial spread as the box itself, but a much more varied selection. Meanwhile Khemri, Orc and Dwarf teams have to play each other lots more.

As was said before in the topic, the problem is not that the box has too many of these teams, it is just to hard to get games for them in ranked, and therefore the fans of these teams are forced to play in the box.

treborius

Joined: Apr 05, 2008

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 23:07

I've had an idea a while ago: if racial diversity in B is really desired, why not give underrepresented races a
slight advantage (TS-wise) in the match-ups in a self-organizing way along the lines of the following model:

1. keep track of the number of times each race was present in B-matches over the last, say, 10 days.
(with about 75 B-games / day that would be 750 games x 2 teams = 1500 samplesize of race-diversity)

2. based on the fact that there are 24 races (if i counted correctly) there would be an expected occurance of 1500/24 = 62.5 games / race in an ideally diverse division. I call that number ideal_occ

3. since we don't have an ideal division (yet), each race has either been over- or underrepresented over the past 10 days as measured by delta_occ_r1 .. delta_occ_r24 (in the example, if Orcs have been drawn in 200 of the matchups and Flings have been drawn 20 times, their delta-values would be: delta_occ_Orc = 200-62.5 = 137.5 and delta_occ_Fling = 20-62.5 = -42.5, where positive numbers mean overrepresentation and negative numbers mean underrepresentation).

4. based on each race's individual delta_occ, the match-up-algorithm could now be tweaked in a way, that it would give the underrepresented races a (slight) TS-advantage in its generated match-ups and the overrepresented races a slight disadvantage (on average).

the amount of advantage / disadvantage has to be defined, of course.

i could imagine something like TS_adv_race = - sign(delta_occ_race) x sqrt(sqrt(delta_occ_race))
in the (extreme) example above (for Orcs vs. Flings) we would get:

TS_adv_Orc = -3.4
TS_adv_Fling = +2.6

Thus in all matchings Orcs vs. Flings the Flings would get an expected advantage over Orcs of about 2.6 + 3.4 = 6 TS.

i don't know if my idea is transparent to everyone.

it wouldn't directly contribute to B becoming an ideally diverse environment directly, but it would surely give an incentive (in terms of TS-advantage) to coaches who are willing to play less popular races.

please also keep in mind, that when coaches adopt to this and start playing the less popular races more, the system would adapt quickly (over a short period of time of 10 days) until the TS-advantage was neutralized.

(i.e. when all races are played equally often, there would not be any TS-advantages for any race)

EDIT: 'hope anybody is willing to read all that and would love to hear what others think about it Wink

freak_in_a_frock

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 23:26

The main reason i don't like the idea is that it punishes noobs for picking the simpler races.

Orcs are probably the race most selected by noobs, followed by (in my experience) chaos. Both of these races have a higher than average proportion in the box. Therefore it would penalise inexperience to make these races suffer.

Just for the record i use none of the top 4 teams in the box (Orcs, Dwarves, Chaos and Khemri). In fact my preferred race to play with is Necros, so if this was to go ahead i'd be gaining an advantage, so that has nothing to do with it.

The best way for more diversity in the box is for coaches to stop complaining about the lack of certain races, and to start using them, themselves. To put this in context, the original poster's most used teams in the box... Orcs and Chaos. Yours (Treborius) Ogres and Orcs.

So to summarize, if you think there is a problem with the lack of diversity become part of the solution, not part of the problem.

Frankenstein

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 23:32

freak_in_a_frock wrote:

The main reason i don't like the idea is that it punishes noobs for picking the simpler races.

Orcs are probably the race most selected by noobs, followed by (in my experience) chaos. Both of these races have a higher than average proportion in the box. Therefore it would penalise inexperience to make these races suffer.

Just for the record i use none of the top 4 teams in the box (Orcs, Dwarves, Chaos and Khemri). In fact my preferred race to play with is Necros, so if this was to go ahead i'd be gaining an advantage, so that has nothing to do with it.

The best way for more diversity in the box is for coaches to stop complaining about the lack of certain races, and to start using them, themselves.

I have tried that. Unfortunately, the TS-formula favors strength sides so massively, that I'll probably restrict myself to playing the aforementioned 4 races, chaos dwarfs and undead (without ghouls) in the future.

treborius

Joined: Apr 05, 2008

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 23:39

Frankenstein wrote:

freak_in_a_frock wrote:

The main reason i don't like the idea is that it punishes noobs for picking the simpler races.

Orcs are probably the race most selected by noobs, followed by (in my experience) chaos. Both of these races have a higher than average proportion in the box. Therefore it would penalise inexperience to make these races suffer.

Just for the record i use none of the top 4 teams in the box (Orcs, Dwarves, Chaos and Khemri). In fact my preferred race to play with is Necros, so if this was to go ahead i'd be gaining an advantage, so that has nothing to do with it.

The best way for more diversity in the box is for coaches to stop complaining about the lack of certain races, and to start using them, themselves.

I have tried that. Unfortunately, the TS-formula favors strength sides so massively, that I'll probably restrict myself to playing the aforementioned 4 races, chaos dwarfs and undead (without ghouls) in the future.

lol, made me laugh

i see freak's point.

unfortunately, i guess, there will be no system where advantages and disadvantages of choosing certain races are neutralized without taking the easy races away from the noobs.

(don't know if i qualify as noob, really - i play 2 Orc-teams in the box and they are much more easy than anything i've played before, yet i don't know if i qualify as noob, really - actually i'll pretend i don't care for the time being Wink

)

freak_in_a_frock

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 16, 2009 - 23:43

I would very much NOT put you in the noob camp. I don't mean to sound like i am putting noob coaches down, but if someone was just starting out in bloodbowl most players would recommend that they start with orcs as they are one of the most versatile races. That is not to say that only bad coaches use orcs, there are many of the the best coaches on the site that use orcs, all far better than i can.

Pirog

Joined: Jul 13, 2006

Posted: Dec 17, 2009 - 00:04

I think the problem isn't really about the people who like their orc teams, or khemri or whatever, the problem is with the stat hunters, people who play certain races because they know it puts them at an advantage. It's certainly their freedom to play like that, but it doesn't look good when they are the ones who complain about it.

(Oh, and virtually nobody plays dwarves because they are fun. Ask almost any dwarf coach and the response is usually "I just felt like winning" or surprisingly often even arguments like "dwarves are so boring that I play them as a way of revenge against others".)

Frankenstein

Joined: Aug 02, 2003

Posted: Dec 17, 2009 - 00:27

Well, they say that my Guard/MB longbeard is, TS-wise, as strong as a pro elf catcher without any skills and weaker than one with just Dodge. If that doesn't turn dwarves into a fun-to-play roster for you, I don't know what does! Smile

treborius

Joined: Apr 05, 2008

Posted: Dec 17, 2009 - 00:30

freak_in_a_frock wrote:

I would very much NOT put you in the noob camp.

/me blushes

Pirog wrote:

I think the problem isn't really about the people who like their orc teams, or khemri or whatever, the problem is with the stat hunters, people who play certain races because they know it puts them at an advantage. It's certainly their freedom to play like that, but it doesn't look good when they are the ones who complain about it.

i agree with what u say, but i think the model i proposed would solve a lot of the racial imbalancy-problems.

any race that's currently offering an advantage (in general) is overrepresented and would (on average) get matched vs. teams with (slightly) higher TS, thus loosing it's advantage until people would retreat from playing that race all too often.

i think this approach is much more sound than tweaking TS-calculation-formulas which will always have its traps and pitfalls.
it's not complementary to using the TS-formula either, but adds to static TS-measures in a dynamic way as it is self-adapting to whatever optimization trend people are currently following.

JellyBelly

Joined: Jul 08, 2009

Posted: Dec 17, 2009 - 00:38

I've played a fair bit in the box recently, all at below TR160, and I don't think the diversity in that range is great. Check out my [B] stats for races I've played - I've played orcs, chaos and dwarves more than twice as much as any of the other races.

I'm always in favour of trying to keep things balanced, so I think it would be good to introduce something that helps to encourage better racial diversity in the box. Although I don't agree with the initial poster that games should be made harder for over-represented teams.

How about factoring in the popularity of a team into the BWR calculation that gets done after each game? So coaches would find it harder to increase their BWR if they mainly use over-represented races, and vice versa. That would be a good incentive for people to try out a more balanced spread of races.

I'd also be in favour of any way that the [B] tourneys could be used to help promote better racial diversity in the box. Maybe a tourney that accepts a certain 'quota' of each different race? Or where under-represented teams get a cash bonus at the start of the tourney?