JackassRampant
Joined: Feb 26, 2011
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 Posted:
Aug 25, 2026 - 21:25 |
 
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| MattDakka wrote: | | I didn't suggest to consider Season 2+ game 1 as game 4 for matching purpose. It could be an idea, but it wasn't something I said. |
Right, I was riffing off of it. |
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Lude enixe, obliviscatur timor. |
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Chingis
Joined: Jul 09, 2007
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| Posted:
Aug 25, 2026 - 21:33 |
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| Sp00keh wrote: | orcs as the example again, but if the bigger orc team has an extra 200-400k, it's probably elites like block mightyblow guard
inducements are not gonna save the smaller orc team facing the bigger orc team with an extra 200-400k of block mightyblow guard, hahaha
games like that are a nightmare for the small team
and if it included stats, as u say, that'd be even worse for them |
If it was a nightmare, then it'd be a nightmare that they'd chosen.
If both teams are, say, ten games old, then if one team is packed full of 400k worth of Block-Mighty Blow-Guard while the other one isn't, then the other team has pretty much chosen not to. Or if they're a different race, chosen not to invest in counterplay to Block-Mighty Blow-Guard teams. They've had ten games to do that choosing, in the knowledge that there are teams out there that go Block-Mighty Blow-Guard and they might have to face them.
That doesn't have the same 'unfairness' of facing something that you've never even had the possibility to build any counterplay to, because your team is just simply not old enough.
***
I think there is an additional consideration too which isn't about some singular measure of strength but about diversity. TV-Spreadsheet-Bowl (the set of metagaming behaviours arising solely from the knowledge that you're going to be TV-matched) is not so much about manipulating your team strength but essentially more about manipulating who your next opponent can possibly be.
In my perception, that's part of a wider tendency among the really hardcore "let's 'solve' the team building game, if I can't win the BBT, retire the team"-end of the spectrum who get a far bigger proportion of their enjoyment from the act of winning rather than the act of playing. My impression is that that type of mindset, the sort that assesses the season in terms of deviation from a 15/0/0 record, really above all in their team building craves predictability. "If I know that I do do X with Y player (who I built specially to do X) then I will win 90% of games. I want to be able to do exactly that same thing against a predictably similar opposition team for fifteen games. If I play what feels like the same game fifteen times in a row, I will be very happy." (You see a similar kind of thing in some competitive deck-building games, where some players craft decks which just work to a goal with as minimum possible interaction with the opposing deck (and player!) as possible. That is, they are looking for every game to be the same predictable experience as far as possible, at least on their side of the board.)
Now, TV-matching plays into that desire because it makes your opponents far more predictable (this is the key thing that TV-Spreadsheet-Bowl works on). If allows (incentivises?) more single-track team building and play styles, rather than 'toolbox' teams which expect to find answers to a potential multitude of questions on the board and from a range of skills, rather than answering the same predictable question over-and-over, game-after-game, in a way that has been determined before the game ever started. If you know you will never face, say, Morg and Ripper in the same match, then you never have to build any kind of counter to that possibility. If you know you will likely never face a team with more than two Tacklers, you don't have to have a plan B for that. Or whatever the specifics are for any particular team. And I think a similar thing goes for Prayers, by the way! The thing that people really dislike seems to be the randomness. I think as much as any imbalance people also really don't want their cozy predictability being shattered by an environment in which every game starts with both teams gaining three random special rules that you then have to modify any pre-conceived plans around. |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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Aug 25, 2026 - 22:03 |
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If I had to play with number of games as matching criterion instead of TV I would still build my teams as I do for TV matching.
A team tailored to do something well: bashing, with Guard, MB, Tackle or scoring, with natural one turner, a Thrower and supporting crew of rookie scrubs, is generally better than an all rounded team able to counter many opponents but without a clearly defined plan to achieve the win most of times.
With Re-Draft you can't keep many players built to counter a variety of team, but just 1 or 2.
That generally means a stat freak ball carrier and 1 or 2 partially developed players.
The idea of having an all rounded team is romantic but not effective, the game rules don't support it. |
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Chingis
Joined: Jul 09, 2007
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Aug 25, 2026 - 23:48 |
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Of course, in any environment you can still make an assessment of whether overall you want to build your team to do one single thing incredibly efficiently or many things a little less efficiently. But if you think of it as a sliding scale, or as a probabilistic gamble that you make, then in an environment where you expect to face a wider range of questions (Can your team cope with being a strong underdog? How about facing some nasty star players as an strong overdog? How about if you can't go-for-it all match? Or what if you can't foul?) it certainly pushes the needle in the direction of having a 'toolbox' team, whether that's to outright favour them or simply to close the gap between that all-rounder team and a monomanical team.
But whichever sort of thing you personally prefer, I was just really mentioning it as something where I wonder whether that preference for predictability is the real, unspoken* motivation sometimes? Or maybe you think it's not and that I'm misinterpreting! (I speak I think as a kind of observer in a way, as I am very aware that I fall on the other side of the spectrum, be it in Blood Bowl or deck-building games or board games or whatever: I tend more than most I think to engineer things to provide opportunity for in-game decisions to decide the game, rather than to try and pre-determine singular plans in the setup/team management/deck building/whatever stage.)
*and perhaps sometimes even assumed as universal?? |
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JackassRampant
Joined: Feb 26, 2011
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Aug 26, 2026 - 16:51 |
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Sorry for a bit of necro, but I think this is a thing that hasn't quite been digested.
| Sp00keh wrote: | | Chingis wrote: | | All other things being equal, if two teams are meeting who would otherwise be the same, then the one who has lost a player (temporarily or completely) hasn't really lost a player for the particular match, because the extra petty cash from losing that player is exactly the amount needed to hire a mercenary stand-in, minus the 30k mercenary tax, regardless of which position has been lost. |
so you're losing 30k immediately there,
plus the player has 4+ Loner,
plus u can only get a single primary skill on them, and it costs 50k
this is why inducements are not enough |
Let's look at an alternative. Let's say the teams are 5k apart. Now the lower value team has a Mascot and a Prayer, which could be Knuckledusters, or Moles, or any of a lot of really good results that could wildly overpower the 30k (one elite primary) that they offset. The Mascot is half a reroll, for 25k. On some teams, that's worth 35k. So you could put Moles on your opponent and get a 35k reroll, because they're 5k ahead of you.
You can't have fair, no matter how you slice it. This edition precludes the feeling of comfort you're seeking, on purpose. Embrace the crazy, the era of fair fights is over and you can't protect it with TV matching.
In TV-matching, you can redraft your rickety raft of linemen and a few good players without any reserves or Apo, and walk straight into a perfectly crafted 1265k storm of evil. TV says it's fair, heh heh heh. Not only that, but this will happen over and over when you redraft, with every game you play, until your team floats or dies. Might be a problem for 2 games, might make you just want to quit playing these horrible stupid losers who can't get out of Journeyman hell.
Do you want that? That's what we have now. That's where we are. People play 15 games and abandon their teams, because the redraft is punishing.
TV is no longer a metric for calculating team strength. It is a resource and a drag on big teams. That doesn't mean it doesn't correlate with team strength, even if you consider its effect on opposing petty cash, but the way the petty cash rules are written, if you're close to your opponent, being slightly behind them is a horrible, scary weapon after about 5 games, once money stops mattering. |
_________________
Lude enixe, obliviscatur timor. |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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Aug 26, 2026 - 17:05 |
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| JackassRampant wrote: | | People play 15 games and abandon their teams, because the redraft is punishing. |
Yes, but there are other reasons too: Season 1 teams find more easily games, they are protected from pairings with Season 2+ teams and the BBT encourages playing only Season 1 teams.
There could be a Season 2+ Trophy (there is the IDT but teams winning it don't play in a tournament, like the BBT teams).
Anyway, Seasons should be shorter, today I faced a ST 5 AG 2+ Human Blitzer on a Season 2 team. Too easy to develop and keep the freaks with MVP nomination, BB 2025 level up table and 15-game Season.
We can argue endlessly about TV matching and age matching, but we are not focussing on Season length, which is quicker and easier to change than inventing a whole new MM system based on games played.
By the way, how a MM based on number of games played would work?
A Season 2+ team would be paired with another Season 2+ team with the closest number of Seasons and games played? |
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JackassRampant
Joined: Feb 26, 2011
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| Posted:
Aug 26, 2026 - 18:17 |
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I was thinking that in season 2, you'd start with more effective games played and then catch up on some schedule.
First Season: N = Games played.
Second+ Season: N = 3.5 + 0.75 (Games played in season).
Or shorten the second and later seasons to 12 and make it 3+ games in season.
Or combine those, make it 4.2 games plus 0.9 per game played, out to 12, whether you shorten the second season or not.
Then adjust the tolerance for mismatches enough that teams can get games, but ideally less than enough to match redrafted teams with brand new ones. So the minimum baseline for redrafted teams is more than the necessary match tolerance for new teams. Tolerance can also be a slight variable: a 9 game team vs 12 games is one thing, a 0 game team vs 3 games is another.
This will give a slight advantage to redrafted teams more than about 6 games in, but it won't be crazy. Shortening the second season would reduce the impact of this. |
_________________
Lude enixe, obliviscatur timor. |
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JackassRampant
Joined: Feb 26, 2011
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Aug 30, 2026 - 09:23 |
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Okay, the last two horrible Box matches I had wouldn't have been picked up by either metric.
Match 1: S2 g3, 1375k vs S3, g14, 1710k
Match 2: S2, g4, 1555k vs S2, g12, 1450k
Does that scream, "OMG team 1 is going to massacre team 2!"? No? Me neither. But both of those games, that's exactly what you'd say going into it, because it's Orcs vs 11-player Khorne, then Orcs vs Halflings. No getting around that.
Second observation, some teams need a little goose in their starting position relative to others. What about something like a trait that invisibly follows a team upon redrafting?
S1: N = number of games in season.
S2+: N = number of games in season, with a minimum of their redraft value (including agent fees but not any forfeit cash) over 1M in increments of 150k, rounded up, plus a similar 1/150k for player improvement value and agent fees, rounding that up separately. This is just a minimum, it doesn't add to the effective age of the team once the actual number of games in season exceeds this number. If the team has no games in season, cut this number by a third (rounding the total up), because Week 1 of a new season often kinda sucks.
Maybe make it 100k for the first +1 game and 150k for each +1 after that? Nobody interacts with it, it can be kinda convoluted as long as it only checks states that can be recognized, right? Also, there's a point in arguing that a team with 400k in returning players/fees is cheesing the system, but by 550k you're just playing with yourself, so let's cap the minimum (yay, a maximum minimum) at 7 games.
So my Orcs with their ST increases, elite skills, regular skills, agent fees, and not much wasted cash would draw as if they had 7 games in season, until game 8 (or 7, I guess), when the actual number of games takes over. On week 1, it would be 5 games, though, because they just kinda hatched and have to buy key stuff over.
But on the other hand, if I decide to blow the team up and start over with 1M gold or less, and no returning players, I'm zero games old and can be matched up with brand new teams! I could cheat by up to 100k and be ... one game old!
So: check separately for (TV used on redraft) and (skill value plus agent fees after redraft):
Treasury spent:
1M or less: 0
1005k to 1100k: +1
1105k to 1250k: +2
1255k or more: +3
Skills + Fees (value):
0: 0
5k to 100k: +1
105k to 250k: +2
255k to 400k: +3
405k or more: +4 (no point in penalizing teams beyond this)
A team redrafted at/near 1350k, with a good allotment of skills will be at 6 or 7 games as a minimum, or 4 or 5 games in the first matchup. |
_________________
Lude enixe, obliviscatur timor. |
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ph0enyx13
Joined: Nov 14, 2015
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| Posted:
Aug 31, 2026 - 01:40 |
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| MattDakka wrote: | The fact there is no set Season Re-Draft in the rules and only a level up table for any Season length suggests to me that game designers didn't have an accurate idea.
There should be specific level up tables for different Season lengths.
Reaching 14 SPPs is harder with 8-game Season than with 15-game Season, and keeping a freak is harder or easier, according to different lengths.
The Commissioner can decide the Season length but the Commissioner should be able to modify the level up table as well (for example, with an official formula to correlate Season length to SPPs required for level ups).
If a Season is long, rushing the stat boosts is a no brainer, but would still people try to get a freak if they had to play with a short Season? Would people hoard SPPs to get MA 7 on an Orc Thrower or Blitzer in the very last game (in a Season lasting 8 games, for example) or would people take Leader or Mighty Blow respectively to have an immediate, early advantage since game 3?
The Season length affects the team building. |
the spp costs and tv costs for skill ups and stats were built around NAF style and possibly short leagues. They make sense for NAF since you can disallow stat ups on the good teams and the costs make sense for either tv or spp based skill ups. |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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Aug 31, 2026 - 02:41 |
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I understand, but the stat ups here are not disallowed and there was no need to make a bad level up table and ruin the normal game (the non-NAF leagues) to suit NAF format.
Short league: I'd like to know the official Season length meant by GW designers.
It can't be a vague, hand waving definition such as "short". If the Season is at Commissioner's discretion, the level up table should be as well, because the two things are tightly related. |
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JackassRampant
Joined: Feb 26, 2011
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Aug 31, 2026 - 03:06 |
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I think the proper response should be to sound it all out. There are probably quite a lot of viable strategies, and a lot of them are very different from anything that has come before. Why not dive in and embrace them? |
_________________
Lude enixe, obliviscatur timor. |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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Aug 31, 2026 - 11:45 |
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I could develop myself a monster team in the Box (not as good as one farmed with GF, of course, but with better freaks or more stat boosted players than 2: I usually don't take +ST to keep the player cheaper and re-draft them, also, I prefer to build natural one turners when possible and taking +ST ruins that kind of build), but the higher the TV is, the harder finding a game gets. I already waste hours failing activation after activation, having more 1600+ teams would not help to get a match. I could play only teams with natural one turners, that's another possibility. For example, High Elves, Wood Elves, Skaven, Vampires. I play a mix of bash, agile and hybrid, but if people want to exploit, I can do it as well. I can play a game reducing the interaction with my opponent to the minimum and winning through 1TTD. Is this what people want?
Why not just making Season shorter, which is the easiest solution?
Or keep the 15-game Season but lower the budget to 1300k (note: if changing the Season to 12 or 10 games is a problem for BBT, Season 1 could stay at 15 games and Season 2+ last 10-12 games).
There are many ways and they don't require lot of work. It's just a matter of changing Season and/or budget settings.
Why this doesn't happen? The site currently doesn't discourage picking, that is at the expense of quality matchmaking and rankings' accuracy with bloated win rates and CR.
Absolutely unfair to the honest coaches always playing only in the Box.
The game experience results into a wasted hour if the match is vs an unfair team developed on GF. This on principle, but actually as well, is blatantly unfair and could be avoided with some simple solutions.
I suggested shorter Season, lower budget, tick button, a GF/Box games ratio. There could be other ideas, not saying we should use mine, but it could be possible to improve the Box MM. People here don't even contemplate it, because many of them play teams for 15 games and don't bother about anything else. They don't bother about important things like the fairness of Box match-ups, they just play. |
Last edited by MattDakka on Aug 31, 2026; edited 1 time in total |
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koadah
Joined: Mar 30, 2005
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| Posted:
Aug 31, 2026 - 14:37 |
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MattDakka
Joined: Oct 09, 2007
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Aug 31, 2026 - 14:48 |
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Yes, I thought of higher cap, but shorter Season too. For example, 1400 budget and 10 games.
Otherwise, 1350k budget and 8 games. Something like that. |
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JackassRampant
Joined: Feb 26, 2011
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| Posted:
Aug 31, 2026 - 18:21 |
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EDITED
Ooh... cap starts at 1M, +40k per match for 10 matches (to 1400k), -20k per match after 10 (down to 1300k at 15), auto-redraft or tournament @ 1300k after 15 matches. Every tournament round adds 10k back.
Double initial gains (but not the 1400k cap) for season 2+ teams, so they peak after 5 games, and hit 1300k (redraft/tournament mandate) after 10 games.
Season 1:
1: 1040k
2: 1080k
3: 1120k
4: 1160k
5: 1200k
6: 1240k
7: 1280k
8: 1320k
9: 1360k
10: 1400k
11: 1380k
12: 1360k
13: 1340k
14: 1320k
15: 1300k (mandatory season end)
16: 1310k
17: 1320k
18: 1330k (brawl winner)
19: 1340k
20: 1350k
21: 1360k
22: 1370k (major winner)
Then in the second and later seasons...
1: 1080k
2: 1160k
3: 1240k
4: 1320k
5: 1400k
6: 1380k
7: 1360k
8: 1340k
9: 1320k
10: 1300k (mandatory season end)
11: 1310k
12: 1320k
13: 1330k (brawl winner)
14: 1340k
15: 1350k
16: 1360k
17: 1370k (major winner) |
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