Accelerated Team Development

Post by **DoubleSkulls** » Tue Aug 20, 2002 9:23 pm

Our league is about to resume in a couple of months and we'll be having a couple of new players join the league. We've managed to arrange half a dozen friendlies for them to get a bit of development, but I doubt it is enough.

1) The handicap table does not adequately compensate for TR.
2) Although some teams will plateux over the course of the season, the new teams will be a disadvantage for at least the 1st half of the season
3) It may be easy for the new teams to enter a negative cycle - players getting killed/SId because they are behind and so never catch up.

So, any suggestions as to how to help the new teams develop a little bit more quickly so they can catch up? Or some method to help them win a few more games.

Ian

High & Mighty · Post by **High & Mighty** » Tue Aug 20, 2002 9:31 pm

Our league did three things.

1) 1,050,000 gold

2) Each new starting team was allowed two random MVPs before the season started (kind of like an expansion draft where you get some already experienced players to play with all the youngins), and

3) No new team played an experienced team until the third game of the season.

Our experienced teams were TR 150-170 to start the season and the new teams weren't especially squashed...well...except the wood elves, but that's to be expected. Our semi's include a new orc team and three experienced teams (orc, dwarf, and dark elf) with a new undead team getting marginally left out of the playoffs to the new orc team.

Deathwing · Post by **Deathwing** » Tue Aug 20, 2002 11:25 pm

ianwilliams wrote:Our league is about to resume in a couple of months and we'll be having a couple of new players join the league. We've managed to arrange half a dozen friendlies for them to get a bit of development, but I doubt it is enough.

1) The handicap table does not adequately compensate for TR.
2) Although some teams will plateux over the course of the season, the new teams will be a disadvantage for at least the 1st half of the season
3) It may be easy for the new teams to enter a negative cycle - players getting killed/SId because they are behind and so never catch up.

So, any suggestions as to how to help the new teams develop a little bit more quickly so they can catch up? Or some method to help them win a few more games.

Ian

Appearance fees and OSP.....ah forget it!

Zombie · Post by **Zombie** » Tue Aug 20, 2002 11:37 pm

What we do around here is we have a minor league for new teams to play each other for an entire season, and a major league running at the same time for teams that have played at least one season. It's working well so far.

Deathwing · Post by **Deathwing** » Tue Aug 20, 2002 11:46 pm

Ian, out of interest, what kind of TR are your established teams running at?

Post by **DoubleSkulls** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 8:14 am

Deathwing wrote:Ian, out of interest, what kind of TR are your established teams running at?

The experienced teams are 175~210 TR (having played at least 14 games each).

Post by **DoubleSkulls** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 10:15 am

Zombie wrote:What we do around here is we have a minor league for new teams to play each other for an entire season, and a major league running at the same time for teams that have played at least one season. It's working well so far.

A nice idea, but we really don't have enough players to run two leagues.

We may have enough to have two conferences. Has anyone tried having strong/weak conferences (so top half in one conference, bottom half in another)? Do they work? I think that we'd then have the top two in each conference enter the semis.

Ian

Marcus · Post by **Marcus** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 10:55 am

We are planning on running our summer open style league in parallel with our scheduled season. The idea here is that we can maintain a league for non-regular coaches, and for coaches who want to try out a new team, while keeping the regular scheduled season.

There's every possibility that new coaches could continue developing teams in the Open league until such time as they feel their team is ready to take on the scheduled season.

Part of the problem here is, the culture of our league has been one where - due to frequent major rule changes over the life of the league and coaches' desire to try new things - we have tended to restart teams from scratch every season. This ensured that teams were quite evenly balanced all the way through the season.

More coaches are looking at continuing their teams over to the next season this time which means that the gap between top and bottom teams may well increase. I'm not sure this will be a bad thing. It will certainly give the Handicap and Aging rules the workout they haven't yet really been given in our league.

If we end up with at least 10 teams for the Regular season I'd be happy to see a top and bottom conference setup. Should give the lower rated teams room to develop.

TiMuN · Post by **TiMuN** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 11:01 am

We once played giving the newbie coaches 12 SPP to distribute among their players, so only 6 SPP would be avaliable for each player .. enough to get two players to the next level, and pick a skill. If those new teams at your league, ian, had already been playing 4 or 5 games, giving them the possibility of distribute 12 SPP would probably make 3 players to take a skill .. and thus, making them more hard to be killed without even seeing where did it come from!

just my two cents.

High & Mighty · Post by **High & Mighty** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 12:41 pm

ianwilliams wrote: We may have enough to have two conferences. Has anyone tried having strong/weak conferences (so top half in one conference, bottom half in another)? Do they work? I think that we'd then have the top two in each conference enter the semis.

Ian

We had 8 teams and put two new teams and two old teams in each division.

Post by **Thadrin** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 12:57 pm

Two conferences can work. I imagine my league will be facing this problem when our new season kicks off soonish. Some folk want to try new teams, some folk may be new. What we do have in place is the free league system along similar lines to what marcus mentioned: a team is allowed 5 games before they enter the league proper. Most people have at least a couple of sideline teams in the "free" league in addition to their own team.

Now I just have to persuade our commish that Aging is OK and we should give it a longer test period. I talked to him on Monday and he really wants it gone...

Deathwing · Post by **Deathwing** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 1:08 pm

ianwilliams wrote: We may have enough to have two conferences. Has anyone tried having strong/weak conferences (so top half in one conference, bottom half in another)? Do they work? I think that we'd then have the top two in each conference enter the semis.

Ian

We've split Wodell in two divisions this season. We're bringing in rookie Amazon, Halfling, Lizardmen and Khemri, bringing the total up to 20 teams.
Div I are contesting the Chaos Cup, Div I the Spike. We're planning on running both division simultaniously in the BB, with the top 4 from each Div. going into the quarters.
If you go that route, maybe some of your coaches can start a second rookie team. Should they get both teams into the play-offs, they pick one of them, and the other stands aside for the next best placed team.

Haar · Post by **Haar** » Wed Aug 21, 2002 3:00 pm

In my league, we had four preseason games in scramble format that only the rookie teams could play in. We got from 100 to about 120-140 or so as a group. The older teams were 150-180, so we're still down a little, but not a lot.

Acerak · Post by **Acerak** » Fri Aug 23, 2002 8:02 pm

I believe rookies should take their lumps - and let's be honest, those lumps are far less lumpy than they were in Third Edition days - but I like a suggestion Marcus made elsewhere on TalkBB:

"Roll a D6 after the game for each player. If the roll is greater than the number of SPPs the player has, the player gains an SPP."

I'd add one simple amendment:

"A roll of 1 always fails, and a roll of 6 always succeeds."

Understand that you're going to get about 3 free SPPs per game even on a team of players with one or more skills apiece. But I think it's a nice addition to the rules that's worth a shot, especially in a league like yours.

Cheers!

-Chet

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