Precise or Vague Team (Power?) Rating System

[Toby]

1. Treasury does not affect Team Rating

2. Add a new column to the Team Rosters called Title (see Page 40 LRB1.1)

For every Rookie add 0 Points to the Teams Rating
Experienced add 1 Point
Veteran add 3 Points
Emerging Star add 6 Points
Star Player add 10 Points
Super Star add 15 Points
Mega Star add 25 Points
Legend add 35 Points

That reflects 100% the experience of a team, while not reflecting if their coach was lucky and or has choosen his player's skills wisely. However, the higher the Team Rating gets, the more Star Player Rolls were made and the more luck is reduced to an middle value.


(1-3 Middle Value is 2 whats the english word ?)

[Dangerous Dave]

Toby,

What you suggest makes sense from a purely balanced point of view. However, the thrust of a lot of recent changes to the rules has been to try to ensure that high TR teams need to down size over time and that means retiring players etc.

Your proposal goes against this since once the player has made his next skill roll he doesn't add any more TR points until his next skill roll. Thus TR is automatically lower using your proposal. This has 2 effects:-

The High TR team will get more cash.
The Low TR team will get less Handicap Rolls.

Although what you have suggested gives a more accurate reflection of the strength of each team - (eg a player with 32 SPPs is the same as a player with 49 SPPs), I prefer the current method:-


The current method raises TR by 1 point for every 5 SPPs earned - this means that there is a ceiling on team development.

In addition hoarding cash to replace players is penalised - does cash help your team win? No (unless you roll one of the events on the Handicap Table and need to pay one of your players to play) - however, I for one prefer to see the cash spent on the team rather than building it up so that should your star blitzer fall over and die you just dip into the kitty. This adds more strategy / decisions to team building - should I buy a player / reroll now or keep the cash and be penalised....


Similarly keeping players on your team with Niggles or who were Seriously injured in the last game impacts your TR - again from a strength point of view a team with 2 players missing the next game is lower than a team with a full roster..... but because the TR is artificially higher, the Coach may again be forced into retiring a player. If not he will get less cash.


So, although GW may not have envisaged this when setting up the rules , I think that the current TR system is a good one.


Dave

[Toby]

Dave, you are absolutely correct.
In an other Topic i explained how i share your opinion on the Current system.

The System i suggest is a Team Power Rating, if it was the desing task to better reflect actual power.

Your Points raise the Question, what weight and impact and should Handicap have on a uneven Team-Power Matchup.

[christer]

Maybe I'm just lazy, but I find calculating team rating taking too long... I want to be able to quickly calculate the rating, without having to fetch a calculator to add up all the spp's and stuff.. And no, I don't want to add the numbers without a calculator. Takes too long and is error-prone.

I need a laptop so that I can have a spreadsheet roster or something, or a quicker way to calculate the rating...

-- Christer

[Lucien Swift]

team rating can never indicate the precise power of a team, simply because you cannot include _qualitative_ factors in the mix.... a team full of highly skilled players whose coach makes terrible decisions on selection will not be as effective as a similarly-TR'd team with a coach who choses skills well... thus, while they might be the same in both rough and precise calculations, 1 team will be vastly more efficient on the field than the other....

TR really should be a nebulous, vague rating used for nothing more than gauging rough power level of the team so that you can adjust the income generated downward appropriately so as to plateu the team and keep the league healthy....

[Thadrin]

Here's an idea (bearing in mind this would only work in an open league):
More points for a win against a stronger team, less for a win against a weaker team, somewhere in the middle for a team of about the same strength.

Something like 1 point for beating a team with a TRR lower than yours by twenty or more, 3 for a win against a team within 20 points of you, 5 for a win against a team with more than 20 more than you.
-1 point for losing to a team with a TRR more than 20 points higher than your own, -3 for a loss against a team within 20 points within your TRR, -5 for a loss against a team with more than 20 points less of TRR.

[Toby]

I disagree.
Team Rating can be relatively precise, and the precision increases as all statistical evaluations along with the number of contributuions. In fact Every coach is equally lucky in rolling for skills is you assume that each of them has 100 rolls.

It is to be assumed that every coach is equally good in choosing skills.

So the more skills you have the more complete is your tactic and game plan puzzle, and the more difficult it is to stop your team from sucessfully execute their game plan.

[High & Mighty]

But Team Rating used for handicap purposes will always have to be a rough approximation. The rigor to make anything more precise would just be too time consuming.

For example, if my humans have 4 catchers with pass block and shadowing and 5 lineman with tackle and a few other plaers with diving tackle, my team is likely going to shut down any passing/dodging team but will be relatively ineffective against any bashy team. Should a handicap system to even out the two team account for this difference so that the game is competitive?

The line has to get drawn somewhere and you suffer or prosper on the field for the coaching and managing decisions you've made. I developed the above team to stop passing teams so should I suffer if I have to play a strength team. Of course. If I played poorly last game and have three players missing the current match, that's my penalty for my gameplay in the last game. I shouldn't get a benefit on the handicap table because of it. If I'm saving up big money to freeboot 2 starplayers and a wizard and buy an ogre all at the end of the season in a push for cup, there are consequences to that strategy right now.

Fluffwise, it could be discontent on the team because the manager is a greedy guy who likes to keep the money rather than spend it on the team. Missing players causes disorder on the team as others have to fill in. I shouldn't get handicap help for that. Just makes sense that way to me.

[Lucien Swift]

It is to be assumed that every coach is equally good in choosing skills.

but they aren't... i've known coaches who will put kick on three different players just because he thinks the opponent gets an unfair advantage from a touchback, just as i know coaches who will just take block as the first skill on every player, just because he thinks it's the key to success.... the fact of the matter is that some coaches don't appreciate or understand the full tactical tapestry of the game, they just concentrate on one little part, be it fighting or passing or whatever... perhapos you're in the "golden league" where coaches aren't human, but around here, people are human, and therefore, they do stupid things...

...beyond skill rolls, there are coaches who will stock up on cheerleaders and assistant coaches at the expense of finishing out a roster, coaches who will start with very few rerolls and scrimp and save for them the rest of the team's lifetime (and therefore have an artificiually low tr), etc... .

...if you wanted to take coach error out of the equation, you'd have to assign very poarticular values to what you could get as a team advances, "good" skill would be worth more than "bad" skills (buit then coaches would only ever take the skills that had been ticked as good, because what kind of idiot takes bad skills), team building options would be treated int eh same way, etc.... if you did more than a vague, rough system, it will assign qualitative values to the teams, skills, etc and those numbers would ultimately reveal a formula, get this team, take these skills, have the "best team".... now, they might not win all the time, but _the numbers say this is best_ and outside of the golden league, coaches are a bunch of greedy, power-mad, win-or-quit bastards who are constantly on the watch for an "edge"... while qualititative evaluations wouldn't in reality show a path to success, the fact that the numbers pointed to a certain combo would result in a lot less variety in the game, since those "powerful" patterns of team/development would attract avarice like the one girl at every gaming convention...

but then, what do i know...

[christer]

I have to agree with Toby on this one. Team rating could be made to reflect more or less precise power of a team. Ofcourse, this would need a database containing loads and loads of information (10000+ match records, 100+ coaches of varying skill). Also, this computer (yes, a computer.. You don't do this by hand) could take into consideration the coach ratings as well. In the end, a fairly precise team rating could be calculated. Also, with a system like this, you could finally get a mathematical say in if orcs are better than humans for instance. It could create a team ranking and suggest various modifications to the team lists. Ofcourse, by modifying even one of the lists, you'd need to recalculate all statistics...

Bottom line is that this is way too much work to be practically useful.

-- Christer

[Toby]

Christer there are some factors which obviously contribute to Team Rating but not Power, see my 1st post in this topic. (wasted SPP, Treasury)

When Coaches pick stupid skills, that is not to be solved by the Handicap table, sorry, so lets asume they always pick perfect skills.

So first of all team rating must be calculated BEFORE each game (Hire Griff, 180K = +18 TR), right before Handicap is measured. Everything else is stupid, unless treasury contributes, but then if Griff is not hired, nobody really adds to the teams power. not that easy. ^^

Lucien, Team Rating is not about indicating the Balance of a Matchup.
Consider a Teams Power to be 100% total. (100% of TR 100 or 100% of TR 300, its always 100%)
So a team could be 50 % Strength and 50 % Agility. Or 100% Strength 0 % Agility. Its Power is still 100% !!!

So Team Rating is not a Matchup Analysis.

[neoliminal]

Don't forget that the accuracy you are looking for will probably not be effective anyway. The handicap table has very large spans for ranges. The fact of the matter is that you will unlikely change the range in most games with a more accurate TR. Probably one in ten games would be affected... not enough benefit for the hassle you are asking for, IMO.

[Toby]

I would really push you towards using the changes suggested in my first post, and simplifing things by making the currency kgp (Thousend Gold Pieces)

So Calculating Teamrating would be like this:

10 Veterans = 10 TRP
A Star Player = 10 TRP
Cost of Team = 100 TRP

Ok new Team Rating 120. Actually even easier than the curent system.

[neoliminal]

I would really push you towards using the changes suggested in my first post, and simplifing things by making the currency kgp (Thousend Gold Pieces)

So Calculating Teamrating would be like this:

10 Veterans = 10 TRP
A Star Player = 10 TRP
Cost of Team = 100 TRP

Ok new Team Rating 120. Actually even easier than the curent system.

You're right, that's an easier system. What about RR's?

[Toby]

Neo,

are re-rolls and Coaches & Babes not included in the Total Cost of Team ?

As to the Range on the Handicap Table:
Using the system i suggested, team ratings would rise in "sudden jumps" for example, 2 Star Players Leveling up to Superstars, Team Rating goes up by 10 suddenly.