Open League

[Greyhound]

Does anyone have a good set of rules for an open league?

The idea would be to have casual games, not bound to a schedule to have players battling with a spare team while the normal league rolls on.
The idea is you could show up on the forum, and ask if anyone is free tomorrow night. Play a game, then not play for two weeks, before having a weekend with 4 games crammed in.
I'm sure it's been done before, so I come here to get ideas for the rules.
1) How do you organise match up if several people are free? In real life I don't think it will occur to often, if I ask if someone has an evening free this week I'll be lucky to have suddenly free at the same time, but we could dream and maybe suddenly there's 4 of us... would we debate, get paired up by TV, score etc...?
2) How do you "rate" a team? Points would actually be rewarding whoever can play more often, TV is... ridiculous. I was thinking Score divided by #Games. But maybe ELO would be better...???

cheers.

[Drool_bucket]

Does anyone have a good set of rules for an open league?

go strictly by the book. that way there can't be any confusion over "oh, yeah, we forgot to do it this way, how can we fix that?" If you make any changes, make them broad and simple, like "no special play cards"

2) How do you "rate" a team? Points would actually be rewarding whoever can play more often, TV is... ridiculous. I was thinking Score divided by #Games. But maybe ELO would be better...???

TVR, since LRB 4.0, imho, remains the best way to track teams and balance inequalities. Score by games might hurt WE/Skaven who score lots, but can get scored on, why helping out Orc/Dwarf teams who like 1-0, 2-1 games.

and for strange match ups, toss a die. Or chug a beer, first to finish picks his opponent.

[Greyhound]

Does anyone have a good set of rules for an open league?

go strictly by the book. that way there can't be any confusion over "oh, yeah, we forgot to do it this way, how can we fix that?" If you make any changes, make them broad and simple, like "no special play cards"

That was my intention, i meant to ask for a set of rules to organise and ladder such games.

2) How do you "rate" a team? Points would actually be rewarding whoever can play more often, TV is... ridiculous. I was thinking Score divided by #Games. But maybe ELO would be better...???

TVR, since LRB 4.0, imho, remains the best way to track teams and balance inequalities. Score by games might hurt WE/Skaven who score lots, but can get scored on, why helping out Orc/Dwarf teams who like 1-0, 2-1 games.

I meant to divide the Points earned by the number of games.
That read: 3 Wins, 1 Draw, 16 loss = 9 + 1 + 0 = 10
Divided by the amount of game 10/20= 0.5

Which would be worse than 0 Win, 4 Draws, 0 Loss = 4 points
Divided by the amount of game 4/4= 1

[Digger Goreman]

You can scavenge what you might need from our Ladder League

http://graveyard-gothika.webs.com/aabbladderleague.htm

[mattgslater]

I meant to divide the Points earned by the number of games.
That read: 3 Wins, 1 Draw, 16 loss = 9 + 1 + 0 = 10
Divided by the amount of game 10/20= 0.5

Which would be worse than 0 Win, 4 Draws, 0 Loss = 4 points
Divided by the amount of game 4/4= 1

Uh, are you saying that 3-1-16 isn't as good as 0-4-0? I agree. But apples:apples, 0-4-16 is only 4 points, divided by 20, is 0.2. Another way of putting it is that a 0-4-0 team is about the bottom end of the undefeated. A 3-1-16 team is a proven loser, just good enough to benefit from a few "any given Sunday" situations.

[Smeborg]

Greyhound - we are running a successful open league here in Christchurch, New Zealand on exactly this basis. We have about 20 active coaches and about 55 active teams at the moment, with all 24 races represented.

The points are set at 3 for a win, 1 for a draw, with rankings decided by points ratio (total points divided by number of games played). The league will run for 10 or 11 months (we have a sort of summer break in December/January), and in order to qualify for the end-of-season rankings, teams must have played a minimum of 10 or 11 games (i.e. 1 per month on average).

We allow new coaches to join any time (which is just as well, as we are growing quite fast) and we encourage coaches to run more than one team. We rely on purely "soft" factors (talking to each other, awareness and gentle persuasion) to make sure we don't get power gaming and that coaches spread the love around in terms of who plays who. So far (this is the second season) it's all working very well.

We are purely a tabletop league. We have the good fortune of living in a hghly centralised and well-planned city with good transport links. There are 2 well organised wargaming clubs where we play regularly (one on Thursday, one on Sunday). A sizeable minority of games take place at people's homes outside of this schedule. But the club venues are very important for attracting new coaches.

All the best.

[mattgslater]

It's amazing how much this matters. Living in canyon country makes it very hard to keep a BB league together.

[Smeborg]

It's amazing how much this matters. Living in canyon country makes it very hard to keep a BB league together.

What is the geographic spread of your coaches, what are your main population centres, and how do the "canyons" inhibit you?

[Demagoge]

In our open league we give the playing teams a little benefit. So there is:

win: 6 points
draw: 3 points
loss: 1 point
With equal points we count the touchdown difference of the teams.

So every team who plays gets some points and players who don´t, can´t camp on a few good games.

For us, it works really well.

Best regards

[mattgslater]

It's amazing how much this matters. Living in canyon country makes it very hard to keep a BB league together.

What is the geographic spread of your coaches, what are your main population centres, and how do the "canyons" inhibit you?

San Diego is a city of just over 1M people, in an area larger than New York City (almost 9M people). The greater area is 3M people, and about the size of Connecticut. It's built on or between a bunch of different mesas, with deep canyons in between; getting about between them usually involves taking one of the gigantic highways. There are a couple dozen Blood Bowl players, at most: there's a decent 40k community (the military like it), but real gamers are few and far between, as most people come here for the 300 days of sunshine, and the hobby of choice seems to be getting drunk at the beach and rooting for the Chargers between sets (I must say, this has its merits).

My mesa is about the size of San Francisco, or at least it was before they dug the freeway. The highways are indeed gigantic, but there are only three or four going north, so they crowd up, and you have to plan your trips carefully or you'll take 45 minutes to get to the game store 5 miles away (as the crow flies). The canyons mean there are no back-routes, or what few there are are common knowledge and equally crowded. Being in the U.S. of A., the people are allergic to taxes, so the government is always broke, so mass transit really sucks unless you're going to Mission Valley, Downtown, or UCSD and the mall next to it. There isn't much of a gaming community in any of those places (I'm sure there are some Magic players at UCSD). A good high-speed rail system would actually be pretty affordable, all things considered, but it ain't happening. So if you don't want to drive a lot, you pretty much have to game with people on your mesa or the next one. Yes, I have a car, but not all my coaches do. So I get a few games against a lot of people, and a lot of games against a few people.

[Smeborg]

Thanks, Matt, that's quite clear. Another Blood Bowl city where I have lived has similar transport problems (Auckland), caused by topography (sea, creeks, old volcanoes) and lack of past planning.

But here in Christchurch, we are lucky. We have 20 active coaches now, out of a population of somewhat below 400,000. Some guys catch the bus, but those with cars are often able to give them lifts home, because of the relative compactness of the city. The city is a new world one, it was planned in 1850 and laid out in 1851, just by a dude who knew what he was doing (the layout has not changed since then). And we are flat, of course.

All the best.

[Ullis]

1) How do you organise match up if several people are free? In real life I don't think it will occur to often, if I ask if someone has an evening free this week I'll be lucky to have suddenly free at the same time, but we could dream and maybe suddenly there's 4 of us... would we debate, get paired up by TV, score etc...?
2) How do you "rate" a team? Points would actually be rewarding whoever can play more often, TV is... ridiculous. I was thinking Score divided by #Games. But maybe ELO would be better...???

We use an ELO system in our open league. One player wrote a short web application to automatically track scores (if you want, I can pm you the address but I won't post it here).

Matchups are based on the ELO points. Out of those who show up at a given night, the team with the fewest teams gets to challenge any higher ranked team first and so on.

An example to clarify:

Players A, B, C and D have shown up on Thursday for a hot BB session. They each coach two teams and they are ranked by points in the following manner:

A1
B1
A2
B2
C1
C2
D1
D2

Now, D's not such a great coach and has lost quite a few matches. Since both his teams are the lowest ranked, he gets to completely choose which team he wants to play and which team he wants to play against. Let's say he challenges C1, which happens to be a pretty new skaven. After that there's coaches A and B left. B gets to decide whether he wants to play with B2 or B1. If he doesn't challenge with B2, then coach A gets to challenge with his team A2 but there's only B1 above him so he only gets to challenge that team. If he doesn't challenge, then B1 and A1 play against each other. In effect, unless someone else challenges him, then A can only play against B1 (a killer orc team) with either of his teams but that's only fair cause he wins all the time and is cocky about it.

If only C and B show up, then C gets to decide which teams play against each other.

Anyway, pairings are made only after we know who's coming at a certain night. So this really accommodates coaches who play a lot and those who play less regularly. TV doesn't come into the equation at all so if a rookie team has a string of victories, then there's a large pool of teams that have a chance to cut it down to size. A losing high TV team also gets to often choose it's opponents. And we're pretty ok with someone saying that he doesn't want to play a certain team right now so that team can't be challenged.

This has worked pretty well. You could easily build in tournament structures or league finals in there as well, based on a certain cut off date or a team reaching a certain number of points.