Warrior General Games

Thread started on March 18.

Discussion on ways to improve the League Structure, and ways to increase competition within the leagues.

This is early discussion and is ongoing...
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Originally posted by Sik Wit It
The top 5 sim issues thread prompted me to make this topic, because I think this problem is bigger than any of the current issues with the sim, and more time should go into improving the system we have now.

I think Bort should be aware that the #1 problem in all of GLB, in mine and a lot of peoples eyes, is league structure and parity. That is THE worst problem with GLB at the moment. When 80% of your games are decided by upwards of 100 points (and this is not an exaggeration...some leagues are like this), then customers feel they didn't get their money's worth. I think this needs to be fixed ASAP if you want to keep people interested. Not only do people feel they don't get their money's worth, but it also basically makes at least 60% of your player's career insignificant. More often than not your team is either getting blown out or blowing out another team. It's just not fun.

This isn't such a hot issue here, because a lot of us are fortunate enough to play at the highest levels of the game, but the mid and lower levels of the game are really a mess. If you get a new potential customer and every time he clicks "Show Score", it says "L 0-255 (0 tkl)", how much longer do you think he's going to stick around?

I guess I'm wondering if there's anything that's going to be done about this. McBriar made a topic about a week ago, but it was more about improving CPUs, and it kind of died out before it started without much admin input. We've got a lot of smart people here, I'm sure we can come up with some methods of at least reducing the disparity between teams in the same league.

A few relatively simple ways this parity can be reduced:
-Don't allow owners to sell back mid-season
-Make CPUs better
-Sorting leagues pre-season based on levels/effective levels - If a team is in a cap 42, but their avg lvl is 22 with an effective level of 29, shuffle them out preseason. It's pretty clear this team will not be competitive in any way.

I'm sure we can expand on this list^, just want to get some discussion going.
Originally posted by Mat McBriar
The Elite Leagues are great, fwiw. I was very happy to get old style USAPL-like competition and go 9-7. I know outside of an Elite League we would have been a 14-16 win team, but I gladly would trade that for the superior competition. If we could sort everyone by those same methods while still holding onto rivalries as best as possible (this is where rivalry points come in I think) things would be great. And obviously figuring out how to deal with promotion.

Originally posted by Sik Wit It
I think the Elite leagues were a step in the right direction as far as bringing like-talent together to form competitive leagues. I was on 1 elite minor team this season and all the games were really close. I was really happy with that after so many seasons of either winning or losing by 100+. Couldn't the same system that determined which teams belong in the elite leagues also be applied to leagues before the preseason starts to do additional team shuffles?

I believe that in conjunction with not allowing owners to sell mid-season would do away with a lot of the problems. Not allowing owners to sell will do away with those mid-season CPUs, and pre-preseason shuffles will do away with those teams that sell between promotion and the start of the season.

Then it's just a matter of making sure teams are in the appropriate leagues for parity, then making CPUs better, and I think you eradicate a big part of the problem. If it's determined teams will not be able to be competitive in their league, shuffle them out before the season starts. Basically we should never start simming real games when it's clear right off the bat that a team is going to go 0-16 getting blown out every game.
Originally posted by johnbarber
I also think this is top priority, without it then a lot of people either get bored or extremely aggravated depending on their circumstances within the game. Ideally you want leagues where there's some drama on the field for about 3/4 of the schedule.
Originally posted by Catch22
I know Bort is starting to use the rivalry points starting this season and has been working on it and testing it. He actually texted me the other day saying he was stoked about how it was working. He knows a lot more about it then I do though.
Originally posted by Kirghiz
The sim needs tweaks here and there, but things like league parity and making game planning take less time are far more important to keeping people playing this game imo. Having a perfect sim doesn't make the game more fun.

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Discussion is ongoing...

The Elite team and Rivalry points are very good steps in the right directions.
I do think that there should be more motivation for winning in the minors. Many (vet) users just treat this a lol, and don't put effort into the game planning. The easy max XP change will just make it worse, since being on a SB team is no longer important and the indifference will spread more.
A poor minors resume, should carry some kind of penalty to a dot career (maybe make the fame actually meaningful).

The problem with the competition in the minors (aside from the gut jobs) is that teams in the same cap with different build systems are put together (ie regular build, slow build, SSB, non-boosters) which aren't really all that competitive against each other.

Average effective level is a great way of comparing teams, but only if both teams have players using the same build system, it's not so good at comparing boosters to non-boosters due to non-boosters having a lot less SP's to round out their build and therefore can't go as extreme with their major attributes as the boosters might/do. Which due to the ALG's means the effective level of the non-boosters/SSB's goes up by less per level than it does the regualar builders and slowbuilders who boost to the point where they can have a similar effective level yet one team has fully rounded builds, the other does not.

My solution would be this:
Sort teams in each cap into average player age bands (thus seperating the SSB and non-boosters from the regular builders and SB's who boost) and then by average effective level within each age band (effectively seperating the SSB's from the non-boosters and the SB's from the regular builders) the result is relatively equal competition across the board because all the different build systems would be kept apart. All the trouble from 100-0 games comes from us having a system that puts all of these different build styles together in the same league, and they are not on an equal footing.

I think the current fix adding the elite leagues helped a lot and the new training limits will stop the SSB problem. If the rivalry points work out as well, then the only issue I see is the auto promotion up 3 caps. What if a team went 20-0, but never won a game by more than 7 points. That would indicate it was place correctly and should stay with those it is currently competing with and not shoot up 3 levels to get crushed.

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