Season 2 Concluded

Going to call BB Season 2 here.  I dragged everyone, kicking and screaming into the playoffs, but I'm not going to push them any farther.  I may still do our All-Star game I was so excited about, but that seems awfully irrelevant at this point and most coaches aren't even around anymore.

This run lasted an entire season longer than my online attempt, along with a substantial run-up/training period, but ultimately was called at around the same point for almost identical reasons.

The issue with the online Cyanide run was it was not compelling; there was no attachment to your team, no context/history in the league, no interaction with your opponent.  It became an impersonal chore, and right then one coach rose up who delighted not only in killing his opponent's players but making it well known, to the point where everyone hated playing him.  Given that enthusiasm was already pretty low, his future opponents (as well as the league leader who completely lost interest) stalled things out to where it was pretty obvious there were going to be a lot more outgoing players than returning + new players.

These issues were fixed in tabletop, and it was a perfect system in its heyday.  The tradeoff was ridiculous game times, with matches regularly taking 4 hours including lengthy setup, and coupled with travel time and scheduling chores that was literally all you would do that night.  That really wore on people, myself included (no one wanted to fool with turn timers btw), and y'know right here I was going to copy-paste the above paragraph... but that's not quite right.  Sure, there was the rise of yet another gloaty killer coach absolutely no one enjoyed playing (sure, have a gentle talk with him, but is it worth risking losing a friend for a defunct BB league?).  There was a league leader (the Norse) who finally suffered a couple stinging defeats and soured heavily against the game.  But two coaches had kids, one started a business, one got a divorce, a few got new jobs, and ultimately there wasn't enough enthusiasm to bother pushing through all that.  Maybe if a couple things had gone differently we'd have this, or that, but who knows.

It had a great run, and I am proud to have been behind this, but it was a tremendous amount of work, and I wish I had more to show.  I still have the posters and leaderboards I made, I still have my rosters, I'll still play an occasional game of course, and in 6 months or so I'll once again be itching to get back in.  And, I have this blog, which was meant to give a play-by-play of an amateur league because this is something I would have found worth its weight in gold when I was looking to start this up.  I hope it helps you.

2 Season 2 Update

Season is crawwwwwwling.  Real-life conflicts, lots of other store events (and Spring) competing for attention, the previously-undefeated store owner completely devastated about his team's recent spat of injuries, matches scheduled haphazardly throughout the week keeping the rest of the coaches in the dark.  It will be a grind to finish even this 6-week season, and then the game will certainly get shelved at least for awhile.  It's a shame, but I don't know how to fix it.  Obviously a fixed playtime would help as far as keeping everyone in the loop, maybe 1 Saturday a month type deal, and most but not all coaches would be able to make it.  Hmm.  People still ask about it, and the most enthusiastic coaches still discuss, but the league is certainly on life support.

I SHOULD be the most enthusiastic, if I wasn't ready to take a break from it.  My Humans are (W-T-L) 4-1-0 for the season, and 6-4-0 total, and get more and more dangerous every game.  Handing the store owner his second straight defeat on Week 5 all but locks me in at the #1 seed in the bracket, and leaves me 1 game left regrettably against a very bashy, very murderous Necro team.

Playoffs should be fun, if they happen.  Looks like the Wooden Spoon is going to the same guy this season: Orcs with an absurd 0-2-3 record, still after 9 games and 5 deaths chasing that elusive win.  Or at least level-up.  He finishes the season vs. our current league #2 (Runner-up last season as well).

Season 2 Update

No good time for updates for these sorts of things.  End of week, maybe?  Some weeks are certainly more noteworthy than others.  But otherwise I'm likely to forget interesting details.  I've also been busy with store runnings, the kind of thing that starts with "Where do I store these BB pitches?" and ends with, "Maybe I can clean out this room and set up these shelves and sweep."  On the BB logistics side we have not one, but TWO new dads, which is exactly as disruptive as it sounds, so I'm racing to get into the playoffs before the whole thing goes off the tracks.  We are behind, finishing up Week 4 tonight and with 2 regular season Weeks left.  We have some close races, I'm still creating the weekly leaderboards, there is still momentum, but with the coming of Spring the priority level of the game has dropped in general.  It has gone from a 3-days-a-week to 1-day-a-week activity for the league, and with the corresponding loss in visibility.  I think that's ok, but the honeymoon is over and we're settling into the mature phase where BB definitely takes a backseat to many other games/projects.

What DOES concern me, though, is that visibility is what draws new coaches in, to keep us at the magic 8.  The store organization is not at the point where it can give us much help there (which is a big reason for my getting involved), and so I'm worried about where that new interest is going to come from.  The other pressure is from INside the gates; the game length is drawing a real bad rep from people.  We're having trouble getting our games in under 4.5 hours, and it's slowly sapping people.  I need to implement game timers, or at least try them, even though ironically no one is asking for them.  It's the frog in the boiling pot.  In true penny-pinching fashion, I'll use some website on a laptop to try it out.  The first time it'll get rolled out, and here's a kicker, is the grudge match between me and the Norse.

I am leading the league, haven't lost but I've had some damn lucky Turn 16 wins, including my patent-pending 14-Square Pass.  Norse is second, he played last week against a prepared and focused Chaos team who took him apart.  This leaves him with one AG-boosted runner and a skillless Yeti (if he rebuys for one match) against my Human team.  My team has leaned on a lot of luck, armor breaks, Guard-spam in a Guard-less league, and Dauntless.  That Guard in particular has set me up with a very good casualty record, including pummeling the Chaos team the week before he pummeled the Norse.

What we’re playing for isn’t nearly as exciting as Swiss: seeds 1&2 (or 3, whatever) for the bracket.  I don’t like fixed-schedule, it’s nice that games can occassionally get done early logistics-wise and no one has to ask who they play next but it’s much more bland than Swiss and many games are insignificant.  I will do a swiss regular season and brackets, the best of both worlds, for Season 3.

Jump To Season Two

Short, 5-game initial season was a very, very good idea.  5 games doesn't sound like much, and indeed it put a cap on things right as I think they were getting good, but with so much going on and so many schedules to work around the time I spent on running it was plenty enough.  It put a cap on things right as a couple coaches were ready to/forced to bow out as well.  I'm seeing 20-man single round robins out there with playoffs to boot and I'm thinking holy crap how can you expect to finish that??  At that point an initial run at it needs to be divided into conferences/pools that can run more or less independently of each other, with the hope that one conference, at least, will somehow emerge on the other side in one piece.  Even the 10-game + playoff seasons of Three Die Block seem far, far out of reach.

So all-in-all 5 games was a perfect shakedown.  But, having proof-of-concept, we were ready for something with a little meat on it.  I also wanted to see how the other half lives and try a simple, fixed-schedule setup with all its pros & cons.  I suspect Season 3 will be a mix, a swiss regular season followed by a playoff.  But that’s only if this goes well.

8 teams is a nice, pretty 7-man  round-robin, tidy little playoff bracket and it’s ready to go in the books.  I even had it all made up.  BUT, 2 coaches signed up at the last minute and brought us to 10 teams and 10 teams is anything but pretty and tidy.  A 10-man  round-robin + playoffs would have made the season too long; if I learned anything from Season 1 I was right to err on the side of too short.  So I setup 2 5-man divisions, division coaches would play each other and the odd men out that week would play each other in a cross-division game.  This all works out to 5 Weeks, and I threw in a “Wildcard” week where you play someone random across the divisions.  So 6 Weeks: play the 4 opponents in your division and a random 2 of the 5 in the other division.  Because the seeds were random but not equal, the playoffs basically had to be overall (in other words, your divisional record was irrelevant), 1^st overall seed playing 8^th overall seed and so on.  I made a Wooden Spoon game between the overall 9^th and 10^th seeds, because it’d be really funny and cool but more so because I knew we’d have dropouts by then and this was the sacrifical game to soak up the losses.  Dropouts were going to royally screw up the regular season schedule, but that’s one of the prices you pay for making it fixed.

If the playoffs ignore divisions why have them, no one asks.  Well, I really wanted an All-Star game.  Just after the teams in the Championship are determined, but before the big game, I envisioned the two coaches that lost their Finals game (so 3^rd and 4^th finishers overall) coaching their division’s All-Star team.  The 5 division coaches get together and assemble the best team they can using all their rosters, with the ultimate aim of beating the snot out of the other side’s famous guys.  Putting a nice big bow of carnage and mayhem on the season, which is the way Blood Bowl should be.

Season 1 Wrap-Up

After the Norse win he was obviously, entirely out of reach and would take the title hands down.  The unfortunate Orcs were destined to bring up the rear, or taking seventh by the slimmest half-point with a final week win.  The rest, including me with a lackluster 2-1-2 record (all non-wins being vs the Norse) were left battling it out for the middle.

With a close race like this and lots of rounds to consider the Kaiser calculations get pretty complex.  I’m not afraid of spreadsheets but after about 4 weeks the calculations are long enough that mistakes started turning up; double-checking and double-checking the corrections starts becoming important.  I think I straightened everything out for Week 5 but a full season without a program for this would be unrealistic.  

At any rate, assuming my calculations are correct, every game had major implications.  The tension of this is largely lost on everyone else who didn’t have numbers in front of them, keeping coaches in the dark being the major drawback of a complex rating system.  Best case is a big table of Win-or-Lose point totals, and this isn’t satisfying enough.  We went to a playoff structure for Season 2, partly because of this and partly because of unsatisfying ties, and I’m looking forward to comparing notes.

Partly because of the relatively obscure ratings, and partly because Week5 was largely a repeat of Week4, there wasn't a lot for coaches to play for.  The top coach for Table 2 conceded due to his personal schedule; a draw would have kept him runner-up (Golden Spoon) but a loss dropped him all the way to 5th.  Table 3 was won by the overdog Dwarf team, vaulting a coach who played bottom table Week2 AND Week3 ("The Longest Game") to third overall and the Silver Spoon while justifying his Coach of the Season nomination.  So after all those boring draws things finished with plenty of shake-ups and upsets and drama, but I'm not sure it wasn't lost on most of the players.  The final awards were going to floor anyone who wasn't diligently following along!

As a sidenote, the League Champion won Coach of the Season (which was intended to recognize someone's efforts who didn't otherwise GET recognized!) and his killer Yeti got Fan Favorite to cap an absolutely dominating season.  CotS gives a TRR on every Brilliant Coaching kickoff event.  Sportsmanship went to our Wooden Spoon earner for sticking with very disappointing results.  It allows a single casualty the next season to automatically become a Badly Hurt.  He was probably going to need it.

Season 1 Championship

Well this was it, what everyone had been playing for I suppose in what was (at least on paper) a short season.  This was a game between my 1180TV Nurgle and the undefeated 1470TV Norse.  This Norse team is dynamite, and I went in with a wizard, merc rotter and a play card (gives an opponent Really Stupid) hoping for something, anything to even the odds.

My team was my 4 skilled Pestigors, 2 Nurgle Warriors one with Block, a Beast of Nurgle with Stand Firm, and 5 Rotters (mostly loners).  This Norse team had been pulling away from me, Week2 barely eaking out a 1-1 draw, Week4 barely preventing me from a 2-2 draw, but also with many more casualties.  Though I lost that one (2-1), the third seed didn't win his game and so didn't knock me off my perch.  Once more unto the final week, and it was going to be the worst yet if I couldn’t get a classic grind going and cart a couple AV7 off the field in a hurry.  Easier said than done, this was the best version of this team I had faced yet.

His team was led by 2 runners, one blodge AG4 and one blodge AG5 which is more than a little broken.  His hitters were 2 ST4 Block Ulfwereners and a MB/Claw/Frenzy/BreakTackle Yeti affectionally named, “Chewie.”  His linemen were all various 1-skillers, and he ran no Beserkers.  My saving grace, no beserkers.  And no bench.

The first half was a showcase of Nurgle defense, including a Turn1 casualty successfully apothecary’d, frustrating Chris to the point where his AG5 ballcarrier attempted 6 dodges and 2 GFIs to score.  He fails the first GFI, still leaving him a score next turn with a 2+ dodge and 3+ pick-up.  He fails the pickup, and my team wanders aimlessly for the next 3 turns to go into the half 0-0.  This was a sticking point, incidentally, my failure to ever look ahead and also consistently forget inducements.  With a slow team like Nurgle, the whole point is to play a turn or two ahead since that’s how long it takes your guys to get there and yet here I was ALWAYS in the moment.  I didn’t have anything else going for me, here’s a team with universal Block (except Chewie), exactly equal strength, much better AG, far better speed, more skills, more rerolls…  I had a wizard, a twelfth rotter and a BlockMB Pestigor named Pi’Noir.  I needed to be looking ahead.  I took two casualties to go into the second half without a bench.

The second half was honestly worse.  I gave the ball to an unskilled Nurgle Warrior, no idea what I was thinking.  It was 0-0, Turn 16 1-0 grind, put it in the books, I guess.  He did what he had to, marking my ineffectual ballcarrier constantly while closing the noose and keeping his distance while whittling down outliers.  It was a beautiful defense.  I used the fireball Turn 14, KO’ing two defenders which gave me an outside (and I mean outside) chance at the win.  But my team was plagued by bad rolls, including two guaranteed surfs ending in Both Downs, as well as the aforementioned terrible ballcarrier decision, and we were destined for 0-0 OVERTIME!

At this point I probably didn’t deserve to win.  Setting up on offense I was missing a Block Pestigor and my ballcarrier Pestigor (who didn’t touch the ball), as well as a Rotter for a total 9 players (3 Loners).  He fielded all 11.  That’s right, for the entire duration of regular time I had caused that Turn 1 casualty healed, and the two fireball KO’s that were quickly recovered.  Much of my play this game had been focused on maximizing hits especially with Pi’Noir and I couldn’t remove Norse to save anything.  As in all my BB losses though, it’s only with hindsight I realize how hard I leaned on a plan that wasn’t working.  Regardless, frustration was settling into resignation because I just didn't feel like my team has a Plan B.  His OT Turn 1 stunned both remaining Nurgle Warriors and a Rotter and we dutifully played out the motions of blitzing down my ballcarrier and recovering it.  I created a chance on defense hitting the blodger with a Pow, but the second die knocked it into a Both Down and I was delaying the inevitable anyway.  He strolls it in for a 1-0 in overtime and the win.  A rookie coach who picked Norse game 1 and never looked back remains undefeated Season 1 Champion!!

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Cant win them all, and this wasn’t some game that hinged on a crazy 3+ roll in the final moments.  This was a blowout, and a simple continuation of the history of these two teams.  It helped that I played badly and made some very bad calls, but I don’t think I ever had a chance.  Going into the previous game I felt BAD for him, thinking he has no way through my AV9 and with Disturbing Presence shutting down the handoff game.  But I got out-casualty’d 7:3 over the past two games (which actually isn’t as bad as I thought…) and I didn’t have any answers for anything else.  I think more than anything this is just a case of 1200TV Nurgle with no doubles or stat-boosts, and 1450TV Norse with boosts in all the right places save maybe Yeti Block, just being a very bad matchup for me. For his part Chris is infatuated with the gambling wildness of the Yeti, and wants to try Chaos, so in that case it’d be awhile before he’s a threat again.  Which I wouldn’t mind- I am really looking forward to playing someone else for a change!