Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

Some folks don't/won't make a google account. I have one--but really only use Gmail.

I'll see what I can dig up with the current Excel shortly--I think more comments may be needed.

Actually... I was thinking of doing the opposite. Losses = 0, so QS is what the scorers use for quals. BUT, in elims, W-L-T has no effect. The reasoning behind the scores originally was: QF, you don't lose points. SF, you get win points from QF, etc. But, when losses = 0 and W-L-T is factored in for elims, winning the event is the same as RCA, which we don't necessarily want. (The other thing I was thinking was a 2-point bonus for a third match in any series, given to the losing alliance.)


As far as using the District scoring system for District stuff, that would be playing by 2 sets of scoring rules. (Not that you Michiganders seem to have a problem with that!) It's easier if everybody in FF has the same scoring. At one point, I seem to recall being asked for the FF scoring system by someone in FiM, to see if that was something they wanted to tweak to fit them...

And for PVCPirate--I was thinking two drafts, split by weeks, plus DCMP--2 chances to change teams.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

Would it be a hard reset on all picks, or would teams be able to just keep one? It's probably in the category of minutiae that will fall into place later but I'm curious.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

It would be two full normal drafts plus DCMP (again, normal process). If a team competed in two events covered by one draft, the average score would be used.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

That works as well, however I think we should keep out the 2 pt bonus just to make it easier on the scorers.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

So now that the FRC season is complete, I thought I would write down some of my thoughts on this years FF season.

One of the big draws for me to FF is the fact that I constantly bump into teams that I had never heard of before, yet they are a very successful/up and coming team. In this way, Ed's one team per week is less appealing to me, as "one team per week" for all of the competitions. Pretty much all of the picks will be well known powerhouses, and who wins FF will come down to who picked the more powerhouse of all the powerhouses. It becomes more of a chance game. "who is going to be better this year? 67? 469? 1114? 2056? 254? 987? 33? 1986? That being said there were also times where I wished I didn't have to pick a third team, because the selection was so limited. I don't like the fact that some of the events the teams had to reach waay down low for picks.

I think my goals are as follows:

• To preserve the feeling of finding a new and upcoming team/one that isn't popular yet.
  
• Minimize the amount of "luck" that comes into play.
  
• Make it easy to participate.
  
• Make it easy to run.

So firstly what could have gone better?

From a player's perspective

It's draining to go through two full events every day to make a coherent pick list. With the exception of a few teams, very few FF teams had a full scale pick list. As Breakfast Company, we started with listing all the teams in order at the beginning of the season. We quickly realized that it was too much effort. Most teams seemed to have 7-15 teams on their list, followed by "random rookies" or just "randoms"

Drafts were frequently delayed/moved around at the last minute. You would prepare for a draft happening that night, only to realize that the draft got moved to the end of the season, and was replaced by one you hadn't had the chance to look at. Often drafts weren't run because nobody wanted to run them.

Waivers at the end of the season didn't really exist. Teams that had time to be on the ball stole some killer picks (Eg. one of the MI districts 67,1918, 1718 and 503? Joined after the draft was done) Sucks for teams not devoting a ton of time for this. For us as an FF team, we just looked at other people who were picking up teams, and picked up the same ones if available in our tier.

Getting stuck in a tough tier. Some teams have expertise in a specific FIRST area, because that's where they are from. If you are in the same tier as they are? Sucks. Meanwhile the other tier leaves tons of stellar teams unpicked. It's not a major thing, because it could be anyone, but it does add another element of luck into FF.

From a draft runner

Spending a ton of time filling in randoms for the 50% of teams that didn't submit a list (perhaps for some of the reasons above) then waiting again for those teams draft time to end so we could move on with the draft. It was annoying.

It takes a lot of time and energy to run a draft, and you want to make sure that you don't mess up a draft (which always happens) The pressure was also on you to get through all the drafts before FRC kickoff. (One night I was running like 5 tiers)

The lack of organization of who was doing what draft, and the lack of people who were able to help run them. It always seemed like we were struggling to get enough people to run them.

Going through pick lists could be long and tedious at times. Occasionally you would miss someone's pick due to that team getting picked in the other tier, and accidentally crossing them off.

From a scorer

RANDOMS suck. They take forever (because you have to go down the list to like #25) and so many teams dropped/switched competitions, and teams didn't realize that they were missing a team.

Manual entry is irritating, because it takes so long. Scoring an event for me would take around an hour from start to finish, so it's a big time commitment.

Thoughts on what has been said so far

I like being involved in all the events, even district events. If we only ran a few of them/some sort of culmination thing, I think we would be adding another item of luck into FF.

As for the actual points awarded for picking teams, I don't really have anything for that.

Possible Changes

Pick one team per event. If you miss your pick, you don't get assigned a random.

This one solves literally almost all our problems. Picking only one team per event reduces the time commitment, makes it easier for scorers (less teams to score) makes the drafts quicker, and makes lists easier to make as you don't have to dig that deep to find a decent pick. I wouldn't assign a random for these reasons:

1. They missed their pick, that's their fault. If they random a good team, that means someone who is actually on the ball with their list/live draft misses that opportunity.

2. It's a pain for draft runners to keep the random list updated.

3. Half the time a random is assigned, the team swaps it out anyway. Wasted time for the draft runner.

4. Teams will notice that they don't have a team for the event and fix it.

This also means that teams can no longer request a "random" if a FF player wants a random, they can go type in all the team numbers into a random list themselves.

One Player per team

This is one i'm not 100% sold on, but with only picking one team per event, it shouldn't be that bad to be on your own.

Auto draft/score/waiver if possible

This would be really nice. I will do what my little knowledge of excel can do to help.

Submit lists via Google Forms

Almost positive this is easy to do. It will format the list properly, and you can just copy and paste all the lists into (hopefully an autodraft) where it does the magic. No more reformatting lists that are a mess. Also. You don't need a google account to submit to the forum. Google account would only be needed for draft runners. (if people are really bugged about having a Google account)

Run District Champs and Divisions with 3 teams per player

The field is deep enough, we can run it like we do now for these events.

Run all the players in one tier (AKA no more tiers)

Everyone plays with everyone. Unless we have more than 30 players/(perhaps teams) with each of them only picking one team. Then they can be fit into one tier.

Only hand out randoms for dropped teams (hopefully few)

When scoring, make a random list if you need it for a team that is missing their one team, then sub em in. Hopefully they notice that the solitary team that they did pick isn't competing in that event anymore, and they fix it beforehand.

Let me know if you have any questions/comments. I haven't been involved in FF that long, so if any of these things have already been tried and failed, then I would be interested in knowing why.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

I haven't thought as in depth as some people about changes tot he format, but I think I have a couple of ideas that could relieve stress and jobs on the runners and scoreres.

As FIRST moves to districts and opts for a more traditional sports-like "Season", I think Fantasy FIRST should move towards a Fantasy Baseball like model. I say for each of the districts, we have one large draft for the entire district system, and not per each individual event. For example, let's say we're about to draft the Michigan district. All teams in FiM would be open for picking, and the draft order would be randomized. Everyone would draft 3 (or even more) teams once at the beginning of the year. As the year goes on, your FiM teams would accumulate points for your team's FiM point totals (only the first 2 events for each team will count, just like the district model's point structure). During the regional/district season, teams can be added and taken out at will through waivers/free agency, but you will lose all points accumulated by the dropped team and gain all points accumulated by the added team. At the end of the district season, MSC would be run like it is now, with a draft of all teams going to MSC, and picking order determined by point totals in FiM.

I think if we go to a model like this, we will cut down on the number of drafts by a huge chunk, and we may able to stick with the current regional drafting model for next year. I also think if we emphasize lists over live drafting each region, we can make it easier on the draft runners. Scoring is the other hurdle to overcome, and I think we need to either write an excel sheet or continue to manually go through scoring each event.

*also, I really want to keep the teams. I love being able to talk with others about FIRST, but it's great to be able to collaborate with others on your lists and have multiple people be able to send in a list if you can't.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

I voted 'Weekly Drafts' because, for the near future, I believe that is the best solution. However, in the far-future (say maybe 2017 onward) as we move into more districts, I think the "Block District" or some variation of it could work very well.

As for a website/auto draft runner/scoring, I've been messing around with the TBA API and had an event scoring system running, just not updated for 2014 because I was too busy and therefor couldn't release it to you guys. However, I am looking for a summer project right now. I'd be up for a few of us banding together and getting this banged out, but it for sure isn't a one man job.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

Brennan, Brandon, and the rest of ya:

The current plan for next year is to axe the draft-every-district system. Each district area gets 3 drafts total: Week 1-3, Week 4-6, DCMP. Guess which drafts go last in the drafting season? (But, I'm considering adding a 4th round to those drafts, just because there are so many district events.)

Teams of players will be kept, for now. I prefer a 3-team-per-event draft, as current, so that if you pick 1114 and they have a REALLY bad event you don't get totally hosed. I've had that happen a couple of times over the years. (Not saying which team(s) or where or when.)

We're working on more automation. I see some of you already found http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh....php?t=129129; if y'all find something in there that you want to do, go for it (just let others know that you're working on it). Trying to make this easier on everybody.

Waivers: Trying to come up with an alternate method. I've got one, but it's a little convoluted. What I'd like to do is keep the current method for drops/boots only, and then use another method for teams that add. I'm definitely open to suggestions, with the exception of a totally open grab.

One of the reasons for the random teams is specifically so that people that accidentally forget, or have an emergency of some kind crop up, have a chance to compete. Trust me, I've been there. First couple of drafts I ran were stepping in for Ed when he had to step out--back in the day when 4-5 tiers were commonplace due to number of players. (And you ain't never seen the scoring headache from THAT season! There's a reason for the miss-5-and-out rule, and that season's why. I think one set of alliances was "owned" by no fewer than 3 different people, none of whom finished the season drafting. It took no fewer than 3 people to do all the scoring--one or more to "clean" the lists, one or more to score the events, and one to do all the data entry.)

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

Thanks for filling in some of the holes in my experience with FF Eric. Here's some more thoughts.

So what happens if this happens?

FF team 1 picks:1234, team 1234 has all of their district comps in week 1-3
FF team 2 picks: 4567, Team 4567 only has on of their district champs in week 1-3.

Also all three pick lists would be virtually the same.

After some more thought I like teams.

For the most part (at least from what i've seen with my own team and scoring for events) is that this would be the case regardless. At least for most event's I find the first pick gives you the most points by far (with some exceptions) That being said, picking three teams does continue with the "FIRST Format" as well as giving FF teams a chance to make up some ground? Is it significant? Perhaps. The benefit of going down to one team is that it is less time consuming for non-automated tasks. If we can pull together auto randoms/scoring/draft running it would be awesome, and would resolve those problems.

We may be able to automate waivers if we can auto detect what teams are new adds/drops

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

I was the one that asked you about it when FiM was forming up. They wanted to compare/contrast any measures or systems that they could. Ultimately, CA and EI points were not allowed, and some of the points were quite similar, some were not.
I am a big fan of the current point system for districts as it now includes those bigger awards. I also think that having the "Districts" doing the scoring makes it a ton simpler to keep track of. For all the areas in districts, I really like the district format, and think a FF league that matches that would be useful. I would need to think a bit more on what such a "league" would look like.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

I guess I forgot to mention: You get the AVERAGE score of each team for those weeks. If all your team's districts are in weeks 1-3, then you get the average of up to 3 districts. Due to the large number of teams, I'm debating adding in a 4th pick. (Think it'd be a pretty simple hack on the setup side... famous last words from a non-programmer!)

One thing that could be done would be to only run the week 1-3 drafts during "drafting season", and then run the week 4-6 drafts starting after Week 2 with a random order.


On the points: There will be a couple of tweaks to the system to make it easier to score while still maintaining the intent. The main one right now is to make losses 0 points, but eliminate W-L-T from consideration in elims to balance out the win/CA point totals.


It looks like automation is taking a strong lead, at least in the discussion. I say, let's get programmin'!

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

The only recommendation I would make for scoring is not to have a scoring system that relies on draft order past the top 8, as the current district system does. FIRST doesn't put that information out, and is therefore near impossible to get without either guessing or going back and watching a recording.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

Sorta unrelated, but is it cool if I run another league through the FF forum during the season? Not sure if I will yet, but I wanted to check.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

No restrictions on how many leagues, or who runs 'em. Just make sure to use some sort of unique identifier.

Re: [FF]: Season Long Format Change Discussion
 

Ok, I'll just put a leading tag in brackets for those threads.