Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Got some ideas for rules? Maybe a skill change or something completely different!!! Tell us here.

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dode74
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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by dode74 »

Balance teams by match up and each league, no matter the composition, will be balanced.
I get that is your preference but it is not the design intent. I also get that you don't like that, but that is the way it is. Feel free to come up with a solution for how you want it though, preferably in a dedicated thread.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by Shteve0 »

plasmoid wrote:(Shteve0, I'll get to you first. You seem quite upset, and some of the things you write I just don't recognize).
Hello mate

Apologies if it's come across that way; but yes, for what it's worth I'm concerned at your assertion that you're somehow "improv[ing] on CRP" through your roster changes, not because I know better, but specifically because you have disregarded the massive wealth of actual legitimate information available to you in favour of instinct and gut feelings. I'm not disputing the detail of the changes you've made nearly so much as the idea that you would actually pass them off as legitimate improvements in the absence of, or even in direct contrast to, the evidence at your fingertips.

Let's address the elephant in the room: a lot of people come across this project and believe it to be semi official in remit and how it's seen in the broader community, and you allow that impression. Fine. But a big part of this impression is driven by the overt allusion to scientific analysis (heavily implied by the 'Narrow Tier' aspect of the name and the tone and language of your site) and if you scratch the surface it's simply not true; you've said yourself that instead your changes are driven by the feedback of a select handful, that you don't wish to dedicate any time to researching actual win percentages (fair enough, you've done a lot for the data collection in the past) from the data out there other than the small sample that you already identified, and that you have disregarded even from within that data sample on the basis that you feel you know better than the stats; and I'm sorry mate, that's not fair, and it's not fair that you allow the impression that you're somehow acting with great care and restraint for the good of the community when, ultimately, without actual data you're just crapshooting your own personal vanity project.

Oh dear... I came on here to be conciliatory and balanced, and it probably doesn't read that way. But I just want to be straight and honest with you about why we as a league are just cutting our losses on this; as I alluded to much earlier in the thread, I fear that your project has somewhat become a victim of its own publicity - yet "all that glitters", as they say. Hopefully this is clear enough without causing too much offense - that genuinely isn't my intention.

Cheers

S

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by VoodooMike »

MattDakka wrote:In rock scissors paper the win rate is perfectly even and balanced amongst them, unlike BB teams.
Assuming an even composition in the pool of teams, and assuming a large number of games involving random matchups, yes. It's a balanced design, but one that will not produce a balanced win% if the environment is not an even distribution of teams, and the matchups aren't done randomly. Let people choose their match-up and rocks will only play against scissors, and you'll have no idea how rocks fare against paper, and so on... have a league of only rocks and one paper, and the paper wins every game... only scissors and one paper and it loses every game, and so on.

It's not an argument against such a design, only against the utility of league data due to there being no compositional guarantees.
dode74 wrote:Only when there is a perfect distribution of rocks, paper and scissors.
Of course, when we take Blood Bowl data and we control for the different number of teams and matches such that we're comparing an even number of teams of each roster, and and even number of matches, they still don't line up at any TV range, really. Blood Bowl is not a rock, paper, scissors game.. if it were then each roster would have a roughly similar number of teams it was good against and teams it was bad against, and each roster would appear on roughly the same number of good and bad lists.
dode74 wrote:The game is balanced within the tiers as laid out.
This is one of the most often spoken and misleading statements people (mostly you) make. Very often the teams don't stay in their "tier range", which is why the tiers keep getting subdivided, to make it seem like "oh yeah, we meant to do that". There's no specific design happening here... things cluster around what is basically a coin toss to determine the outcome of the game, and then the tiers get defined AROUND the win%s, and you make statements implying that was where they were targeted and go "yeah, nailed it!".

One thing that is relevant to MattDakka's statement is that you can't really trust win% data from leagues specifically because there's no guarantee that a league will have an even composition - instead you end up with data that takes much, much longer to normalize owing to the skewed composition. If you're not seeing that in the league data someone claims to have collected then you should be skeptical of whether it is real data or not. BBRC was using that kind of data for the so-called design decisions, and it's a poor source of data for exactly those stated reasons.

It is very ironic that such people question the validity of MM data.
Koadah wrote:No one is forced to use it. If anyone likes it good for them
Yep, power to anyone who wants to play with the space marines roster too, but I doubt you'd let someone weasel it in without arguing the many reasons why it shouldn't be, would you? Nobody is forced to use NTBB... and nobody is forced to care about what people opposed to it said. Both, however, deserve to be heard and discussed.
MattDakka wrote:The overall win rate doesn't take in account league composition, that's a design flaw.
The design flaw is that the data used for design was taken from leagues which don't guarantee composition... that league composition doesn't always produced even win%s is not a design flaw, just an indication that the game is even LESS balanced for league play than it is for perpetual MM play.
MattDakka wrote:Balance teams by match up and each league, no matter the composition, will be balanced.
I'm not sure that's the best way to go, really... nor is it necessarily possible in a game that allows for team development. Without development having zero practical effect on the power of a team, you can't keep things at a 50-50 win rate modified by skill... which is something that, for example, MMO PVPers don't seem to understand either. Instead, you try to design things such that each powerful advancement has a non-esoteric counter, which creates the rock-paper-scissors scenario again... some teams will steamroller some other teams, and then be steamrollered by someone else, but in the end it all matches up. That encourages the building of more balanced teams rather than one trick ponies, too.

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dode74
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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by dode74 »

This is one of the most often spoken and misleading statements people (mostly you) make. Very often the teams don't stay in their "tier range", which is why the tiers keep getting subdivided, to make it seem like "oh yeah, we meant to do that". There's no specific design happening here... things cluster around what is basically a coin toss to determine the outcome of the game, and then the tiers get defined AROUND the win%s, and you make statements implying that was where they were targeted and go "yeah, nailed it!".
Who's subdividing? I think you are assuming the chain of causality here.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by spubbbba »

I can see Matt’s point, rock/paper/scissors may well be balanced but it is not a good mechanic for a fun game.

If amazons had virtually no chance against 8 of the 21 crp teams, close fought games against another 8 and massively easy walkovers against the other 8 then that would be balanced win% wise. But it would mean that 2/3 of your games would be very dull.

Now we don’t have that at the moment but zons are more prone to this issue that other teams.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by MattDakka »

VoodooMike wrote: It's not an argument against such a design, only against the utility of league data due to there being no compositional guarantees.
Did the BBRC collect data from leagues with a good composition? Because if there were no league compositional guarantees then the game design based on such data is flawed. Moreover, how many data were collected? There are so many factors that only massive online testing would be meaningful enough to design a balanced game from.
I showed that a league with a bad composition wouldn't guarantee fair chances of victory to all teams, especially considering that some teams need to develop some skills in order to cope with their "nemesis teams", 10 matches are not enough to develop enough a team in order to compensate for the built in unbalance.
VoodooMike wrote: Of course, when we take Blood Bowl data and we control for the different number of teams and matches such that we're comparing an even number of teams of each roster, and and even number of matches, they still don't line up at any TV range, really. Blood Bowl is not a rock, paper, scissors game.. if it were then each roster would have a roughly similar number of teams it was good against and teams it was bad against, and each roster would appear on roughly the same number of good and bad lists.
Exactly. BB design has some affinities with rock paper scissors (some teams are stronger against others) but it's not really a rock paper scissors game (some teams have just one or two nemesis team, others have more, and you might never face your nemesis team if the league composition is skewed, or maybe you are the rock and the league is full of scissors).
VoodooMike wrote: I'm not sure that's the best way to go, really... nor is it necessarily possible in a game that allows for team development. Without development having zero practical effect on the power of a team, you can't keep things at a 50-50 win rate modified by skill... which is something that, for example, MMO PVPers don't seem to understand either. Instead, you try to design things such that each powerful advancement has a non-esoteric counter, which creates the rock-paper-scissors scenario again... some teams will steamroller some other teams, and then be steamrollered by someone else, but in the end it all matches up. That encourages the building of more balanced teams rather than one trick ponies, too.
Not perfect 50-50, but as close as you reasonably can to this goal. So far, Amazons are really very far from 50-50 when playing against Dwarfs at TV 1000.
Yes you can build some skills over time to mitigate the difference in teams' relative power, but out of the box you are doomed to lose, barring good luck and/or a poor opponent.
Now... if a BB match was as quick as a rock scissor paper round I could accept the defeat and carry on, but considering that a match lasts 1 hour or so the match up should be more balanced and less dull.

P.S. :D I'm not an Amazons lover... I used them just as an example, I wish that every BB team had a fair win rate (i.e. as close as possible to 50%) against every other team in every match.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by Darkson »

MattDakka wrote:P.S. I wish that every BB team had a fair win rate (i.e. as close as possible to 50%) against every other team in every match.
Then go and start your own thread about it, because that's got nothing to do with NTBB. Personally, I find t hy at idea even less interesting than I find NTBB.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by dode74 »

Well I do agree that Zons are a poorly designed team, but I do think that perhaps we're getting away from NTBB here. The point I was making orignally is the same as Shteve0's.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by Pug »

I asked that 3 pages ago!! :smoking:

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by Darkson »

[Mod hat on] If you want to talk about NTBB, then do so.
If you want to talk about 'zons, whether there's enough data, how to collect data, that the game should be 50% or anything else that isn't NTBB related, then do it elsewhere.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by Hitonagashi »

Darkson wrote:[Mod hat on] If you want to talk about NTBB, then do so.
If you want to talk about 'zons, whether there's enough data, how to collect data, that the game should be 50% or anything else that isn't NTBB related, then do it elsewhere.
Thanks :). I was enjoying reading this before it got derailed.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by caracarn »

I haven't read through all these pages so someone might have said this earlier....

Have it been considered to give the goblin bombardier passing access on normal rolls and perhaps increase the cost by 10k? That would make him into a better player as getting him to level 2 would make him a real threat, and level 3 (HMP+pass perhaps) would be really fun.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

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caracarn wrote:I haven't read through all these pages so someone might have said this earlier....

Have it been considered to give the goblin bombardier passing access on normal rolls and perhaps increase the cost by 10k? That would make him into a better player as getting him to level 2 would make him a real threat, and level 3 (HMP+pass perhaps) would be really fun.
Suggestion Box is closed for the remainder of the year. Check back in 10 months for any changes to be made.

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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by plasmoid »

Actually, suggestion box is always open!

But as we slowly approach the end of this project changes will only be made if the option currently tested is not working out.
And if so, the transition to a new rule will occur by new years.

It's still early in the 2013 testing period, but to my eye 4 things are candidates for a change:
*Bank is likely to go to 150K
*Halflings are more viable now (still not awesome), but the combination of a viable team and the huge Master Chef discount may be a bad idea. Master Chef may go to 150K (half price).
*Amazon change still under review. It's arguably the biggest team change, and if it doesn't work out then I'll be looking for a leaner change. Shteve0 has made some suggestions.
*Gobbos had a boost to the secret weapons. If this makes them feel too much like a tier 1 team, then I'm likely to just buff one weapon rather than all 3. In that case the Bombardier is the most likely candidate. That said, I'm worried that a P-Bombardier may be too much of a game-changer.

Cheers
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Re: Thinking ahead: NTBB 2013

Post by dines »

We played with a pirate team in our tt league. They had a p access bomber and yes it is a game changer! Suddenly caging isn't fun anymore :lol:

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