Short league : boost new rosters

[snakees]

We are a group of 10 players. Each player do around 12 match each years. We reset all rosters and all scores after the end of season.

It allows us, to play with more races and the reset avoid to have huge TV difference.

As the league is short, we have to boost a bit the new rosters. We do as bellow:

• gold to start is 110 instead of 100
• each roster start with skills according to standard tier list: tier 1: 3 normal skills, tier 2 : 2 normal skills, 1 double excepted on big guy (yeah a big guy with block make a huge difference), tier 3 : 3 double skills, no restriction. when a player get a skill it count as a MVP and a pass so it count in tv

We are finishing our first season with theses rules and still not quite satisfied. Perhaps the starting skills should be out of TV (like in tournament)

Any suggestion or personnal experience is welcome.

[Chris]

Do you have a fixed match schedule or can teams cherry pick opponents? Can you play as many games as you like in the year?

[snakees]

Each player play one time against each other opponent. We play one match per month and all match are scheduled.

Once every player played their match we play a tournament in 4 matchs to determine the final ranking.

The pre-tournament ranking serve to define first tournament match (first against last, etc.). We give also small bonus to the top 3 players before tournamenent.

[mzukerman]

Why do you think it doesn't work? Is it that you want the feel of having a team that is more developed and has more skills? Certain races will benefit more from that than others. If that is what you want, just go with more skills in the package. However, I would caution against excluding this from team value. First off, that may not be possible with many of the tools in the community like OBBLM or Halflings Scribe. Secondly, that's what balances out some of the teams. Otherwise, you'll see a preponderance of elf teams that can benefit from not inflating their value and making blodgers everywhere.

[snakees]

It works partialy because in fact this tier system doesn't realy favourise tier 2 and tier 3 team because their tv are higher than tier 1 team at beginning.

For exemple a fling team start with a tv of 119 (110+3*3) and a dwarf team at 116 (110+3*2). In fact, 3 double skills vs 3 simple skills is not enough to reduce the potential difference of a tier 1 team against a tier 3.

We want, like in tournamenent, see more tier 2 and 3 so we have to find a good way to do that. We are close but it's still not enough efficient.

[Chris]

My experience is with the ecbbl, and they just have 100tv starting teams, no extra skills or anything. Works fine.

I would imagine allowing 3 extra skills off the bat and the extra money changes things considerably. I can see elf teams benefiting considerably, both in getting 3 blodgers and all the positionals they want.

[dode74]

I've read somewhere that chosen MVP can be a good thing for shorter leagues. People with more experience of that might be able to confirm or otherwise.

[hissa-lives]

We use a system of pick 3 and roll d6 to see which gets mvp.
We also run silly event rounds, we had a free mvp week and a free randomly assigned dirty tricks card and planning other ones too as seem to go down well

[mzukerman]

We have chosen MVP as well among 6 players and it allows you to focus somewhat.

If you are trying to even the tiers, maybe this isn't the right approach. Narrow Tier Blood Bowl (NTBBL) may be the option for you.

[Shteve0]

We use chosen MVP in all the nz (reset) leagues. It accelerates development nicely. Fears that it would abnormally favour one style or another proved unfounded; traditionally slow-to-skill players gain experience faster and far fewer spps are wasted, as even a cas or interception can potentially lead to a skill up.

Obviously in perpetual environments its all about the random MVP.



For tier balancing, in the Capital Shield we have a system of allocating each team an SPP budget depending on historic performance. Its untried in a league setting but it might offer you some ideas!

[Brot]

Obviously in perpetual environments its all about the random MVP.

Exactly that. In short leagues you can use these house rules since the main problem will not show up.

The critical, leaguebreaking factor is that selection of the MVP favours high TV teams. If most of your players are legends, you'll easily recover from a lost player because you can 'pump' the new guy every match.
(He is almost guaranteed lvl 3 in 6 matches as long as he gets 1 other SPP.)

New/Low teams would not get much advantage out of it, they can use the MVP on the entire team. Yes, you can slightly boost the speed of specific skillups, but... nah.

D3 players or D6 players does basically the same thing. It also eliminates the small development of certain players - which they are kinda supposed to suffer from (e.g. Sauri).