Do we need more PBEM leagues...?

Be it FUMBBL, PBeM, the Cyanide Computer Game, VASSAL or whatever - talk about online play here.

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martynq
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Do we need more PBEM leagues...?

Post by martynq »

I've seen comments by Galak to the effect that there is too great a demand for the number of PBEM leagues around. Do we need someone to volunteer to run another one (or more)?

If so, how would this person ensure that cheating doesn't occur? (I know that Galak has access to the programming code, but how would others do it?)

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Post by Anthony_TBBF »

As long as PBeM doesn't overshadow face-toface play, sure :)

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Post by GalakStarscraper »

If someone is willing to set up a PBeM league, Ronald has a cheat detection program for commishes that I can give them. It requires that I have proof that the league is actually running as this program is need to have basis only to get it.

Anthony as for PBeM over table top. Cannot happen. If I had the ability to play table top I would be ... but I don't. Nothing can beat the painted minis and dice ... period.

The problem is its a lot of work. Currently there are only 4 major PBeM leagues and I've been helping a guy in Australia set up a 5th, but I cannot announce the site that he's set up at his request as he's not ready.

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Post by christer »

Galak,

How much, and what kind of things do you do as a PBeM commisioner? It would be interesting to get an insight into what happens "behind the scenes".. Also, if people knew how things should (or could) be run, I'm sure there would be alot more leagues out there.

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Post by GalakStarscraper »

I'd be interested to hear what Dangerous Dave says on this as he runs one as well.

When the league first started it took about 30 hours a week to run.

Now by working with Ronald, improvements to the game ... especially the HTML export ... I'd say its takes about 10 hours a week to run the league with a 10 hour burst needed each time a division needs to go out.

So if you ran a 40 team/40 coach one division league with 4 week rounds ... I think it would be 10/10/10/20 hour time commitments.

This is a best guess as I have basically 3 leagues: MBBL, MBBL2 Div A, and MBBL2 Div B ... so my schedule is more like 10/20/20/20

My roles during the normal week:
1) Rules answers
2) Reviewing games with problems or disputes
3) Reminding players of the deadline for match submission
4) Review new requests to join the league

At the end of the round the roles are:
1) Review each log for cheating ... if found issue penalties.
2) Review the log at the end for mistakes to updating the roster, traits given for skill rolls, missing pictures to players, wrong numbers, TD SPP points not matching up with TD scored etc.
3) Export the HTMLs
4) Update the league tracking spreadsheet with all the results (thanks to Dangerous Dave for this spreadsheet)
5) Assign match-ups for the next round and verify the opponent has not already been played.
6) Create the htmls for the league standings
7) FTP the new htmls for the teams and standings to the web site
8) Start all the new matches and resolve handicap rolls and then mail them out.

Then there are the spikes .... example ... it took me 150 hours to create all the pictures for the MBBL2 and attach them to the htmls.

Galak

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Post by Dangerous Dave »

IMO the most important thing about running a League is to ensure that you have a spreadsheet or similar that tracks everything and provides all the information for your League - Table, Results etc. If you do it manually 2 things will happen:-

1 It will take a long time and you will get bored and the Coaches bored too

2 You will make errors and players will get fed up and leave

So before starting a PBEM League, work out what you want to do, how many Teams / Coaches, what schedule you want, How does the Post season work, Which rules are you using, How are you going to produce HTMLs (Team Tracker or something else)? etc When you have done this, prepare whatever electronic League Management Software you want to use. In addition get used to the PBEM software - how to use it to set games up - extract rosters etc.

The League I run is the RABBL. This is a small league compared to Galak's Leagues - 16 Coaches. However, the format of the League does cause some issues (each Coach is randomly allocated a different team each round). This is because I edit team HTMLs using Excel - this causes the HTML code to get screwed up - basically the pictures get mixed up and will not display properly and the file sizes expand due to dulpication (don't ask - I don't know why!). So I am running 3 HTMLs for each team in the League - 1 with no Pictures, 1 the full roster and the third with all players missing games removed and the TR adjusted - this is a House Rule). This messing about with HTMLs is the biggest bane of running the RABBL.

So what do I do....

Before Each Round

Make a draw to see who is playing with which team
Email this info out together with skills and cash spend available
Update HTMLs for cash spent and skills changed (the new Coach can change skills picked by the last Coach at the end of the team's last game)
Ensure that all HTMLs have the right picture for each roster slot (I am maintaining a separate text file containing all the picture refs for all 16 teams)
Make draw to see who plays who
Set up the PBEM game files

During Each Round

Update my League Spreadsheet for results as they come in (this way it spreads the workload)
Check for Cheating
Upload info to the web-site
Update the Team HTMLs as they come in
Answer queries as they arise
Chase up Coaches to ensure that games are not behind
Win my game ;-)

Most of the time spent is to set up the League Management Software (LMS)... however, since I basically used what I had set up to help Galak, this was easy ;-)

Updating the LMS takes less than half an hour per round
Updating the Team HTMLs is at least half an hour per team per round :( (it was more than this - but I now have a process that works!)
Making the draw is about half an hour
Setting up the 8 game files - less than half an hour
Updating the website - about half an hour


So I spend much less time on this than Galak does (approx 12 to 18 hours per month).... and if it wasn't for those damn team HTMLs. :pissed: .. it would be a breeze. That said the bigger the League the longer it will take!



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Wow...

Post by Ghost of Pariah »

Maybe the hours required seems like alot because I think of it as computer time? But whatever there goes my, "Hey, maybe I could run one?" thought.
I salute you PBeM commishes. Being a commie is hard enough but you guys are the Marines!

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Post by GalakStarscraper »

It could take less time ... I'm just not sure ... its difficult for me to seperate the league from my TalkBB time, blood-bowl.net projects, and programming the PBeM tool ... I'd use Dangerous Dave's estimates more.


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Post by christer »

Ok, so alot of time goes "to waste" by manually transferring updated rosters from saved games to the spreadsheet..

This gives me an idea. Imagine the PBeM client being modified so that it produces a "report file" of some kind.
Now, couple this with the NAF supporting uploading of these report files, and you'll have a very nice little way to update team rosters and league standings..

To make it even easier for the commisioner, add "cheating checking" into the PBeM client as well, and let the computer filter out potential cheaters in a restrictive first step (probably filtering out quite alot of matches).

If you're paranoid, you could make a separate application (ie, the cheat-controller software you have now) handle the report generation and cheat checking.

This all requires the NAF to add this possibility though, but I'm sure something like this would go pretty well among them... Oh, and while on the subject...

Neoliminal, have you had a chance to look at the db comments I sent you? Haven't heard a word from you about it.. ( Ok, I hope he's reading this :) )

-- Christer

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Post by Dangerous Dave »

Christer,

The updating of Team rosters from the PBEM tool is normally no problem. The reason I am having problems is because I am editing the files after updating.

If all you do is update the roster it works like this:-


Select "Update roster" from the PBEM Tool
Find old roster on your hard drive
click OK - this creates a file called - OldName_New.htm
Check file - delete old (or save if you want!) and rename new file


That's it! If you have no problems - 2 minutes (or less!). Now if a Coach screws up in the post game or has awarded himself the wrong SPPs, bought a player at the wrong price or with the wrong stats, not selected a picture.... etc... then this would have to be corrected - if this editing is done in Excel, this will screw up the HTML - pictures etc - then you are looking at 20 mins or so (it depends on what the screw ups are) to put it right. Of course you could edit in an HTML editor - however, I've always found finding and correcting the right places too difficult!


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Post by christer »

With the help of a database, you could do it like this:

Select "upload game" from the PBeM tool.

A dialog now shows up, giving you a rundown of what has happened. And if you see anything wrong, you modify it then and there. Also, the program should be able to make sure people don't buy players at the wrong cost or stats and that kind of detectable mistakes.

Click ok, and the program will connect to the db, make the updates and voilá, you're done. Also, you'd get rid of all "player picture" issues. And ofcourse, for security reasons, the same error checks should be made here.

Benefits of using this system would be that you'd get rid of that "find-update-save-rename" sequence.. Also, and this is the big thing, you'd more or less get rid of alot of the mistake-hunting.

My "vision" is to make a Play-By-Web system, which would play something like:

Start your PBW client (modified version of the PBeM tool perhaps?), which connects to the server and downloads the game or games in which you have your turn (Batch downloading as not everyone is able to be online 24/7).

You complete your turns just as usual. press "Save", and the game will be put on an upload queue. Repeat for all games you have queued.

Press "Upload" and the games are sent back to the server.

The client could probably be updated to handle some of the book-keeping stuff, such as rewarding SPP's automatically for instance. That way fewer mistakes would be made.

From the commisioners point of view, there could be a separate tool to handle stuff like creating schedules or randomizing matches, and various other "utilities" that might be needed. This could probably be strictly on the web, as I'm assuming most commisioners have more or less 24/7 connections anyway...

Anyhow.. The basic idea is to make the computers handle the easy stuff, and let the commisioner take care of rule disputes and other things that the computer can't do...

-- Christer

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Post by GalakStarscraper »

Also, the program should be able to make sure people don't buy players at the wrong cost or stats and that kind of detectable mistakes.
As one of the programmers for the PBeM tool .... no thanks. Remember the PBeM tool is designed to be infinitely flexible so its plays 3rd or 4th edition, it can play straight BB2k1 or the rules for the MBBL2.

Sooooooo... in order to prevent wrong stat/cost errors I would need to program in 76 rosters worth of players by race, correctly identify their allies which change by league, identify secret weapon possiblities, and allow for cyber upgrades to handle this for just the MBBL2.

It sounds easy but its daunting.

As for time Christer ... well unlike Dave, I find html editing not so difficult.
The majority of my time comes from writing down the results of the 2o matches and then inputing them into the spreadsheet to determine the next round .... Now I guess in a perfect world, Ronald and I could work on a tool that could be run against a directory and would pull out the needed information from each game log and put it in a comma delimited file.

Or if you want the much easier route, you'd go the method used by the PBeMBBL. All players are responsible for correctly updating and editing their own HTMLs and for calling out opponents and setting up their own matches and having their own web space to post their roster on. The commish's job is to simply review for cheating and update the web site standing once in a while. If I ran the MBBL2 or MBBL, this way I would say I could fully run each league in about 5 hours a week total.

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Post by serra_kim »

i'm starting a mini-league with some friends. just to test the work of a commish. if its doable i'll probably expand my league. only one problem, i cant check for cheaters yet :( .

anyone got a solution for that?

kim

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Post by GalakStarscraper »

I emailed Kim as I will with anyone starting a league requesting help. There is a system in place to get you going with Ronald or I's help and then once you have a real league (ie webspace and all to prove it), we can give you some more tools to help.

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Post by christer »

would need to program in 76 rosters worth of players
Ok, I see your point. Although there is a solution to this as well. Given some thought (remember the 90/10 rule of the software creation process: 90% of the time should go to design, 10% to actual coding), you could make team lists be read from a file somewhere ( in xml or some other easy format ). This would allow non-programmers to create team lists fairly easily.. You could even make a tool to generate these team lists.

Yes, I know, it takes time and effort to create tools for everything, but that's how it is. If you are interested, I could give you a hand creating these tools.

What I'm aiming at is that you could, if you wanted, create a tool which read all rules from configuration files. So when you start a new game you are able to select a ruleset for which you have _total_ control. Someone could even make up a rule configuration which would let you play blood-volley or something...

Let me point out that I believe the PBeM client is a very nice program, and you guys deserve lots and lots of respect for letting us use it for free. What I am trying to say is that it could be made better.

-- Christer

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