Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Old Man Draco »

Dr. Von Richten wrote:One thing I would like to see next time(s) is the team result having a bigger impact on the overall score, so instead of getting just 1 or 1/2 point extra for a win or draw, make that a bigger number, or even the only number; 3 points for a team win, 1 point for a team draw, 0 points for a team loss, with individual results as tiebreakers.

Btw. I can't claim credit for this concept, I got it from Draco, which proves that even that old git sometimes has a good idea! :wink:
Well David, as for an idea I mentioned this:

Team win 3 points, a draw 1 point and a loss 0 points. But! A big win of 5.5-2.5 or more gains an extra point. This will hopefully make it more fun to go that extra yard to win your game instead of settling for a draw because the team will win anyway. But this is a discussion that should be held elsewhere.

I allready gave my feedback to the organizers. They did a great job, espicially if you know what they faced in preparation. The live stream of some matches was great. The fact that you got an answer to everything was great too. I can tell you now that I would not like to have been in their shoes. It takes strong personalities to pull this of. So well done!

And Haktar, keeping a strict schedule is very important in a tournament, mainly on the last day. Not just that the hotel wants everything at a certain timeschedule (personel only will work until certain ours youknow), but also players who have to leave on sunday and still have a drive of more than 3 hours up to 10 or 11 hours, would prefer to leave asap. As Portugal is hosting the Eurobowl in 2017, you'd better take that in consideration. I should never end like a Rendez Vouz I still have in mind (even though that was a blast too). So back on giving a complement to the organisation, that point was well met too. And keeping up timetables even scares the shit out of ex NAF presidents! :lol:

Also great was the shuttle service to the parking lot and back. The car was recognizable with the yellow logo of the tournament. Great little idea!

But there were some minors too:

On friday the registering at the hotel was a bit chaotic. Bart tried his best but doing the hotel key part alone made it look like him swimming in the ocean. For Bart it wasn't a pleasant experience either, I can promise you. Suggestion for the next organizers: Make sure you have the roomnummers of the hotel together with all the other stuff in one package. That means early communication with the hotel that you need the roomlist in advance so you can organize that before the guests arrive.

On saturday the software let us down. Not only that, also the pointsystem for Europen was not mentioned in the booklet. I even didn't know that system until I asked the organizers. It was funny to see Arioso come at the table asking how it was possible that after 3 rounds the top seed team had 27 points, where as accoording to the ruleset (Eurobowl rules) they could have a maximum of 12 points. For me, the same system as Eurobowl would have been as good as well, with the individual results a tiebreaker. Main thing here, communication. Although I also have to admit, not many people seemed to care about the points at all, only about the beer! :wink:

As for the software, I think it had to do with adding reserves and switching pairings (the team names were not always in the right order when we got back the filled in leaflets) to make it more easy to get the results right. After we stopped that and reset the entire thing all went great and smooth until the end. Great work from Sjapie to simply announce the start of round 2 first and then worry about handling the software. This might have been avoided if the score software would have been used to it's full potential, using the inbuilt option for printing match sheets. Not sure why that was not done.

Even though the hotel was great, one minor thing was the first course. It was on the table too soon and that is not hygenic. This is BTW not a fault of the organisation itself.

For the rest, great work done. And I'm very curious to see the endresult of your book of organising a damn good Eurobowl and Europen!

And now of to the World Cup in Lucca. I'm really excited about that allready!

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by driesfield »

Now that the event is finished and I had some time to recover I have some spare time.

I'd like to thank all the players and their wives/girlfriends and my staff for making this tournament work.
The event was made possible because of the help of the whole Belgian community.
I would also like to thank Babass (Florent Maire) for his help in contacting the French Bloodbowl scene.


Like somel of you pointed out there is room for improvement.
So the feedback I've received during the weekend and afterwards has been written down and taken into the playbook.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Garrick »

driesfield wrote:Now that the event is finished and I had some time to recover I have some spare time.

I'd like to thank all the players and their wives/girlfriends and my staff for making this tournament work.
The event was made possible because of the help of the whole Belgian community.
I would also like to thank Babass (Florent Maire) for his help in contacting the French Bloodbowl scene.


Like somel of you pointed out there is room for improvement.
So the feedback I've received during the weekend and afterwards has been written down and taken into the playbook.
Dries, I honestly believe there is very little room for improvement on the excellent tournament you ran! You have set a high bar indeed for future hosting countries to aspire to. I was almost relieved that Scotland failed (yet again :( ) to win hosting rights! Congratulations, Garrick

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by haktar »

Draco wrote: And Haktar, keeping a strict schedule is very important in a tournament, mainly on the last day. Not just that the hotel wants everything at a certain timeschedule (personel only will work until certain ours youknow), but also players who have to leave on sunday and still have a drive of more than 3 hours up to 10 or 11 hours, would prefer to leave asap. As Portugal is hosting the Eurobowl in 2017, you'd better take that in consideration.
I have to admit that i haven't been enought accurate. I was thinking about Friday Night, and the announced time to have diner 18h30-19h00. When people arrived from differents points of Europe, i think more agility in time schedule is better.
During the tournament i agree you : that was perfect.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by azzroag »

hello guys,

what a fantastic weekend !

thanks for all. You do really good job. I hope that the next WC and EB will be so nice than this event :)

congratulations to the 8 machines of this 2 last year : Team England, Je bande (yes its work too !!!) (for other guys it was the war cry of team france). You are awesome !!! congratulations again

See you in Uk challenge and then in world cup

Julien.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by babass »

driesfield wrote:The event was made possible because of the help of the whole Belgian community.
I would also like to thank Babass (Florent Maire) for his help in contacting the French Bloodbowl scene.
It was my pleasure :)

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by sann0638 »

Just a quick one on Score while the iron is hot, but will certainly be contributing to Dries's guide.

There are two quick suggestions I think I would make were the tournament to be next weekend:
- use the printout that comes with Score that has the teams on it. One of the problems with this was the vast amount of printing it would entail, but I am 99% sure that the template can be adjusted, or if not the template the output could be copied on to a new template. As the scoring sheets are not really needed until an hour into the game, there is little time pressure on producing them.
- design a scoring system that can easily implemented in Score (or whatever you are using). As everyone was keen to boost the team element, and Score is what we had, this was done in the best way we could, but it was a little cumbersome and the team points were not immediately obvious (could have put a fix on this, with hindsight, by dividing them by 8 when applied to the individuals. Would have made data entry harder though.

Back to Ofsted planning now...

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Garrick »

Should we mandate that every hosting nation has a sann0638? He is Scotttish by the way :wink:

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Vigfus »

sann0638 wrote:Just a quick one on Score while the iron is hot, but will certainly be contributing to Dries's guide.

There are two quick suggestions I think I would make were the tournament to be next weekend:
- use the printout that comes with Score that has the teams on it. One of the problems with this was the vast amount of printing it would entail, but I am 99% sure that the template can be adjusted, or if not the template the output could be copied on to a new template. As the scoring sheets are not really needed until an hour into the game, there is little time pressure on producing them.
- design a scoring system that can easily implemented in Score (or whatever you are using). As everyone was keen to boost the team element, and Score is what we had, this was done in the best way we could, but it was a little cumbersome and the team points were not immediately obvious (could have put a fix on this, with hindsight, by dividing them by 8 when applied to the individuals. Would have made data entry harder though.

Back to Ofsted planning now...
On the subject of the front up printout. That really was handy, and I'll be honest, it did not affect the results much.
The way I see it, the wrong entries were much more caused due to the following:
- while entering results you were disturbed by players asking questions unrelated to the results entry.
- players filling in wrong results (on more than one occasion when we dug up the entry slip, the players had wrongly filled it in)
- Some of us noted there seemed to be a problem with the results wrongly entering in the tables when we used the switch home and away function to enter the results.
To this effect I've suggested to Lard to make sure that at the next Eurobowl (or any other large event (World Cup, Portugal)) to make sure that there is an information stand available where players can request all kind of information, so the people registering the results can do so without being constantly disturbed.

The second point Mike makes on the scoring system: I think this is a spot where we did not perform as we should have. The main problem to me is the rules were decided before we had any software available and there was no one that had an intense knowledge of the available software present during the decision making. In hindsight we should have had someone experiment with the different types of available software to see what scoring systems could be easily implemented before we decided on the rules. The inclusion of both number of draws and victories as first and second tiebreaker was very hard to implement, and we had to resort to keep a spreadsheet to get that under control, and I feel it was impractical at best. Including the opponent score before numbers of touchdowns led to sometimes illogical choices of players you had to play against (I am convinced that all the complaints about wrong pairing was due to the opponent score having a bigger weight than the Net td + Net Cas tiebreaker).

I honestly believe that once the software had been decided we did as good as we could, but the fact that we'd taken a theoretical good points system was confronted with the practical implication of it. I believe this is also a point to keep in mind for future organizers.

Then lastly, for the second round of the Eur'Open, we had major issues with Score. The new draw was limited to 40 games at most, while there should have been 60. According to the score software help when a player is flagged as not active, he should not be included in the next draw. I believe that this is not correct when you use a drawing based on groups. After the first round had been drawn, a number of reserve teams had been added so players who were only showing up for the second game could have their game played for 1 round by a reserve player, to be then replaced with the proper teammember once he turned up. This is in my opinion the basis of the issue we encountered on Saturday afternoon.

Here's the solution I used: Because I felt players were coming to play and not watch me or others sorting out the software mess, I did a manual draw based on the results of the first round. I then resolved the software issue by doing a manual extract of the database, doing a cleanup of the whole thing (to 120 players), and using that as an import file for a second "start" of the tournament. With that start done, I did a new draw and manually changed all games played so it was the same as the games that had been played in the first round. I entered the results of that round 1, and did a new draw, which was once again manually adapted to reflect the games that were being played at that moment (as recorded by Draco) (there was less changing to do here: all groups played the correct group and of the pairing between players the differences were only where 2 players had the same result).

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by sann0638 »

Good work! Just to be clear, my 2nd point wasn't a criticism, and my first is with the benefit of hindsight, if only because it stops people having a suggestion of a possible improvement...

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Vigfus »

Fully understood Mike, and I really welcome the feedback you gave.

I decided to post what had happened because:
1. it would help future organizers identify potential pitfalls.
2. to show those who work on the score code where there might be an issue that can be improved.
3. if anybody else would experience the same issue, to provide a way we resolved it (at first I didn't know how to resolve it)
4. to show that once you have an error in score like this it is very hard to get it out of the tables. (read score developers might want to consider having a delete function available (there is an add function after all))

All my points are also with hindsight. I feel the second one I make (approaching the points system from solely a theoretic standpoint) is one we will sure work hard to avoid next time. It will make a world of difference and there will be much less confusion on the part of the participants. The big problem is that unless you have experience this is a point which can have a major impact, while it is very hard to detect this potential pitfall.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by RoterSternHochdahl »

I haven't been at the Eurobowl, I am afraid. But reading this makes me think of a question I have asked myself before (and I repeat it to you now as this may be the right platform to find somebody with the right capabilities to do something about this, in particular since I heard that programming work was going on to replace (?) score):

Isn't there a better way than paper-printouts, manual bookkeeping and manual transfer of input to Score in the age of internet, smartphones and cloud computing? Shouldn't Score be a webbased solution where everybody can send their results to?

A lot of the tournaments I went to this year suffered heavily from delays connected to result management. The NAFC stood out in a positive way, probably because of the amount of staff for the job and their experience.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Dave »

RoterSternHochdahl wrote:I haven't been at the Eurobowl, I am afraid. But reading this makes me think of a question I have asked myself before (and I repeat it to you now as this may be the right platform to find somebody with the right capabilities to do something about this, in particular since I heard that programming work was going on to replace (?) score):

Isn't there a better way than paper-printouts, manual bookkeeping and manual transfer of input to Score in the age of internet, smartphones and cloud computing? Shouldn't Score be a webbased solution where everybody can send their results to?

A lot of the tournaments I went to this year suffered heavily from delays connected to result management. The NAFC stood out in a positive way, probably because of the amount of staff for the job and their experience.
During the last WC the programme used was Web Based, thus accesible from different computers. The new software will probabely have this very same feature as well as it's crucial to the smooth running of a big event, similar to this weekends' EB.

An App or something like that will indeed be usefull, we'll see what the wizzkidzz come up with.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by Pipey »

Garrick wrote:One of my team mates had decided that this was going to be his last Blood Bowl tournament so that he could focus on other things. He enjoyed himself so much that he has committed to staying on the tournament scene for 2015 and will represent Scotland at the World Cup - RESULT!!
I was going to make the point that the huge success of Eurobowl X will hopefully set the scene for an amazing NAFWC turn out. Sounds like it already is having that effect!

Things really went up a notch this weekend. Fantastic fun, lots of attention to detail, and when there were inevitable glitches they were handled calmly and efficiently. I'm sure Sweden and Portugal can raise the bar even further! :)

Perhaps the bar manager could have been more prepared! But what venue has ever been prepared for the amount of beer Blood Bowlers consume? :-D Some sort of beer guide might also be handy: "imagine how many staff and how much beer you will need. Double it. Double it again. Add some more. Then restock on Saturday. Repeat."

And maybe champagne and podium babes in the winner's area too? One for Sweden 2016 and beyond?

;-)

It was a pity not to see Podfrey's programme in use with the national flags and rolling results during the rounds. I know that wasn't always perfect and it would be hard to incorporate that alongside EurOpen but I think I missed that 'traditional' aspect. Maybe just a personal thing.

But there's no doubt that overall this will be remembered as the Eurobowl which reached out to the community more than any other. The people's Eurobowl dare I say it!! I think EurOpen may remain a team event for ever more.

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Re: Eurobowl X- Feedback thread

Post by sann0638 »

Pippy wrote:emotional stuff
<sobs> :)

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