Talk Fantasy Football

This got posted at the beginning of the month on the NAF forum:

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Just an update on the NAF League front. I am please to announce that I have formed a NAF League Committee (with the help of Giuseppe (Beppe)) as per my goal to unite all the Leagues of the globe into one central database. All the members of this committee are computer savvy and know what needs to be done to make this a reality. They are:

Corwin (Carlo Ferrari) - Italy: He's a computer programmer and he's very good with OBBLM. He's one of the Commissioners of Bolognabowl: Italian biggest league.

Gunboat (Chris Davitt) - Australia: He spent some time researching and developing a league management website module.

Elyoukey (Lucas Lebielle) - France: He's a computer programmer and he already worked for NAF, developing a League locator system.

Nicholas Rathmann - Denmark: The man who created OBBLM.

William Leonard: He's one of the guy who works with Nicholas at OBBLM. He owns the domain which hosts some OBBLM based leagues.

vmcat (Valerio Catella) - UK: The current NAF Web Director. Valerio will be sitting in on the discussions and adding feedback.

Sitting in on the discussions as well and adding their two bits will be:

Beppe (Giuseppe Viti): Current NAF President

Lycos (Dave Downes): Current Projects Manager.

Join me and welcoming the committee and looking forward to presenting the community this League database sooner rather than later. Thank you for your continued patience.

Fraternally yours,
Craig McAree (generaljason)
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Wow. Looks like very competent people

Good start

Am I alone in missing in the point of doing this? I mean, offering free or discounted hosting is one thing, but is having all leagues located on a single DB really beneficial for anything other than transferring teams and email scraping? Genuinely curious.

The gap I could see obblm filling beautifully is for creating and submitting tournament rosters to a TO in advance, and as a refresh of both score and the ranking DB, integrating coach, teams, tourneys, reports and rankings in one swoop. But unless I'm mistaken, that's totally not what this is.

League support I can kind of get behind, but even being familiar with obblm this seems like a weird and slightly fruitless thing to do. What am I missing?

you should be able to compare data across various leagues
aka you suck in your league but might not suck so much when compared to teams of other leagues
you question is kinda like asking
why are there baseball cards
ask a real question like
explain it to me again how ERA is calculated

Right, but there are still issues with that. For a start, it presumably means standardising all the rules formats and custom plugins, or paring back to an inferior product (customisation wise).

Any variation in roster setup and environment is going to vary results beyond the madcap coding and security complexities. For instance, in our local league we allow khorne and apes, chosen MVP and a challenge schedule. How is, say, an LRB6 khemri team's performance in that meta comparable to that of a team in Daventry that plays NTBB? Or at least in a way that couldn't be achieved by just linking to websites? We also have the team creation plugin from doubleskulls, which is unsupported by the core devs, and I've reskinned our sites to dovetail with the national BB forum's switchable league skin options. Others have Conference containers, cemetaries, admin panels, brettonians, you name it...

Data mining makes far more sense in FUMBBL and cyanide, but I don't think that's the point either. I'm not expressly against this by any means, I just genuinely am not able to see the point in it yet - which is why I ask the question. What value is there in moving all leagues to a single database?

I just assumed it was so that NAF could offer it as a "service," as a part of an attempt on their part to make the NAF an online destination for Blood Bowl.

Shteve-0, I believe you may be misreading the intention. I'm not sure this is to consolidate the league tables and data into a single database. I believe this is more to keep a league registry and metadata. For example, if you know what all of the "NAF-sanctioned" leagues are, you can store that along with NAF IDs of coaches, how current the leagues are, how big the leagues are, list of prior champions, what races are being played, etc. You could even write an OBBLM plug-in that would feed the database if you were using it; otherwise users of other tables would need to manually enter it.

There are definite uses of this. Judging the health of the game as a whole, geography of leagues, whether or not certain teams are not being played, a repository of league champions across the world, etc.

I agree with you in that since there are custom league rules all around the world, doing a ranking or comparison system of teams between leagues is unrealistic. But if you were just looking to collect metadata for analysis, I think this is a worthwhile experiment.

Well, I don't know how much of this was covered here (as opposed to on the NAF forum), but the goals (as I understood them) were to collect data and create an option for a sort of "Champions League" playoff. I never really got whether that was to be facilitated through FUMBBL or what.

Regarding custom league rules, leagues were going to be segregated into several groups:
-Fixed schedule, no house rules.
-Open schedule, no house rules.
-House rules.

This was about a year ago, though, so some things might have changed by now. The full discussion can be seen here:
http://member.thenaf.net/index.php?name ... pic&t=6091

My opinion hasn't changed much. It's a nice idea, but I don't want to alter my league to the extent that would be required in order to participate.

Out of interest, is NAF support going to extend to online leagues using fumbbl and cyanide? I commission a small cyanide league and I would be interested in joining the NAF if there was support.

I know Cyanide can interact with OBBLM and think the same is true of FUMBBL. So if you're willing to take the extra steps involved, it would certainly seem like you could be included in the project. That's all supposition, though.