How could a new BBRC work?

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How could a new BBRC work?

Post by Shteve0 »

koadah wrote:
Testing over a lot of games.
VoodooMike wrote:people are not resistant to change, they are resistant to everyone else's changes. Everyone and their brother has a vision of how the game should be, but they'd rather it not change at all than change the way you want it to. It is a lack of clear vision... a lack of anything approaching consensus... that leads to the appearance of conservatism. It is the one clear thread we've seen for years and it shows no signs of changing
For me, these are the two elephants in the room whenever these discussions come up. We all have bugbears and the concept of a BBRC is great until it sanctions a change you do don't like - witness previous BBRC concepts like binning undead, all it takes is player x mooting any kind of change to player y's favourite roster for all hell to break loose. And what amount of testing is enough to convince player y that the roster he likes so much wins more because it's objectively better (let alone is practical without effectively rolling out the full ruleset)?

I fall on the side of Mike here. For all I'd love to see a consensus based, rigorously tested living ruleset pioneering by some sort of committee of awesome, representative, all seeing savants; the reality is an unsatisfying halfway house that's only realistically going to cause as many problems as it solves. Practically speaking, given the realities of our situation, I think we're looking at unilateral action or else no action at all being our choices. In the absence of clear leadership from the IP owner, who you'd usually look to for this kind of leadership (however unpopular that unilateral action is - just look at the reaction to the latest rumoured warhammer changes!) there's no obvious party (other than perhaps cyanide) to take the role.

Note the NAF charter makes no mention of taking a leadership role in rules reviews. That could change, but given the above I think it's a little harsh - or at the very least premature - to suggest the NAF is fiddling while Rome burns.

The NAF is an international association of players dedicated to Blood Bowl. The NAF's goal is to act as a central resource for Blood Bowl coaches the world over - offering news, contacts, discussion, sanctioned tournaments and international player rankings.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

Post by plasmoid »

On a side note I'm pretty sure that the BBRC weren't behind the binning of the undead. AFAIK like all stupid decisions, such as 4th edition, OSPA and replacing High Elfs with Pro Elfs, that was unilateral action by JJ.
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Fair enough, thanks for the correction. I think the point is still valid though - one man's gold is another man's garbage.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

Post by rolo »

spubbbba wrote:Out of interest does anyone have any figures for how popular the Khorne roster is since it came out? It's been a while now so it would be interesting to see how it fares in comparison to other teams, in particular those that were also released with CE.
I'm looking at the BB Manager stats, 1229 Khorne teams have played 6270 matches.
BB Manager is only a subset of all Cyanide matches, and I can't filter "only matches since Chaos Edition" came out, I only see the grand totals, so all Chaos Ed teams are far behind.
For comparison, 1055 Underworld teams have played 6289 matches.
this is out of a total of 285154 matches - but those include years of Legendary Edition when Khorne, Underworld, and Chaos Dwarves were not available.

Orcs are by far the most popular team, 10064 Orc teams have played in 57308 matches.

I think dode has FOL stats broken down by season, which would be more useful to see how popular Khorne has been. But my guess is, comparable to Khemri/Elf/Ogre.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

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koadah wrote:I am interested. What kind of non standard rules are the NAF allowing now?

What power does the NAF have other than not accepting your results for the rankings?
I don't know what they're allowing beyond the use of nonstandard rosters - the NAF's policy is that they'll examine your changes and decide on a case-by-case basis before giving you their rubber stamp. The NAF can choose not to sanction your tournament and for many people that will make a tournament less appealing (certainly less useful if they're tracking their NAF ranking).
koadah wrote:Yeah but Khorne & Bretonnians are only rosters. 'New' rosters at that. For all the moaning they were never really a big deal.
Rules changes are a different matter.
I agree that rules changes are a bigger deal than roster additions (or alterations). I still think that the NAF should have firm rules about what is or isn't allowed in terms of deviation from the CRP, rather than the "we'll see how we feel about your particular deviations on that particular day" as they do now.
koadah wrote:I don't know who really wants NAF BBRC rules. Cyanide would still end up doing what they want. It makes sense for them to continue adding rosters to continue making money. Also to continue tweaking the game to suit their platform.
I don't know either, really. I don't really see a new BBRC as something that is needed, or even something that would be listened to unless a big chunk of players were forced to listen in some way. I do think Cyanide will continue to add rosters... I even think new rosters are probably a good thing for the game as a whole, just to keep things interesting. New rosters can still represent a problem in that they can be too strong or too weak.
koadah wrote:As the higher TV, big, public/private leagues are where the main perceived issues are, who is really going to care what the NAF say unless they testing in that kind of environment?
Testing over a lot of games.
True enough... for NAF to be relevant with that it's going to have to dive into online play, which it has been reluctant to cover so far. To be guaranteed relevance, it'd need to actually control an online environment like FUMBBL, which is unlikely no matter how firm a declaration FUMBBL might make about following the NAF's decisions. Cyanide will likely, as you say, keep adding new rosters because it makes them money to do so, meaning there will still be a tug-o-war between Cyanide's influence and anyone else's until the cyanide and not-cyanide rules diverge to the point that people no longer see an easy way to transition Cyanide's stuff into TT/whatever.
spubbbba wrote:Out of interest does anyone have any figures for how popular the Khorne roster is since it came out? It's been a while now so it would be interesting to see how it fares in comparison to other teams, in particular those that were also released with CE.
It's not a tier 1 team.. but that matters far more in online play than TT.
Shteve0 wrote:Note the NAF charter makes no mention of taking a leadership role in rules reviews. That could change, but given the above I think it's a little harsh - or at the very least premature - to suggest the NAF is fiddling while Rome burns.
Whether the charter mentions it or not, it's what many people expect... to see leadership from the NAF. The NAF doesn't have to "take charge" ever, it just won't be able to change its mind eventually if it doesn't lay down the foundation for it in a timely fashion.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

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Not to interrupt the far more cogent discussion going on, a quick thought I had: If the NAF BBRC wanted to create new star players they want contact with the mini manufacturers. Willy or whoever may be pissed off that they now need to cast a new Khemri star, or they may be happy for the opportunity to sell a new mini but it'd be worth asking the question.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

Post by spubbbba »

rolo wrote:
spubbbba wrote:Out of interest does anyone have any figures for how popular the Khorne roster is since it came out? It's been a while now so it would be interesting to see how it fares in comparison to other teams, in particular those that were also released with CE.
I'm looking at the BB Manager stats, 1229 Khorne teams have played 6270 matches.
BB Manager is only a subset of all Cyanide matches, and I can't filter "only matches since Chaos Edition" came out, I only see the grand totals, so all Chaos Ed teams are far behind.
For comparison, 1055 Underworld teams have played 6289 matches.
this is out of a total of 285154 matches - but those include years of Legendary Edition when Khorne, Underworld, and Chaos Dwarves were not available.

Orcs are by far the most popular team, 10064 Orc teams have played in 57308 matches.

I think dode has FOL stats broken down by season, which would be more useful to see how popular Khorne has been. But my guess is, comparable to Khemri/Elf/Ogre.
Interesting, Underworld are very close to Khorne. Do you happen to have the same for Chaos Dwarfs?

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

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Raveen wrote:Not to interrupt the far more cogent discussion going on, a quick thought I had: If the NAF BBRC wanted to create new star players they want contact with the mini manufacturers. Willy or whoever may be pissed off that they now need to cast a new Khemri star, or they may be happy for the opportunity to sell a new mini but it'd be worth asking the question.
Wow, that is an interesting point of view! And if we (as a hobby) piss off the 3rd party manufacturers what will they do? Remove their figure lines?

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

Post by rolo »

spubbbba wrote:Interesting, Underworld are very close to Khorne. Do you happen to have the same for Chaos Dwarfs?
Yeah, I can't copy the table out of BB Manager but here's a screenshot of the 8 least popular teams. Again, this is a grand total and includes years of Chaos Edition not being available. But it's obvious that Chaos Dwarves are much more popular than Underworld or Khorne:

Image

FWIW, since yesterday, both Khorne teams and Underworld teams submitted 5 new matches since yesterday morning (and none by new teams).

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Post by Shteve0 »

Why do you suppose the number of games to teams is consistently roughly 6 to 1? That seems like a very short average shelf life, even for teams at the lower end of the popularity spectrum. Does that proportion change dramatically as the win% goes up? Is there a contextual explanation to the sample I'm missing here?

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Shteve0 wrote:Why do you suppose the number of games to teams is consistently roughly 6 to 1? That seems like a very short average shelf life, even for teams at the lower end of the popularity spectrum. Does that proportion change dramatically as the win% goes up? Is there a contextual explanation to the sample I'm missing here?
Seems consistent - the most popular teams (Orcs: 57316 matches by 10064 teams, 5.69 matches per team; Chaos: 49237 matches by 8518 teams, 5.78 matches per team) and the winningest teams (Undead: 25050 matches by 4356 teams, 5.75 matches per team; Lizardmen 32283 matches by 5620 teams, 5.74 matches per team) fit the pattern you see.

Some theories (Disclaimer: These are pure guesswork on my part!)
- BB Manager is often used to track Cyanide leagues because their tables and stats are far superior to what Cyanide's client offers. Many such leagues are small and only play a limited number of games.
- A low number of average matches per team actually sounds realistic to me. How many teams have you started, played a game or two, and abandoned?
- Matches aren't uploaded automatically to BB Manager, a user has to upload matches manually, and not everyone uses it, especially in public leagues. So matches by a coach who doesn't upload their game reports only show up when their opponent does.

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Post by Shteve0 »

Ah, I didn't know that third point. That sounds the most likely explanation right there. The second point I'd understand if we were talking matchmaker, but in a league environment I'd say a mean of six games total failed the sniff test.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

Post by PercyTheTroll »

harvestmouse wrote:
Raveen wrote:Not to interrupt the far more cogent discussion going on, a quick thought I had: If the NAF BBRC wanted to create new star players they want contact with the mini manufacturers. Willy or whoever may be pissed off that they now need to cast a new Khemri star, or they may be happy for the opportunity to sell a new mini but it'd be worth asking the question.
Wow, that is an interesting point of view! And if we (as a hobby) piss off the 3rd party manufacturers what will they do? Remove their figure lines?
I don't think there's any risk of manufacturers going home and taking their balls with them (as it were) but it would be good to know if there would be an option for miniatures for new stars or positions or even teams if the BBRC wanted to add them. It would seem sensible to avoid the GW days of "What mini can we use as this star?"

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

Post by WhatBall »

sann0638 wrote:One of the questions was "how could a new BBRC work?"

It would be great if we could have some focused discussion on that in this thread.

- Who would a new set of rules affect (i.e. where would they be used)?
- Who should be on the BBRC?
- How should the rule changes be decided?
1. The new rules should affect everyone, TT and online players alike. They should written/improved in a way to make the TT experience better and more balanced for tournaments (slight tweaking) and better for perpetual online leagues and long running TT leagues with high TV teams (more tweaking required).

2. Me of course. :D
I would include others as I did with updating Stunty Leeg on FUMBBL and writing that handbook/rule set, and as with the WhatRuleBook I am currently toying with. I would definitely include harvestmouse to ensure current fluff is not only maintained, but there was a big left turn back to the importance of the fluff and history/background.

3. Rule changes should be decided on by the new BBRC with feedback from the BB community. Testing done on the FUMBBL client for maximum exposure. I know it was not done in the past, but that was a dead client with the creator long gone at the time.
Loki wrote:I think there is a distinction between TT and online players, or those who play online exclusively would maybe be more accurate. TT players show ther commitment to the game by spending time and money to get places to play leagues, pay 'club fees', buy tournament tickets, spend money on accomodation for tournaments, etc. I'm not saying that online players do not spend some money but there may well be those who got Cyanide for 2.99 and FUMBBL is free (though you should own a copy of the game). An online player can dip in and out which to my mind means that by and large those exclusively online players will tend to be less committed to the wider BB community.
.
I think that is a bit close minded. There are some very dedicated online only players. I considered myself dedicated, it is really the only game I play (online or off, except scrabble, etc. with the family), but I have no time or desire to play TT. There are also many onliners with 1,000s (or 10,000s) games who know the rule inside and out and are aware of every little thing that can be exploited in the rules. This is invaluable knowledge.
Shteve0 wrote:I suppose my ideal would entail:

* no changes to existing skills or CRP rules. A stable core ruleset is the best thing we have as a community, at least for tabletop. An attempted transition between rulesets that have changes to rosters and skills would not, in my opinion, do the tabletop game any favours whatsoever
* potentially a couple of new rosters and perhaps new skills every year or two... Let's say three of each, every two years. Have them targetted at different aspects of the community, for example two in tier 1 (one short term focussed, one long term focussed) and a T1.5/2 challenging, counter-intuitive team
* a new section added to the rulebook for 'perpetual leagues'. I acknowledge the issues long term online play is reported to face, but would like to see it seriously explored whether those problems (a) can be proven to trace back to the issues identified and (b) can be solved without altering any other format of the game.

I personally wouldn't touch CRP+ with a bargepole, primarily because of my first point above.
Sorry, completely disagree. The rosters are not what is "broken" with CRP, it is the core rules. They are definitely passable for TT, because the problems don't arise until later mostly, but they are there. Also, changing rosters is the "sexy" work. Everyone goes straight for them.

Imo, the proper route for changes is; Core Rules > Skills > Rosters. The rosters are the product of what the rules and skills are and how they interact. I really believe a single set of core rules can be created that successfully handles short span TT play and perpetual leagues. As I mentioned, most of the broken rules rear their heads later on, so changes to them can be done that have little to no effect on TT.

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Re: How could a new BBRC work?

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I'm not sure I understand what you mean by 'Core rules' - is that Moving, Blocking, Passing etc? If so, what is broken?

Changing core rules has the most gamewide ramifications and the potential for unintended consequences is greatest. Changing rosters isn't just sexy, it's a way of tuning balance without messing with the rules substrate.

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