Posted by jetwildcat on 3/4/2016 4:56:00 PM (view original):
i think the first half of your points actually agree with me? not sure, but ill respond to one of the devil's advocates one.
the thing about luck... yes, its worse for top coaches. i obviously agree, you could probably find 100 posts where i talk about in team setup and game planning, how volatility is enemy #1 for top teams. of course top teams seek to minimize the impact luck has on their outcomes. but, that doesn't mean luck is good for the masses.
look at the history of luck-driven events in this game. dilemmas - massive disaster (granted, for a myriad of reasons). EEs - people have complained about the luck without pause for 10+ years. injuries - they've been toned down to a cat's meow of what they once were, due to complaints about luck. hell, even the sim engine gets complaints, about the outlier results. its enough that seble introduced feedback, to reduce very unlikely scenarios from taking place.
the history is clear - the kinds of coaches that play HD, don't want their success and failure predicated on events that are largely RNG driven. its almost paradoxical, given the underlying nature of any simulation is repeated coin flipping. but, it is what it is. making it so a guy can spend 10,000 on a player, and another guy can spend 50,000 (using the same 5:1 ratio from the dev chat), and the 10K guy still has a non-0 chance of winning - that will never fly with this crowd. it doesn't matter if you are a+ or d+, that would drive just about anyone bat **** crazy. leveling the playing field shouldn't be about randomly screwing people over hard enough that nobody can really get ahead. it should be organic. before seble wrecked recruit gen, mid majors were very successful in d1, way more than in real life, that was the least of anyone's worries. the complaints came from the other side. introducing luck-driven equalizers is not the answer.
i agree that if one guy spends 49K, and the other spends 50K, it should not be a 0/100% chance of winning, respectively (assuming those are effort points, adjusted for prestige and all). from the minute seble announced signings would have a random element, it was condemned, and i immediately supported it. i think its crazy a guy spends 1 dollar more on a tens of thousands of dollars scale, and wins 100%. but, its even more crazy for a guy to outspend another 5:1 and potentially be able to lose. this isn't real life where you have many targets and can run 6-7 men. so, if a battle is close, give the underdog a chance, and if the battle isn't close, don't. i honestly thought that would be intuitively obvious to everybody, i am genuinely somewhat stunned seble came out and said a 5:1 battle could go to the 1 guy...
If in a 50k:10k battle you give the 1 guy 0% chance of winning, he has wasted that 10k. Most likely, for the 10k guy, that 10k is a pretty high % of his budget, too. Now, 10k guys has nothing for it.
If you are spreading the odds roughly proportionally to all contributors, you are ensuring that every dollar spent has value. you're getting balls in a lottery, which is at least SOMETHING, even if it doesn't materialize into a player.
They key is: you need to spread your odds out among multiple players. NEED to. Want 1 recruit? get your odds on the good enough players to add up, and you'll be fine in the long run. Better than trying to get one guy under the current system, having someone come over top, and you losing everything you've put in. The beauty of an odds system is that, over the long haul, it all balances out. All-pay auctions, on the other hand, do not.
You didn't touch on my other point. There's a survivor's bias here. This 'crowd' are the 'haves' that had enough success to keep playing the game.
There's nobody on here like "this game isn't fun, i'm getting my *** kicked, i'm gonna stop playing...but i will continue to post on the forums all the time and participate in dev chats to get the game better. because if the game is better, i'll play again.
"Haves" always care more about keeping what's theirs than about gaining something new. It's like the freakanomics Duke basketball ticket example. You can't break the A+ dynasties up without risking the C-schools taking some back from the B's.
The system you describe previously, where mid-majors were competitive...they were competitive by complete accident. The ratings system was broken. It's like the texas sharpshooter fallacy - you can't look at something you did in the past, pick a bullet hole, draw a target around it, and call yourself a sharpshooter. The ratings system needed an update, and so did recruiting, and so did many other aspects of the game. Continuous improvement is what we need here. Old system balanced mid majors? fuckin wonderful, chalk it up, we can do better.
If someone feels like all the effort they've put into the game is about to be taken away by the intro of random chance...consider them the B+ school that dumped 40k on a recruit named HD where an A+ is about to swoop in...
(the analogy needs work but i think there's something profound there)
several things.
your first point is a soccer mom argument, if i've ever heard one. yes, if you spend 10k in a battle you have no chance of winning, in a system like today's, you lose it. i see zero problem with that. that is a feature, not a bug. good decisions should be rewarded, bad ones should be penalized. you say, when you assign a proportional probability off of each player, it all evens out in the long run - like that is a good thing! why not just generate everybody equally talented players for everyone?
a system where i have to go for 3 guards, when i need 1, each with 1/3rd chance of signing, sounds incredibly terrible. the chances i sign exactly one (assuming i offered all scholarships, for simplicity sake) is 44%. so, 56% of the time something ****** happens, either i get nobody, or i can get stuck with more than i need. i suppose its personal preference, but that sounds terrible to me.
i agree with you, that there is a negative aspect to the community, especially with respect to changes that are made. i disagree with you about the reason. sure, some folks do it, like dacj (im sure he doesn't mind me saying, we co-coach, and he's always measuring possibilities against his own situation). but, that is not the wide majority. about the worst thing you could do, for the haves, is to flatten recruit gen, to take away the incredible talent gap enjoyed by top d1 schools - something this game hasn't seen since the times when about 5 people per world knew about pulldowns. many of those most vocally against the changes today, have been beating seble over the head for 5 years, about fixing recruit gen.
look - i am not going to deny some folks, sometimes including myself, are overly negative. but, its NOT that we are against all change. we've lived through two major updates that caused mass havoc on this game - while smaller updates, such as seble's potential fix (slowing the rate of growth) and seble's projection report / seeding update (the two best updates in my time in HD), have been quite effective. the successful long timers who are anti update, are virtually all for some other major changes, generally always including a recruit gen fix. so, i reject its all selfish, as you suggest. that is a factor for some folks, but its just one piece of a much larger equation.
let me hazard one other reason, that most of the game's most successful coaches have a relatively similar take on how to fix this inequity - maybe it has something to do with our underlying understanding of how this game works. i hate making statements like this, but i see no way around it: nobody disputes that i can look at any situation in this game, and predict how it would play out, way above where virtually anybody else can. nobody disputes that i can consider one real setup, and explain the hypothetical outcomes that would result from a wide variety of changes, far better than most. how is examining changes to the underlying system any different? the truth is, the reason that many vets strongly maintain their opinions on this subject, is because we believe we have a good understanding of this problem, and how to fix it. we've been on this problem for ages, warning about it since it went into beta. and even though we've yelled about this, far louder than any other issue, for 5 years, we've been ignored, and had to watch as the game we love was destroyed. so yeah, i'm bitter. this is not a hard problem. it should have been fixed 5 years ago. so yeah, i'm ******. that's why.
anyway, final note. your point about drawing a hole around a gun shot, and calling it a bulls eye - its a total straw man. by your logic, in any imperfect system, you can draw no correlations, no conclusions from apparent cause-effect relationships. nice try, but its total BS! besides, you are acting like i am saying that system was perfect. of course it wasn't! that's why we pushed for changes! the core request from vets went something like this - "cut back on elite players to make star players sort of exit, boost iq of some youngsters to make actual star freshman, institute some form of national recruiting for top players to add competition (really angling for a moat around our advantage there, eh?), and make promises actually mean something". what we got was, a complete mangling of recruit gen, which directly impacts this inequality situation. are there other contributors? of course! i never suggested there weren't. what i'm saying is, the reality that this d1 inequality issue is only an issue in this version of the game, with the reverse being an issue for much longer, suggests that sensible, calculated, controlled changes should be considered first - that we don't have to jump to totally chopping the game up, introducing these massive luck driven events. the strawman misses my point by about a mile.
3/4/2016 9:39 PM (edited)