OK, I'm always ******** that new owners are forced to join crappy worlds and are soured on the experience.    So, while walking the dogs, something occurred to me.

WifS is not going to assign an employee to monitor the way new owners are treated.   So they really have no control over their experience.   Perhaps they should give inexperienced owners the option to join "mentor" worlds.  Basically, when they sign up, the first option would be "Do you want to join a mentor world?  You will be placed with other new owners and a mentor.   He will be there to answer any and all questions you have while monitoring the activity of this world."   Then write some happy **** like "They will be there to ensure your first experience is a good one" or something.     WifS would "hire" an experienced owner to oversee these worlds.   Basically, offer advice, auto-veto bad deals, reset horrible contracts at season's end, etc, etc.   New owners could stay until they got 3 seasons experience(when they can start using advanced settings) and then they have to move on. 

Great idea. Would it make sense to make the mentor world automatic for new owners? The newbs who don't think they need any help are the ones most likely to come in, destroy a team with bad trades and signings, and then leave in frustration. That would also eliminate the option for tankers to put a $4.95 alias into a world for a season to help their tanking team.

The idea behind Hardball Dynasty is to create a dynasty.   I'm not sure "forcing" new owners into a specific world where they can only stay for 3 seasons is the best way to treat new owners.    But I think it's a very good option for some.   That said, the mentor would have to be a good one as opposed to some assclown who thinks there is only one way to play HBD and who's just looking for some form of compensation. 

With that in mind, I have no idea what would be appropriate compensation.   It would be a lot of work.

And this would probably have to work in conjunction with smaller worlds.   You can't have new owners waiting for weeks to play.

Posted by MikeT23 on 9/30/2015 7:34:00 PM (view original):
OK, I'm always ******** that new owners are forced to join crappy worlds and are soured on the experience.    So, while walking the dogs, something occurred to me.

WifS is not going to assign an employee to monitor the way new owners are treated.   So they really have no control over their experience.   Perhaps they should give inexperienced owners the option to join "mentor" worlds.  Basically, when they sign up, the first option would be "Do you want to join a mentor world?  You will be placed with other new owners and a mentor.   He will be there to answer any and all questions you have while monitoring the activity of this world."   Then write some happy **** like "They will be there to ensure your first experience is a good one" or something.     WifS would "hire" an experienced owner to oversee these worlds.   Basically, offer advice, auto-veto bad deals, reset horrible contracts at season's end, etc, etc.   New owners could stay until they got 3 seasons experience(when they can start using advanced settings) and then they have to move on. 

This is a great idea. I have been wanting to buy my sister and her husband each a 4 pack of teams for years now. I feel like they would love the sim once they understood it. My biggest fear is they would feel overwhelmed in their first season and drop HBD entirely.

I feel like a 'mentor world' would prevent that from happening.

I'm worried that the "fuzzy scouting" is going to negatively impact newer players as well. I know in the league I am commissioner of I try to be available as a mentor, and I exchanged some TCs with a newer player who was quite excited to finally have a top 10 pick. He drafted a player he thought was going to be a perennial All-Star only to be severely disappointed with his actual current ratings. Now, who knows, maybe WIS has added modifications to player development and this player might reach the initial projections just fine, but currently it's a pretty frustrating blow to absorb in a time when WIS needs to be keeping people around rather than testing their patience.

But newer players finding a gem at pick 49 will certainly not be frustrating. 

The trick too is there are no 'exhibition leagues' for HBD.

I don't mind telling everyone that I had 4 aliases so that I could cycle through and play exhibition games without having to wait to play again. I took about 2 months trying different things before I finally paid for my first season of sim league hockey. I was still embarrassed with my teams performance but I knew enough to get by. You can't really do that with HBD.

Posted by MikeT23 on 10/1/2015 11:44:00 AM (view original):
But newer players finding a gem at pick 49 will certainly not be frustrating. 

A gem at 49 doesn't necessarily mean the quality of a top-10 pick. I fully get that we're going to get better players lower in the draft than we did before, but I seriously doubt we're going to see anything like a top-10 pick dropping out of the top 30. I certainly could be wrong and we'll probably just have to wait and see, but anecdotally all I've been seeing are players being drafted +/- 10 spots from where they used to be -- so a top 5 pick might now go in the top 15.

There was some sarcasm in my post.   No one should be "excited" to have a Top 10 pick.   That means you sucked the previous season.   The whole idea of fuzzier ratings was to stop people from being excited for sucking, i.e. tanking, the previous season.   Making high picks less of a guarantee might be the best update they've done since correcting the early bugs. 

Well agree to disagree on that I guess. I don't see tanking as a rampant-enough problem to add another degree of luck into a game that already relies on it so heavily. And not all owners who land in the bottom third of the league are trying to lose.

Tanking or not, the point about being "excited" for having a bad season stands.   Someone has to be in the bottom third but no one should be happy it's them.   That's what leads to tanking.    Especially at the end of the season.    40 games left, 25 games out gives one no incentive to win.   Guaranteeing a top player in the draft gives one incentive to lose.   Taking that incentive out of the equation is good for HBD.

My MG team is a good example.   Hardball Dynasty – Fantasy Baseball Sim Games - New York Honey Badgers Franchise Profile

After S33, we were old, expensive and quickly rolling towards mediocrity.   I tried to slap a couple of band-aids on it for three seasons but, at some point, you know the wound requires surgery.   So I quit chasing the aging, expensive FA(for a season) and cut payroll by 40m+.    That allowed me to sign a fine IFA.   Right now I'm 65-73, 6 games out the WC2 with little hope of making up the deficit and, depending on the previous result, somewhere between 10-14 on the WW.    Other than not wanting to be "that guy", looking at you willsauve, there is ABSOLUTELY no reason for me to try to win.    By finishing the season 5-19, I'd probably move into the top 5.   However, due to the fuzzy ratings, and no currents, I'm content to win as many as possible and take my chances at 12th-18th. 

I get your point, and I don't disagree this will have a positive effect on tanking, I'm just not sold on how large it'll be.

The part that frustrates me is they've neutered a skill-based evaluation system and replaced it with a luck-based one. Previously, the draft process was multifaceted: prospect visibility was dictated by scouting budget, accuracy of projections were pretty decent above $15m (75% of the total possible), and with current ratings visible you could somewhat check the accuracy of your projections. Now, it appears anything below $18m scouting (90% of the total possible) has such a high level of variance you can't really trust your projections, and you have no way to check their accuracy with current player ratings. The draft boils down to crossing your fingers that your projections are correct and the other guys' aren't. The only skill appears to be detecting ratings that are out of whack -- a pitcher with 100 stamina and 45 durability for example, or a 1B with 85 range.

It may be more realistic, but I know a lot of folks who found the draft to be the most fun time of the year, and now it's pretty blah. If WIS wants to attract new players and keep owners around, I think rewarding skill and thoughtfulness is better than upping random chance.

I'll be contrarian.  What exact skill and thoughtfulness went into reading which current ratings were higher than others?  Counting?

If the draft boils down to crossing your fingers that your projections are correct and the other guys aren't, that sounds a whole lot more "real life" to me than looking at a player and automatically knowing near exactly how his career will play out.

If you want good scouting you have to pay for it.  To do that you have to take money away from other areas you were previously allowed to spend extra on.  Seems simple to me.

This looks like a never ending cycle of "make players less predictable" and then "make players more predictable."

Until we find five owners who can say "I had 20 million in scouting and I drafted a turd with a top ten pick", I'm not worried.

I say they've taken a blah part of the game and made it more interesting, and that it now involves more skill and strategy, not less. There was no skill involved in putting $10M into scouting and sorting the prospects that generated by Current ratings. The fact that there seem to be clues to ratings that are far off means dedicated, smart players might be able to figure out how to maximize $12M-$16M in scouting. Those willing to put the time in to do more than a quick Formula and sort by a few key ratings might be rewarded. It appears — too early to be sure — that options for a successful draft will include spending $20M on HS/COL or spending less and taking time to scour the ratings looking for outliers that boost or depress OVR. Since tankers are looking for an easy way to win, they're less likely to put that time in.

The assumption that WIS simply turned the draft into a crapshoot is definitely premature and probably wrong.