by krackrjack » Sat Jun 04, 2011 8:34 pm
Fairly recently there was a live draft league in which one of the owners "auto drafted" his entire team using his pre draft rankings. The result was without a doubt the worst team I have ever seen in a live draft league. Most of the owners in this league (Myself, Petrosian, sschu, DonFESQ, dharmabums, scubaking1...the live regulars) commented on what a disaster this team was.
As the season played out I won this division with 101 wins and this team finished last in the same division. I thought it might be useful to this discussion to see if this truly awful team or my team showed any effects of "normalization".
In the first 54 games I went 35 -19 .648, the awful team went 16-38 .296
In the second 54 games I went 30-24 .555, the awful team went 17-37 .315
In the final 54 games I went 36-18 .667, the awful team went 8-46 .148
Final records: Me - 101-61-.623
Awful Team - 41-121-.253
To address nev's original statement "[b:0ad3a7dad4]As I said at the top Normalization Bullspit....This game is programmed or coded to do whatever it must to keep won loss totals from going too much in either direction.[/b:0ad3a7dad4] " this was clearly not the case.
If HAL was doing anything to "normalize" our records it didn't work.
The other teams loss totals were not prevented in any way from going too far. 121 losses is more than any modern team has ever managed IRL. Their worst third of the season was the last.
I actually had my highest win pct. in the last third of the season.
I agree that the game does a lot of things that we don't know about and/or don't understand the process of why and how. I also agree that it would be better for us if the games processes were more transparent.
"Normalization" however, does not seem to exist. I think we all tend to buy into it because we all have teams that got off to great starts and then collapse. I think this league shows clearly that, at least in so far as preventing bad teams from losing too many games, it is just an anecdotal
myth.
JMHO
Jack