Tue Jan 12, 2021 9:43 am
I don’t normally weigh in here, because those of you running things for this Tour are doing a fine job, and I am a relative newbie to the Tour. But there are a lot of good comments here, and I’d like to add mine as we try to improve the Tour going forward. I think we do have opportunities to improve our playoff format.
I haven’t played the other tours, but given the player sets and management of them required to win here, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that the very best Strat players tend to congregate here on this Tour. I’d like to see us continue to expand our appeal, something that very much happened this year due to some good early communications and “PR” moves by our administrators. After seeing some steady decline in participation the last several years, we increased the number of competing teams by over 50% this year, whether you count total participants or just those participants who played at least four events. I’d like to see us reward that increased participation by increasing the number of semifinal opportunities, without necessarily making it much easier for those lower seeded teams to make the final 12.
There will always be a significant “luck” factor in winning a championship, and that holds true for real life sports as well. But even though we’re all attempting to be in the playoffs and finish as “the best” for the season by winning that championship, I do think there may still be subtle differences in ability even in the final 36 that can help some have a better chance to win than others. At least I’d hope that was the case, or most of us wouldn’t be trying to obtain “bragging rights” and have our name forever enshrined in lights on the Tour homepage.
I think at least three main goals we’re trying to accomplish are:
• Determine a worthy champion for each season’s Tour.
• Continue to have the Tour appeal to an expanding number of participants.
• Publish and manage a format for Tour advancement that rewards good performance in previous rounds.
We also don’t want the management of the Tour to become too complicated or unwieldy for those in charge in the process.
This year will be my first trip to the Finals, and I am intrigued to participate in the 8 round draft by seeding with a non-serpentine format. I think the way that’s set up sounds both fun and challenging and appropriately rewards those who finish higher in the standings.
I also very much like the format of the first five rounds. Someday I’ll perhaps learn how to win in the $100M+ cap leagues, but apparently not yet.
As some have well said here, the process of getting from the first five rounds to the Finals through the semifinals seems like it could be tweaked. To require the top player to get through one season where he makes the playoffs in order to advance seems a bit stringent. Even in our current initial five rounds, we allow the record of one out of five leagues to be dropped for scoring purposes, so that seems to be an acknowledgement that it’s fairly likely we will all have a bad league rather frequently. I didn’t check everyone’s numbers, but maybe cristano is the only one who made the playoffs in every round? Of course, maybe he didn’t make the playoffs in the semis because his competition was so much tougher, granted. But wow, only 1 out of the top six made the finals.
Before I propose an alternative for the semifinals, I would like to point out as some have already that there are already advantages for having a higher seed in the semis. First, you do get to be placed in a division with lower seeds, which should provide a little bit of advantage. Second, you get to pick your park first. I don’t concur with the idea that picking a park first is at all a disadvantage, unless you don’t configure your teams at all to your own park. It’s true that if you get to see what parks are taken before you, then you could adjust your park accordingly, but to what end? If you choose a park similar to other parks before you, then you’ll presumably build a team that could play well both in your own park and in away stadiums. But the downside is then you’ll be picking from the same player pool and won’t get as many players for that type of park as you would want. If you pick a park different than other parks, then you may not play as well on the road, but you’ll be better at home and you may get to compete for a player pool that less other people are going for. I think there’s a pretty even tradeoff there, and so picking first remains a small advantage. So, I’m satisfied that the way we’ve structured the semifinal rounds already favors the higher seeds a little bit. But I’d like to see the highest seeds rewarded a little bit more.
I think a way to do that would be to have:
• Some number of top seeds (2, 4, 6, or 8) advance to the finals automatically as a reward for their outstanding performance in the first five rounds. I think the top 6 should get to automatically advance. (For the record, I was just outside the top 6 in my first two years here.)
• The next 48 teams (thus, expanding the number of teams still competing to 54 from 36) participate in either A) 4 12-team leagues with 4 champions advancing to the finals, OR B) 2 12-team leagues with the 4 league finalists advancing to the finals and 1 24-team league (for seeds 31-54) with only the champion advancing to the finals.
• Then, in scenario A, the remaining 2 best total points finishers not already qualifying make the final 12 as wild cards, or in scenario B, the remaining 1 best total points finisher not already qualifying advances as a wild card to the final 12.
Thus, top seeds 1-6 would be then duly rewarded for their 5 round performance. Seeds 7 to 54 could be entered in 4 12-team leagues with the same kind of earned advantages of seeding in divisions and picking ballparks first (and maybe a short 2-3 round forum draft). Or seeds 7 to 30 could enter 2 12-team leagues in similar fashion and let seeds 31 to 54 duke it out for that last guaranteed spot (or maybe a wild card, though for them that would be unlikely).
There are, of course, numerous similar scenarios like this that could be used to generate the final 12. I tried to pick and propose the most balanced options.
One final comment about the polls regarding semifinal and final drafting approach. While I agree there is certainly some strategy regarding autodrafting, that strategy is significantly limited compared to the strategy you can use with contingency picks in the waiver draft. If Strat would provide the option in the initial autodraft for contingent picks (it would add programming complexity), then I could wrap my mind more around just defaulting to an autodraft for the critical semifinal and final rounds. Until then, a little bit of a live forum draft just makes sense to me. I voted accordingly in the polls but see that the sentiment seems to be swinging toward autodrafting. I expect that autodrafting is NOT going to be satisfying when it comes time to finally do it and you look at who you got and didn’t get in the semifinal and final rounds. I think it would be a mistake to move in that direction. You can recover from a bad autodraft much more easily in the early rounds than you can in single-elimination semifinal or final rounds.
), we would have all autodraft $80 mil DH qualifying events, semis and finals, and we could then just spend all our time arguing about unique ballparks.