Monthly Contest Fixed ... Thanks Strat

How can teams and leagues like this be allowed to participate in the monthly contests???

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/467456
https://365.strat-o-matic.com/event/challenge/38

This person is making an absolute mockery of the contest. It's a 6 team league all owned by the same person. Two teams that may go 162-0 and two teams that could go 0-162. It's just insane that Strat doesn't police against things like this. I'm not sure why he didn't just build 3 perfect teams and 3 horrible teams, that way he'd win all 6 credits from the contest.

And then there was this league where 12 of the top 13 finishers were all in the same league:

https://365.strat-o-matic.com/event/challenge/36
https://365.strat-o-matic.com/league/466738

Themes leagues of any sort should not be allowed to participate in the contests otherwise, it skews the results meaning people who try to play by the rules have no chance of winning.

Word of advice to Strat-O-Matic ... If you're not going to allow the contests to run on a level playing field then just stop them altogether!!

well clearly not the former, since anyone else could do the same thing.
But certainly the latter IMO.

Maybe they just want to drive interest, dunno. Never tried for one of the contests so it never concerned me.

Funny on the first example and not trying to sweep all the credits. But on the second example, CDTLB has been around a long time and has good folks in it. If they qual, they qual.

The challenge of any type of restriction on qualifying is the line has to be drawn somewhere and that is subjective. What is a theme league, quantitatively? There are autodraft public leagues that are almost theme-ish just depending who is playing.

your not going to win any monthly contests in 80 Mil leagues so I dont pay it any mind anyway...to me there are better ways to hand out more credits..like the top 3 teams each month with the best records...the monthly contests are for 95% of the players a non issue in my opinion

couldnt agree more with you! As a new player as myself Strat needs to pay more attention to us if they want to keep our interest...I already problems with the bullshit injury system

Themes leagues of any sort should not be allowed to participate in the contests otherwise, it skews the results meaning people who try to play by the rules have no chance of winning.

Word of advice to Strat-O-Matic ... If you're not going to allow the contests to run on a level playing field then just stop them altogether!![/quote]

well clearly not the former, since anyone else could do the same thing.
But certainly the latter IMO.

Maybe they just want to drive interest, dunno. Never tried for one of the contests so it never concerned me.

Funny on the first example and not trying to sweep all the credits. But on the second example, CDTLB has been around a long time and has good folks in it. If they qual, they qual.

The challenge of any type of restriction on qualifying is the line has to be drawn somewhere and that is subjective. What is a theme league, quantitatively? There are autodraft public leagues that are almost theme-ish just depending who is playing.

I think the simplest way would be that if it is NOT the standard player pool and/or has roster restrictions it's not allowed. Every month go through the "leaders" and eliminate the ones that should be excluded.

Not picking on the CDTLB league per se, but clearly it gave them a huge advantage over everyone else because of the restrictions.

yeah that's one way to try to do it on roster restrictions. Though someone can still create a league of scrubs and studs that they own all of. And of course a theme league without roster restrictions could still find a way.

So maybe also only leagues with no multiple team ownership.And of course, that can be circumvented too.

My thing was always just that I disliked the spammed info at the top of my team page forcing me to have to see it or scroll by it. We all have our peeves ; )

Deplorable gaming of the system but players will do stuff like this in pretty much any game they can get away with it. I agree with Steven that alternatives for prizes would be better.

Deplorable gaming of the system but players will do stuff like this in pretty much any game they can get away with it. I agree with Steven that alternatives for prizes would be better.

Giving prizes for best record could just as easily be "stolen" by someone in a 6 person league. It would be super easy to build a 162-0 team in a one coach 6 person league.

Not arguing the point by the way. Just agreeing that if people wanna "cheat" the contest, it can be done. So why not put some rules in place where a human being decides if a team qualifies for the contest or not.

Absolutely. I'll be honest, I don't know what the prizes are, I have never looked. But logically speaking, the lower the prizes the less incentivized people are to manipulate the system. Perhaps spreading a smaller number of credits over a larger number of contests would be prudent. For example, top 10 HR teams get 1 credit each. I'm not sure if that would still be fun enough for you guys but it'd likely be a lot more legitimate.

If they cared about this they'd limit the contest winners to auto-leagues, like the record books are. Seems they must want to incentivize people to create theme leagues to try and compete in the contests.