Suggestion for Season 3?

**Barfo** · Joined: 10 Oct 2006 Posts: 2596

my $0.02 on the various ideas submitted. Keep in mind om only 25% of the decision-making for the commishes, so nothing i say here is gospel.

Yes im pretty sure we will move up and down people on the leagues based on how they did this season. No, this is not decided yet and i doubt we will even fix a specific number per league. The smart way to do it is to use on-the-fly heuristics like rabies did in dividing up A division, and just look for ntural breaks in skill. Also, with four weeks there are going to be a few songs tat got played by multiple divisions at some point (ex: Elephant Bones)

I have big reservations about advertising some songs as a "qualifying" week because frankly I suspect some minority of people will tank that to get placed lower. But for new people for season maybe what you can do is pick 3-4 songs that represent a range of challenge and that were played by leagues A-AAA (preferably more than one each) in season 2. Then you can compare the new scores against he old scores to get an idea of where people belong.

As far as narmalizing against people's individual affinities so taht they dont get an "unlucky" break of songs, that argument is infinitely regressive up to everybody playing all 64 sogns with all possible twists. For purposes of the league, the implicit assumption is that about 4 songs should be a large enough sample size to even out any luck factors mostly. To wit: 8 is too many.

EDIT: one solution would for the first week have all three expert divisions play the exact same 4 songs. And then we divide the 250 or so entries into divisions based on that in the same way rabies did for A this ssn. Same idea as Hylians but its not an extra week, it is the literal first week, with the scores counting fully, etc. I could still see people tanking that, but at least if they do, they start out with a weak week of scores that they have to overcome. Problems with sandbaggers in B and C can pretty much easily be fixed by re-jigging people up based on season 2, i dont expect ot see many more signups for that for ssn 3.
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**rabies** · Posted: Tue Jan 30, 2007 7:32 pm Post subject:

One of the unfortunate side affects of having so many participants with a wide-range of skills, is that even if we qualify people as suggested, or even when we do on the fly heuristics like I did with League A, when you have 20+ people in a division, there is going to be a few who will simply crush the rest. Even in A league right now, across all 3 divisions, there are those who are clearly doing much better than those at the bottom of each division. Why? Do they try harder, practice more? Are they naturally better? Who knows.

When I split league A, there was a pretty clear split in the skill level. Then week 2 scores came in. Guess what? People who were towards the top (or near) of A2 or A3 suddenly showed scores that would have done very well in higher divisions...and vice versa. What happened? Did they get better? Probably not. Did they suddenly try a heck of a lot harder because they now realized they were in the hunt? My vote would be the latter.

Keep up the good work in participating and thinking. The more you guys put into it and participate, the better the league will be. I have a feeling that once we are in the playoffs, the number of newcomers to the league will diminish some. I think we will have mountains of data at the time on who belongs where. However, one of the ideas I had in my head was the same as Barfo's final solution..all expert leagues play the same 4 songs the first week...and we break up the 3 expert leagues based on those results....and make manual adjustments if we see somebody who should normally have placed higher (based on his/her previous results in the league) who may have had a bad week.......and since now 50% of the decision-making has the same idea...its just up to us to convince the other 50%...

**bmintern** · Joined: 16 Jan 2007 Posts: 47

**elx** · Joined: 17 Feb 2006 Posts: 1657

**Javman158** · Joined: 21 Feb 2006 Posts: 640 Location: Fairfax, VA

**freakinsweet85** · Joined: 31 Jan 2007 Posts: 134

when IS season 3 going to be?

**Barfo** · Joined: 10 Oct 2006 Posts: 2596

**eachann** · Joined: 09 May 2006 Posts: 1340 Location: Michigan

I didn't read the whole thread up to here so maybe i shouldn't even post.. it might have already been said but just wanted to throw a quick comment on the OP idea.... like Rabies said, most of the players in season 3 will be players from seasons 1 and 2 and they'll have a good idea of where players will be. But you could do a preliminary for just the new players... of course people wouldn't try as hard knowing that it was just a preliminary round unless they were really hellbent on being in the top league.. but nevertheless it might make a good starting place for new players.

**bart2k8** · Joined: 24 Dec 2006 Posts: 12

i guess it aint a terrible idea, my onle suggestion is

NO MIRROR MODE!

**RocketMan** · Joined: 01 Jan 2007 Posts: 1189 Location: Rapid City, SD

I had an idea for the bigger leagues (A mainly). Why not run them similar to the way many sports are ran?
1. Just have signups...don't put into any particular order.
2. Put everyone into X(4?) divisions in no paticular order. Don't seperate pending ability...its all luck of the draw, where you get placed is where you get placed!!! You may get all the best in one division...or they may be broken up.
3. Have Saturday(s) as a cutoff for registering for the following week. If you are not in by Saturday...you don't play the next weeks songs. Late entries are added to the divisions, so that the divisions get built up evenly...although randomly.
4. When it comes time for the playoffs...you take X(3-4?) number of the people from the top of each division, then you combine the rest of the League and take another X(3-4?) people in as 'wildcards'...just so that if they got into a really good/hard division they could still make it in.
5. Continue with playoffs in the way they are already set up. You wouldn't have an A1, A2, etc. Winner...you would just have an "A League Winner"
6. The topps (winners...maybe more) of each League gets bumped up to the next league. If the bumped up people just absolutely do not do well playing the harder songs (mainly thinking of Med-Hard or Hard-Expert) then the Following season maybe they could go back...or I dunno, hadn't really thought of that!!! Probably by then there could be something figured out for the 'in-between' people.

I think that would solve alot of the "problems" with saying (Name...or whatever) shouldn't be in this League/Division...its all luck of the draw, or they will be out next season.
Sorry if this is already the idea...just wanted to get it down before I forgot it.
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**Sakst82** · Joined: 06 Nov 2006 Posts: 681 Location: Beaver Falls, PA

I would suggest... If you are going to have all expert players play the same 4 songs week 1... then divide them up from there. Please try to make sure there is a wide variety of songs... not 4 EZ FCs but not 4 face melters. Some people are better than some at others. I like to perfect the "easy" songs but I suck at the hard songs. So if you pick 4 hard songs first week im gonna get placed lower than I should, but if you pick 4 "easy" songs I'm gonna place higher than I should. I know the songs are supposed to be random but maybe just for the first week make sure theres a mix
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**Emptyeye** · Joined: 30 Dec 2006 Posts: 828