Team System Discussion and Ideas

[HKim]

Okay, okay. Let me go ahead and post this.

I'm sorry for the drama and the lack of communication. I'm sorry for insults and jabs. I'm sorry for this whole mess. This is my fault for not taking everything into consideration and I apologize for the difficulties we're experiencing.

I'd like... try and reorient the conversation, if possible. I'd like you all to join me in this positive direction of conversation. I ask everyone to remain civil and respective. We're all Pokemon fans here. We all care very much about a franchise that means so much to us and has helped define our lives. I'm glad that's what unites us because, to me, Pokemon has always represented an amazing world full of wonder, love, and adventure.

So, in spirit of what Pokemon means, let's also proceed in love and understanding.


It is probably too late to implement any meaningful system now, so I'd like to move this discussion to focus on next year and what we'd like to do differently.

Yes, I know that a year is far off, yet it probably won't hurt to discuss things now. At the very least, we can share ideas in preparation for what will happen.


I think that there have been a number of suggestions that we can try next year and I'll outline what I've heard. Please feel free to discuss what you'd like to see next year and comment on the ideas.


1. Team Cap

This idea focuses on having a hard or soft cap on the number of members on a team. A hard cap would be a set maximum that doesn't change while a soft cap would raise the maximum based on the number of people participating in the war/number of teams.


2. Bonus Points

Ash originally brought this up and I suggested an alternative. Essentially, smaller teams get more points during the course of the War in comparison to larger teams. Either the points small teams win are multiplied by some ratio, or they receive a set number of points each week.


3. Post-Team Draft System

This method involves members creating teams, then drafting people who sign up to participate in the War to their team. Thus creating equal teams.


4. Pre-Team Draft System

Elysia suggested this idea (though it seems familiar). Essentially, team leaders are selected and they draft members who sign up for the War. The members are asked to get to know each other in the team and to come up with a theme and name they can all agree on.



Obviously there are positives and negatives to each of the ideas. And there are other ideas I didn't list. I welcome all discussion, and I ask that everyone please remain civil during this discussion. Thank you.

[bronislav84]

Team cap should be soft. 10 to start, and raised by 5 each time when all teams have the cap.

I'm for bonus points, but it needs to be counted by the Leaders or tally person. For having less headache for Judges, we should still be giving out 6 points, just that the one doing the tally multiplies the points after if a team is small or not. This needs to be done fairly, so a smaller team is getting similar multiplied counts but not completely ending up leaps and bounds ahead of teams that are getting double or triple normal multiplier-less points.

I'm vehemently against drafts. Harry you and I know how this worked. People don't get on the teams they want, cry, and don't participate. Then there's people who need a certain category, and snipe someone who doesn't want to be on their team when the person is out of refusals. The person HAS to be on that team, and just doesn't participate because they don't like the team.

[WinterVines]

If nobody likes the formal team cap, there can perhaps be some capping in the sections themselves.

1. Limit submissions (# or %) allowed by each team per event (if applicable)

For example, if you have 20 members, only 5 may post in any one section if its a submittable type of event. This would probably not be applicable to RP or URPG.

2. Limit scoring to one person per team

This way, one team doesn't take all the points categories, which allows points to be distributed to other teams regardless of their team size.

---

I was talking to DR the other day and he also brought up splitting some of the bigger teams, but that's probably an unfavorable solution.

The two big issues that we have to try to worry about with all these solutions seem to be:
-Playing with friends (wanting to avoid splitting certain people up)
-Overextending (as in participating in too many sections and becoming stressed/burned out since nobody else available)

---

And please, please, can we avoid the "work harder" statements? They are pretty hurtful to those of us who have a lot going on and can't dedicate all of our time to the forum. I'd really like to see us come to a solution, which will have problems no matter what course, without insulting each other. I'll be honest and say that overall, I feel unwanted here, discouraged from participating in any event other than the one I originated from. It's been more stressful than exciting, and I do get those in-crowd/out-crowd vibes just from reading the thread. But we can find a solution to these issues that are brought up without attacking each other. It may not be this year, and probably won't be, but it's better to address this problem now, while WAR is still young on this particular forum, than wait for it to snowball.

[Pokemon Trainer Sarah]

The only thing that worries me about limiting submissions is how do you choose who gets to submit? Most likely you pick the people you think will win, and then some poor person never gets a chance to participate because they might not be as "good" as others. :( Same kind of thing with the cap and having to reject members in favour of others.

I think at least one time there was a WAR where potential leaders could make up a team and submit it for consideration. Then everyone would vote for which teams they would actually like to have in the WAR. The top x teams were picked to compete and then everyone could pick one of those teams to join. At least that way it's more likely that there will be enough members wanting to join each of the selected teams?

[HKim]

I honestly like the draft, point, and cap ideas. I think they can all work. Even with a few modifications, they could be made more acceptable to most people.

It's not like we haven't done this in previous Wars. We'd simply need to iterate a bit.

[Aberforth]

Just throwing my opinion in there, but I like the Pre-Team draft idea. Perhaps it is just because I don't know that many people around here, but I think it would be a good opportunity to get to know new people. There could always be some people signing up as pairs if they want to be with their friends... :P

[bronislav84]

Pre-draft might work, but members free to be choosing teams after that. I'm still vehemently against all out drafts though. That year with the draft I personally consider a disaster. The voting didn't work out so well. Voting is totally a popularity contest.

[Neo Emolga]

To be honest, I think every method has various pros and cons, and I know most of them we've given a try in one way or another.

There really is no perfect method, but I suppose we can take a different route next time for variance.

[brandon_g]

Well I think proposing that a team can have only a certain number of people competing in a section. I also would like to propose the possibility that a small team of maybe less then 10 people can be given double points for thier small number of people? I think thats only fair and evens out the turf while people can still join where they want. :D

Just my proposals.

-Brandon

Per our skype conversation @HKim here was my suggestion :).

[Felly]

First, I'm going to start off by apologizing for any trouble I may have caused. By no means was I, nor any of my friends from URPG who posted here, looking for some sort of freebie or a larger team. We wanted balance between the larger teams and the smaller teams; we felt outdone by them, and we wanted something done about it. Now that we've gotten the anger out of us, hopefully we can work towards a conclusion to create some balance for next year's WAR and maybe even this year's too!

Of the ideas presented, I think either the idea Harry posted about point bonuses and/or the idea Winter posted about limiting scoring to one person per team would be the best for this year. We can't really do anything about the imbalance of team numbers without ripping teams to shreds, and I don't want to see anyone forced off a team to give us the balance we want; if someone leaves a team and goes to another, it should be of their own free will. I think for the limiting scoring to one person per team thing, it shouldn't be about picking and choosing who's most likely to win but instead allowing all of the members of a team to submit in a category, and then the judge picks the best ones of the ones presented to him/her. Five people could still submit art from Team Trainer as they normally would, but only one of them would get the points, even if all five of them had the top scores. For example, if in art, the judge gives the top five people from Team Trainer a 30/30, a 26/30, a 24/30, a 23/30, and a 21/30, and then someone from Team Magma scores a 19/30 and a person from Phoenix Battalion scores 18/30, the top three places would go to the 30/30, the 19/30, and the 18/30 since only one person from Trainer can claim one of the top three spots, if that makes sense. This way all members of a team can participate and feel like they're contributing, but only one of them is going to be able to get the top three spots in a section. This would obviously be section dependent, so it would work for something like art or writing, but not so much for URPG since the URPG's system is done on the number of wins one receives individually and as a team.

I think Winter's idea with the limited scoring also works because when you look at last year's results in judging, you can see that in some cases like in RP, sprite art, and GCEA, two people from the same team could take one of the top three places. In the current system, if, for example, Phoenix Battalion has 5 people that put in stuff for drawn art and every other team only has one, Phoenix Battalion has 5 chances of getting all three of the top three spaces for that week. Basically, the more people that can enter a given category on a given week from the same team, the odds of that team having more than one member place in the top three increase. Phoenix Battalion gets five chances to place in top three in that example whereas every other team gets only one because Phoenix Battalion had 5 people enter that category and the other teams only had one. If we limit it to where only one person can earn the points for their team, it wouldn't matter if all 21 people from Team Trainer entered drawn art or not because even three of their members placed in the top 3, not all three of those members would earn the points for top three, two others from two different teams would. Hopefully that makes sense, but basically instead of making it a system where the more people you have enter a competition from the same team, the higher the odds of multiple people from the same team placing in the top three, make it a system where the more people you have enter a competition from the same team, the higher the odds of one of them placing into the top three.

In terms of future WAR events, I especially like the pre-team draft selection that Elysia presented and that Harry posted. I think a thought I had earlier was similar to it, but our ideas both stemmed from similar ideas: housing at our schools. Her school does it differently I think, but the way my school does it is you get to pick your top three housing choices and they try to accommodate that as best as they can. The way I was thinking it was different than what Harry said, but team leaders create their teams, and then after a certain date, members sign up to be drafted onto a team based on the top 3 teams they chose when they signed up. This way people are still getting the teams they want, they still get to be with their friends (though not as many as they may have preferred), people get to make new friends, and there's balance in the system in that everyone has an even team. If anyone joined after the initial draft, we could just add them in as we go or figure something out for them.

While I'm for the draft because it still lets people choose while enforcing balance, I think the cap does that too, so long as it's a soft cap. However, with that said, I feel like we may have people who may just wait around for the team they want to join to open up, and then we have unhappy people because if their team doesn't open up, they may feel obligated to join another team and therefore be unhappy about that.

Ultimately, I'm going to be okay with whatever we choose. Whatever creates balance and makes people happy would be the best option in my eyes. I have my preferences on what I'd like to see for that, as stated above, but at the same time, I'm not going to throw a fit if those things aren't chosen. I just don't want to see another incident like this where there's 21 people on one team and then 5 or 6 people on another, and then there's people on those teams of 5 or 6 feeling outclassed and discouraged because they don't feel like they can really do much or have any chance at winning. No one should have to feel bad about joining a certain team, but no one should feel like they stand no chance at winning either. It's not about winning, yes, and we've established that, but at the same time, everyone should be on some sort of equal ground in terms of being able to win the overall event and the individual events because winning does give people a sense of accomplishment (at least most people, maybe not all, I dunno). At the moment, there's not that level ground, but I have faith that we can reach that level ground, if not this year, then next year for sure.