Banija wrote:OOCly, a WBC in our multiverse, by and large, is worth far more than a domestic title ever would be. The WBC is the only competition where the clear and cut best baseball talent in the world is all playing against each other at the same time, whereas IRL that is only true with Major League Baseball. So it makes sense that because of those key differences, we structure this tournament differently than the RL World Baseball Classic(or Olympic baseball) would be structured.
A human arm can only throw so many pitches, so hard, so many times. That basic limit is what the RL WBC and similar tournaments are structured around, nothing to do with prestige. Now, OK, in NS not all the arms are human, and those of Bardney might disagree, too, but we use a scorinator that aims to be essentially "realistic", and our format should reflect that.
Banija wrote:IC Point #2- 30 games plus knockouts are a heavy gameload, potential of 50+ games for whomever wins the competition. However, I think the benefits of the 30 game group stage (aka slightly reducing the inherent randomnness of so few games with a sport as random as baseball) far outweigh this.
Which probably cuts to the core of the point. Repeated objections have been expressed about too much randomness, but randomness is far more intrinsic to baseball than it is to other sports. If a soccer team's center midfielder has a bad game but the rest of the team is still overwhelmingly superior to the opposition, they will still win, at the kind of 90%+ rate that's being advocated here. If a baseball team's pitcher has a bad game, then even if the rest of the team are strong fielders and hitters, they still have a higher chance of losing. Baseball is far more dependent on the performance of one individual -- and thus more prone to randomness.
Banija wrote:Again, I think the logic of international sports RPing being the foundational aspect of this forum outweighs the 'realism' aspect of clubs that mostly exist in the ether. Now, a few of us do RP domestic leagues (Ko-oren, South Newlandia, Cassadaigua come to mind), and many more of us have domestic leagues that exist in the background, but so much of NS Sport would break down if we ended up following the logic of less games because domestic club coaches would hate it. The IFAF is basically dead, but there's no way IRL you'd have a Gridiron World Cup with professionals. Talent imbalance aside, injury risk would never let it happen. But we run with the World Bowl and that's fine. We have a Cup of Harmony that exists as part of the World Cup cycle that likely wouldn't fly IRL for similar reason. But we run it because we value international sports RPing.
That is a reasonable point. I don't disagree international gridiron makes little IC sense.
Banija wrote:Anyways, for me, my objections right now carry the most weight for me personally regarding the bid. I would be much more encouraged about this bid if we adopted a more traditional format for the group stages (30 games- don't need to be straight up three game series) and the KO stages (best of 5 to best of 7 in the final).
Your appeal to tradition falls a little flat. As far as I'm concerned
this is the traditional format.
Super-Llamaland wrote:Hannasea wrote:I'm not aware of any SQIS baseball scorinator. If you have one, send me a copy and I'll give it a test.
Sorry, I meant the Xkoranate baseball scorinator that was used in WBC31. It doesn't produce line scores, but it was much less random than NSFS and could maybe balance out a ten-game group stage more.
I see. I'm not real familiar with that scorinator and I had a memory of it being disfavoured by the community for some reason so didn't consider using it. Having tested it, you're certainly right that it produces vastly less randomness! It's not clear to me this is desirable in a short group stage as it gives lower ranked sides almost no chance of progression.
Super-Llamaland wrote:I don't think we've had a ten-game group stage using the adjusted NSFS formula. Have you run tests of the formula for such a short group stage, and could you share the results with us?
Yes. I ran 120 tests of 10 groups of 6. If there's a way of coding this it's beyond my means so I had to do it manually which limited my sample size and forced me to compromise: instead of increasing maxpoints and RP bonus every day, as would be done in the tournament, I only increased maxpoints and RP bonus 4 times. The teams were:
A - high rank, earning 80% of max bonus every time
B - high rank, earning a minimal bonus, associated with rostering and RPing no further
C - medium rank, earning 80% of max bonus every time
D - medium rank, earning a minimal bonus, associated with rostering and RPing no further
E - unranked, earning 80% of max bonus every time
F- totally unranked
Over the 120 tests of 10 groups:
A achieved an average of 7.8 wins. A achieved an average position in the group of 1.4. A made the playoffs in 88% of groups.
F achieved an average of 1.1 wins. F achieved an average position in the group of 5.6. A made the playoffs in 4% of groups.
The average finishing position flipped B and C.
Of course, 120 is still a very small sample size, but I'm not motivated to undergo substantially larger testing because I in no way believe any numbers I could produce will convince anyone to actually change their position. :)
Which is fair enough because, in part, my attachment to single game series isn't statistical, it's emotional. I remember how excited I was when I won my game against Liventia in my second WBC. Having that accomplishment reduced to the statistical noise of winning one-third of a series would never have had the same impact.
Super-Llamaland wrote:More generally, what was the thought process behind checking whether the formula could support a ten-game group stage?
The measure of a successful tournament is whether it produces a good roleplaying environment. For all the hand-wringing over there being "too much roleplaying" in modern NSS, at least in WBC terms that does not hold up and -- with WBC50 something of an outlier for historic reasons -- there's ample evidence that older, single game tournaments were just as well RPed, often RPed to a much greater volume, than some modern tournaments featuring series. Amount of randomness was
not the primary consideration in any case; the factors Ko-oren mentioned earlier were.
Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2021 10:54 am
), and I feel like if they had been scored three games at a time, a lot of the excitement would have been sucked out.