with a special fall-out-and-get-the-bits-on-the-floor
Tales Spin introductory bait session.
Ed. Scott Emery yobbo@shell.portal.com
Contents of this issue:**********************************************************************Letter FROM the editor: Format changes and resolutions.
Pontification: Damien Hurrel's Excellent Suggestions
Observation: SPARF Product review
Words of Wisdom: Skill-full speech
Forfeiting
Tales Spin Bait: Rust vs. Experience
Outclassed?
First off, let me apologise for dropping the TOW last season when things got busy for me. I found it very difficult to get back into the saddle after falling off that particular horse. I don't know how Steve was able to put out such high quality/high volume work on a regular basis. I review those early issues with increased respect. If you are a new manager, you should review them as well. Send "help" on the subject line of email to munch and follow the instructions returned to receive back issues of TOW. I plan to add to that corpus on a regular basis, but in a slightly different style.
In order to help me keep my resolution, I am going to change the TOW format to suit my style and hopefully the changing face of SPARF as well. I will assume that most everyone has a year or more of SPARF under their belt and/or have availed themselves of the ignorance and wisdom of past issues of TOW. This will enable me produce a telegraphic TOW easier to read and produce. I hope that this will meet with the communities needs.
Finally, I resolve to commit to a published schedule.
I have quite a bit of venerable business to cover in this
issue, so it should be much larger than issues to follow.
Pontification: Damien Hurrel's Excellent Suggestions
Damien Hurrel sent this to me in November of last year, but if I had
a sense of shame I wouldn't be starting this magazine up again.
From dwhurrel@teaching.cs.adelaide.edu.au
I don't know where this belongs, whether it's ponification or what, but anyway:
As a new manager, I have some suggestions as to what can be improved about the
league, and although a 4 game winning streak recently came to an end against
those bastards from darwin, I will put forward myt philosophy as to what
constitutes a good football team (this is not necessarily a good sparf team)
The first thing I would introduce, before any other player attributes, are
pre-season trial games. For a new manager, It is essentially a game of chance
and guesswork when trying to make your first lineup, not really knowing
whether the strategy you have worked out will succeed (if indeed you have a
strategy) Being able to play a couple of games against established opponents
would be a huge help.
Having read the discussions in TOW (all the ones I could get, anyway) about
new player attributes, I would like to contribute my $0.05 to the discussion.
Instead of aptitude, how about we try to describe the player physically:
height and speed. Height is related to taking good marks, ball-ups, and to a
certain extent, defense (punching from behind to spoil a mark etc) and speed
assists with getting good kicks, making good position, and scrambling well.
Height and speed are generally, although not always, approximately inversely
proportional, so smaller players are almost always faster then their bigger
counterparts, and fast tall full-forwards are almost unstoppable. Given a
scale of 1-10 for height and speed, these are how the different
positions would line up.
1 ) 1 )
2 )Rovers, wingmen, 2 )No-one if you can avoid it,
3 )Pocket and flank 3 )Ruckmen are usually fairly
4 )Players 4 )slow, and some defenders tend
)to be slow as well
5 ) 5 )
6 )Ruckrovers, half-forwards 6 )Everyone else
7 )Half-backs, centre 7 )
8 ) 8 )
9 )Ruckmen, Full forward, 9 )Rovers, centre, Full Forward
10 )Full back 10 )
The most important set are the tall Speed is a quality needed by small
players: RKM FF FB. The others groups players to overcome taller opponents.
are less well-defined the rover will be the fastest player
on the team.
The ideal team would consist of:
The effective skills would thus be:
Or something similar.
The introduction of these factors would mean that the interchange rules would
need to be modified. The best way to do this would be to specify a second ruck
division: 3 players out of the selected 20 who would replace the RKM, ROV, and
RKR in the event of an injury to one of those players, with one of the
interchange players filling the place thus vacated.
Well, what do you think? Are additional attributes going to make playing the
game increasingly difficult, or do we need them to make the game more
realistic?
Hmmm... now then, what was next? Oh yes, rawstats. What the hell do they mean?
I find them only slightly more useful than the scouting report, and far less
believeble. Am I seriously supposed to believe that my Ruckman took only 2
marks in the entire game? A ruckman should take at least 10 marks around the
ground. Also, can we find out how many effective kicks and handballs each
player makes, and how many hit-outs the ruckmen get each? I know this will
increase the size of the rawstats file immensely, so perhaps we can divide it
up, game by game, with the whole huge file also available. Also, why do my
interchange players never get mentioned in the rawstats file? Don't they
actually play a part in the game, so I can put my absolutely worst, most
terrible player in that spot rather than risk a good player getting injured,
since they don't appear to have any influence on the game?
Now then, Football philosophy:
I believe that most of the suggested tactics, like longball and the Hourglass
strategy are flawed. Longball means that your goalscorers are bombing away at
the extreme end of their range, which will inevitably result in more misses and
behinds: the two factors which I believe cost me the two games I have lost this
season. The Hourglass theory, putting all your best players at either end of
the field, with crappy plyers across the centre, will result in your opponents
centreline belting the crap out of your centres, so that the ball will never
get to your goalscorers. IMHO, The only way to play Football is to have an
overall good team, with emphasis on certain skills for each line of players.
Mark and Scramble for forwards, scramble and defense for centres, kick and
defense for backs. However, I believe that many teams (including my own) would
benefit from having forwards who could play better defensive footy, backs who
can take marks etc. It is this sort of team I would back for the SPARF cup.
But then, I'm only 4 and 2. Ask someone who is 6 and 0
Well, that's my rave. Comments welcome. Flames to /dev/nul. :-)
Damien Hurrell
From: yobbo@shell.portal.com (Tales of Woe)
I am getting off my duff to commit another TOW to press... So I
dusted off your article and read it (blush), I should have read it a while
ago...
You are are absolutely right about the Hourglass strategy... It has
been consigned to the ash heap of insanity... I attribute my recent miraculous
win against the Cattle to his use of this strategy and his dependance on
mobiles to save the day... (and a favorable RNG).
I like your suggestion about a constant attribute being added to
"personalize" a player... It has a great effect when skills are low which
decreases as one goes up the scale... The down side is that players could
effectively have skills greater than 100... well, maybe that isn't such
a big problem... On the other hand, it doesn't quite personalize players
in a non-linear fashion... They still look like "vessels to pour skill
levels into".
In defense of Van Boughner's Longball, I would like to point out
that it is a reasonable reaction to an opponent with *three* star defenders
hanging out around the posts. (and correspondingly three weak defenders
hanging toward the middle) When it was a suprise strategy, it gained him
many games... I find it hard to argue with that. Now that it is fairly
well known, Most teams have four or five really good defenders...
Rawstats is being replaced by a game description code which will
enable you to generate your own statistics, and recreate the entire game!
Scott Emery
yobbo@shell.portal.com
PS I didn't mean to harsh the Cattle so severely... They had every reason
for overconfidence, I lost to the Redwoods (who had a worse record) and
three teams from the middle of the pack... They outpoint me in most positions
(especially the mobile slots, where they STOMP me). The more I play SPARF
the more I realize that I really don't know what is going on...
PPS There is an observed 30 point variance in match scores... on repeated
plays of the same match the scores can vary by as much as 30 points. I feel
that that balance was swinging wildly in my favor for the match in question.
Observation: SPARF Product review
>From sapolsky@cmgm.stanford.edu Wed Mar 2 19:20:23 1994
This looks great, but there are some bits of data that I don't understand,
even after rereading
Tales of Woe: Volume III, issue 2 (which is where the
expanded scouting reports by Scott first appeared). In particular, what does
the "d#" appearing before some of the 4 scouting stats mean, and what do the
stats mean for the letters "g" "m" "w" "p" appearing after the stats
(sometimes followed by numbers)? I suspect g=goals & m=marks, but it's not
clear which of the two players at a fixed position it refers to, and I'm
stymied by the "w" and the "p".
Thanks for the explanation in advance.
Ron
H.S.A.
From: Livermore Rowdy Yobbos
The statistics are kept for the Offensive side in the pockets and
halves... The marks for the middles are tallied next to their names.
You may rightly point out that this method may miss some statistics.
Occasionally a middle takes a pot-shot at the goal. I don't know whether marks
made by a defender are counted as marks or not... I have lying around here
a perl script written by Evan Harris of the Dingoes which gives a fuller
accounting of the field. Also, my program's source (as well as his script)
is free for the asking... Any modifications you want to make to *my* program
are perfectly acceptable (I can't speak for Evan, naturally). Please
send me a copy of your mods so I can decide whether to incorporate
them into the released source.
Please reply if you would wish the latest copy (unmodified for a
long time I am afraid) of the Sparf Pretty Printer source. The best source
for Evan's Perl script is Evan... Evan has included "percentage ranges"
into his perl script (as described in TOW vol III), which can be veery
interesting.
Scott Emery
yobbo@shell.portal.com
PS If you go for this computer-assisted SPARF sort of thing... Take a look
at abaker's (Angels (gold) manager) dosparf program as well... I use it
more often than I use the program I wrote myself!
From: Mel Nicholson (Da' Commish)
>ive read the TOW and i have some -serious- question concerning the
Swell. This is cc:ed to the yobbo's so he can include it in TOW.
(wouldn't be fair to give out information to just one guy)
>1 - according to the 2 equations(i wont repeat here, you know what they
Read more closely. You'll find that "Offense" and "Defense" in the
context of that article refer to "the team that has the ball, or who
recently handpass/fullpass -ed it. A Fullback might be on defense when
the Full Forward charges to try to shoot on goal, but then if his superior
defense allows him to block the kick, and he manages to pick it up, then
he is now on offense (on the team with the ball) and the offensive side of
the table applies --- where his offence must outwit the Full Forward's
defensive skills. The roles reverse as the ball changes hands.
>2 - i didnt know that scramble is -that- important in your offense. thats why
Yes. Scramble *is* important to the game. As the rules state, the skills
are (roughly) balanced so a point of any given skill should have roughly
the same value overall (though as TOW has often pointed out, a point of
skill may give a better return in the correct place). If your forwards
don't have enough scramble to perform up to scratch, the solution is not
to change the game to fit your team, but your team to fit the game.
As for the comment "marking should be more important in this case" I can
only point out that for making marks, mark is the ONLY skill which is
relevant (well, aside from modifiers which have to do with the position
before the ball comes down and how good the kick was to begin with).
The idea that a skill should be modified based on POSITION doesn't work.
The skill required is based on what is being done, not who is doing it.
A loose ball takes roughly the same talent to grab no matter who is
trying to grab it or where they are on the field. Certain skills are
used more in certain positions not because of a special case in the code
but because the events which use those skills happen more often there.
I won't go into much depth on whether Two Ton Tony Lockett does or doesn't
scramble for loose balls... The point is that when the ball is on the
ground, SOMEONE has to scramble for it, and if that someone isn't on
your team, I'm sure your opponents will be happy to grab it instead.
Mel
From: mel@nca.com (Mel Nicholson, Da' Commish)
If you need to forfeit, send me mail saying that you forfeit, or munch will
try to put a team on the field. I judge voluntary forfeits on a per case
basis, but understand that if you can't replace those injuries (at least
with bodies, if not players) you'll prefer to rather than put recovering guys
on the field.
Mel
Tales Spin Bait: Rust vs. Experience
Just for the record, I read the TOW stuff from the pre-season
issue, and would just like to give you my feedback on a couple of
issues. I think Rust/Experience factors are an excellent idea;
however, I think only one medium should be used. One takes away
points for not playing, the other gives points for playing.
Relative to the actual skill of the player they both do the same
thing, however the net effect is to double (Well, not exactly, but
the idea is there) the effect of sitting out players. If to pick
between the two, I think rust is the better idea. Players already
improve there skills during the game, thus this is already indirect
experience. Perhaps if this in game improvement was done in
conjuction with the new aptitude ratings.... just some passing
thoughts...
Garth
Garth Werner
crip@micor.ocunix.on.ca
Tales Spin Bait: Outclassed?
From: timothy@statsun.stat.ColoState.EDU (Timothy Cree) say, this is Tim Cree of the Buffalo Knights, and I was
wondering...If the opposing team has a player who will outclass
anyone i put of to stop them, is it better to place my best
player in the lineup against them and take my chances that i can
luck out, or should i abandon the position and put my worst player
against his best, since he's likely going to win anyway, and make
up for it by putting my good players with his weaker ones.
which TOW would this be in, if it is? I have had little
success with either strategy, so I am wondering if there is any
clearcut answer or preferred process that all of the Gold teams use.
thanks for any help i can get,
tim
-----------------------------------------
Today random word is : moist
-Timinator
Until Next Time,
Scott Emery
Subject: Article
To: yobbo@shell.portal.com (Tales Of Woe)
HEIGHT SPEED
Manager, Wallamallo
dwhurrel@teaching.cs.adelaide.edu.au
Subject: Off my duff...
Subject: WBRG Additional Junk
Subject: Re: WBRG Additional Junk
Words of Wisdom: Skill-full speech
Subject: Re: TOW comments
>offense-defense formulae discussed there.
>are since you put them there), the guys in defense only have their defense
>and marking skills counted. how about kicking and scramble??? are they
>totally irrelevant?
>my forward line, with its superior overall skills, dont perform as well as
>they should. i suggest that scramble should only be applied to the pocket/
>flank guys, as is the case in real AFL. guys like lockett certainly do NOT
>bow down and -scramble- for the ball. they are full forwards and they take
>big marks. marking should definitely be much more important in this case.
Words of Wisdom: Forfeiting
Subject: Re: Forfeit
Subject: q
These opinions are mine, and my friends, my school's and
my employers. I will only work with those in total agreement
with me 24 hours a day, seven days a week and if you don't
share my opinion, you can take it up with them.
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