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
Subject: Article
To: yobbo@shell.portal.com (Tales Of Woe)
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.
HEIGHT SPEED1 ) 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
Manager, Wallamallo
dwhurrel@teaching.cs.adelaide.edu.au
From: yobbo@shell.portal.com (Tales of Woe)
Subject: Off my duff...
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
Subject: WBRG Additional Junk
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
Subject: Re: WBRG Additional Junk
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)
Subject: Re: TOW comments
>ive read the TOW and i have some -serious- question concerning the
>offense-defense formulae discussed there.
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
>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?
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
>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.
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)
Subject: Re: Forfeit
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)
Subject: q
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
-----------------------------------------
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.
Today random word is : moist
-Timinator
-----------------------------------------
Until Next Time, Scott Emery