Ideas For Fantasy Draft Match Threads (New Ways Of Playing Out Matches)

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Just skimmed through the link on the OP, I think the way they used rankings is much better than scheduling matches.

For me, between doing one here and a few in the Newbie forum, the best part has always been picking players, particularly when you have to try to fit in to different categories, or react to others taking your players, and building a side.

The matches usually end up being a waste because people tend to either vote for names. The rating of weaker picks also goes mental during these, statements like 'Candela and Zidane would destroy Gary Kelly down the wing' will have a huge influence on a result. In this example, Gary Kelly is rendered useless, a non-entity, but over a season, and/or placed in certain systems, these types of player have been and would be good players to have.

So, put each team into one thread and making a massive poll, or as in the original link, create criteria and assign points, rating each team, highest amount wins.
 
Pat_Mustard said:
As a cheerleader rather than a manager, I guess its not really my concern, but its fair to say both of the last two drafts have lost momentum due to multiple delays. Maybe its time to consider cutting the participants (if necessary) and making it mandatory to have an assistant manager? The crux being that if real life stops the manager making a pick/submitting tactics/participating in the match thread, his assistant has to step in and make the decisions without consultation, or else the opponent gets a bye.

So basically, stricter deadlines regarding the drafting but more specifically the scheduling of matches.
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I very much agree. Make sure whoever is signing up has sufficient amount of times in the coming weeks. We shouldn't be needing to have deadlines for submitting tactics but it has come to that, and we don't want to start handing out byes too often either.

Perhaps, the draft mod can come up with a template based on most of the draft write ups we've seen and it can be used uniformly.

If not that, then simply set a deadline for submitting the formation graphic. A lot of formations are straight forward and write ups include a lot of obvious stuff, so in a case like that we can go ahead with the formation for the match and the manager can fill up the tactics later. Or just mention briefly what is in particular not obvious from the graphic. If you don't have that much time as well, then probably it wasn't a good idea signing up.

It's a big enough issue imo and the fact that last draft's final didn't even happen is not really ideal.
 
BorisDeLeFora said:
Just skimmed through the link on the OP, I think the way they used rankings is much better than scheduling matches.

For me, between doing one here and a few in the Newbie forum, the best part has always been picking players, particularly when you have to try to fit in to different categories, or react to others taking your players, and building a side.

The matches usually end up being a waste because people tend to either vote for names. The rating of weaker picks also goes mental during these, statements like 'Candela and Zidane would destroy Gary Kelly down the wing' will have a huge influence on a result. In this example, Gary Kelly is rendered useless, a non-entity, but over a season, and/or placed in certain systems, these types of player have been and would be good players to have.

So, put each team into one thread and making a massive poll, or as in the original link, create criteria and assign points, rating each team, highest amount wins.
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Don't quite mind that, but bear in mind, this will see a lot more delays. I've been in a few where rankings were used and if someone's being lazy to submit a one para tactic, he'd be a lot lazier to submit a full ranking list which really is a tedious task. Ranking 16 teams in one go, so many comparisons to be made. You recognize the clear cut 4-5 great ones and few that don't appeal to you but after that it's really arbitary , the order that is. Delays is surely a major issue in these and you eliminate the tournament which a lot including me enjoy if done proper and without delays. Ranking is the reward for the initial draft, and it does not lie as the result would be a total of 16 ranking cards.

We can have both, no problem with that. Have a ranking card, with a certain deadline, and declare one winner there, and then have the tournament as per the regular norms in here. You won't be surprised top ranked getting out in 1v1s.
 
I think there are ways to make it more interesting. We could use a ranking system to somehow make the matches more competitive which I think is what it is missing.

*Make one top league with 8 people and one 2nd league with 8 people. The 2 finalists in the lower league moves up to the top league and we could have elimination in the top league for who gets pushed out.

I think people would take it more serious like this and people would put in the basic effort of putting forth tactics and picks in time and pulling out would be less common.
 
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We could sort the groups initially by just having a multiple chose poll. The 8 with the highest amounts of votes by other managers/draft "enthusiasts" moves in to league one with league two being open.
 
Let's have a 64 team knockout competition with group stages, top two teams move on to a knockout round...seedings, two legged ties.

Or not. But I'm in for whatever :)
 
Aldo said:
I very much agree. Make sure whoever is signing up has sufficient amount of times in the coming weeks. We shouldn't be needing to have deadlines for submitting tactics but it has come to that, and we don't want to start handing out byes too often either.

Perhaps, the draft mod can come up with a template based on most of the draft write ups we've seen and it can be used uniformly.

If not that, then simply set a deadline for submitting the formation graphic. A lot of formations are straight forward and write ups include a lot of obvious stuff, so in a case like that we can go ahead with the formation for the match and the manager can fill up the tactics later. Or just mention briefly what is in particular not obvious from the graphic. If you don't have that much time as well, then probably it wasn't a good idea signing up.

It's a big enough issue imo and the fact that last draft's final didn't even happen is not really ideal.
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True. The default formation graphic should be submitted before the draw takes place for the matches. If the manager can't be around for their match or just doesn't want to submit a match-specific set of tactics then the match can carry on. You'd hope the more thorough managers on average get rewarded in the voting, or else it might be time to do away with the match format all together as Boris proposed.

The other thing is that player write ups could be made optional. In my glorious one match draft managerial career they took up far more time than the tactics, and I'm virtually certain that no more than 2 people actually read them. Its slightly different in an all-time draft, but in the more typical draft noone needs to read a blurb about Lionel Messi. We all know what he can do.
 
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Hm. The way I see it one out of two is necessary:

Either we seriously cut down on the amount of big names/vote pullers. I mean drastically so. No Messis, Ronaldos, Maldinis...we all know who they are and pretty much everything which can be said about them has been said.

OR

We seriously alter the format of the matches/match threads. Introduce something radically new there.

The problem with the latter is that before you know it, you've gone and overcomplicated things - and it just becomes ridiculous. The very basic idea (it can be modified in all sorts of ways) of a more complex poll, might be a good place to start.
 
BorisDeLeFora said:
The rating of weaker picks also goes mental during these, statements like 'Candela and Zidane would destroy Gary Kelly down the wing' will have a huge influence on a result. In this example, Gary Kelly is rendered useless, a non-entity, but over a season, and/or placed in certain systems, these types of player have been and would be good players to have.
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Aye, often those comments are really extreme.

A lot of the discussion effectively becomes just rating the players out of 10 with little thought into the actual balance of the side or how the players would perform in that set up. One problem with this kind of thinking is what you suggested - you get really extreme comments based on a '6' being against a '9'. If Bale is up against Maldini for instance, there is no point even mentioning that battle - it's pointless. The majority approach is to view it as a dead rubber, Bale can do nothing and he might as well not be on the pitch. Not only will Maldini keep him in his pocket all game, but you can be damn sure he'll help out offensively as well (why wouldn't he, when he only has Bale to watch over). This is frankly ridiculous and I say that as a huge Maldini fan. Matches never panned out that way and inferior opponents than Bale would cause him problems. Combine that with some good service - let's say the team has Scholes in midfield - and you can be sure that Bale running down the wing to latch onto those Scholes passes would have Maldini's work cut out.

That's not because Bale is anywhere near as good as Maldini, but it's due to the combination of Bale being extremely fast and Scholes being an extremely good passer. So it's a combination that makes sense and a lot of the time with those types of attacks there ain't much the defender can do to stop it - once the pass is made and its a sprint to latch onto that ball it doesn't matter how great Maldini was. It's Scholes who needed to be stopped in this scenario not Bale, but there's no way the voting would reflect that.
 
Yes - exactly right. People tend to break the match down in a certain way - and it nearly always* comes down to "battles" which have little to do with what would actually happen in a real football match. And this type of argument may easily be employed by people who know better too; they know very well that it's over-simplified but they resort to it anyway because it's more likely to swing the vote. I'm sure I've argued that way myself - it practically goes with the territory.

So, maybe we need to do something about the territory, i.e. the format/context in which the discussions take place.

* Or too often, at least.
 
Theon said:
Aye, often those comments are really extreme.

A lot of the discussion effectively becomes just rating the players out of 10 with little thought into the actual balance of the side or how the players would perform in that set up. One problem with this kind of thinking is what you suggested - you get really extreme comments based on a '6' being against a '9'. If Bale is up against Maldini for instance, there is no point even mentioning that battle - it's pointless. The majority approach is to view it as a dead rubber, Bale can do nothing and he might as well not be on the pitch. Not only will Maldini keep him in his pocket all game, but you can be damn sure he'll help out offensively as well (why wouldn't he, when he only has Bale to watch over). This is frankly ridiculous and I say that as a huge Maldini fan. Matches never panned out that way and inferior opponents than Bale would cause him problems. Combine that with some good service - let's say the team has Scholes in midfield - and you can be sure that Bale running down the wing to latch onto those Scholes passes would have Maldini's work cut out.

That's not because Bale is anywhere near as good as Maldini, but it's due to the combination of Bale being extremely fast and Scholes being an extremely good passer. So it's a combination that makes sense and a lot of the time with those types of attacks there ain't much the defender can do to stop it - once the pass is made and its a sprint to latch onto that ball it doesn't matter how great Maldini was. It's Scholes who needed to be stopped in this scenario not Bale, but there's no way the voting would reflect that.
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Chesterlestreet said:
Yes - exactly right. People tend to break the match down in a certain way - and it nearly always* comes down to "battles" which have little to do with what would actually happen in a real football match. And this type of argument may easily be employed by people who know better too; they know very well that it's over-simplified but they resort to it anyway because it's more likely to swing the vote. I'm sure I've argued that way myself - it practically goes with the territory.

So, maybe we need to do something about the territory, i.e. the format/context in which the discussions take place.

* Or too often, at least.
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As much as I agree, I don't think anything can be done about this. Scan voters don't comment on how they read a match and we can count on playing (and following) managers to analyse this a bit better or at least argue about their view.

The only way out is the have playing managers votes count x 2 to give a weighting to informed opinions. Scan voters may be knowledgeable, but unless they choose to display it, it will be counted as any other scan vote
 
I wonder if we're just trying to reinvent the wheel here? These drafts are getting more popular if anything, yet we're unhappy about them. To an extent, we might just need to accept that its inherently unsatisfactory to create all these great teams and only be able to imagine the outcomes. The match outcomes will never lead to agreement.

^ I say this, but I'm interested in what you lads propose as a solution. Personally, I think things have went in cycles anyway. Initially a match might be judged on who has the best players, then we have a tumescent wave of matches where managers claim to have more players 'winning the midfield battle' whilst strenuously denying that they're outnumbered elsewhere, then we focus on a great winger vs a weak link full back, then its whether a formation suits the players.

None of them are entirely satisfactory, but the best matches have a manager shaping the flow of the debate (not just about their own match but about future ones), and ideally altering the consesnus about certain players.
 
I wanted to wait till after the final, but seeing the discussions, I'll post the mechanics I've come up for the upcoming reality draft:

The Reality Draft:

Theme: 16 managers fight for title in a snake draft with some real life hurdles thrown in.

Overall Rules:
O1 - All players born on or after 01-Jan-1950 and on or before 01-Jan-1985 are eligible, excepting those covered in rule O2 and M10.
O2 - Preliminary round where each manager picks one GOAT who will be excluded from picking for this draft.
O3 - One reinforcement player per round excepting R3 below.

Draft Boss Rules:
B1 - All matches will be for 24 hrs
B2 - All draft picks will be on 12 hr intervals. More time can be granted on Boss's sole discretion (in case of quick picks).
B3 - No Assistant Managers. It wastes more time. But non-playing members can act as a 'scout' recommending players. Manager have the only say in teams. Scouts cannot vote for manager's games.
B4 - Playing managers vote count twice. Please honour the code and avoid tactical voting.
B5 - Once posted, the pick stands. No changing. Take care before you post.

Theme of Draft (Reality) Rules:
T1 - Each manager will nominate 3 players for DoF Interference Pools (one each of forward, midfielder, defender) + 1 Legacy Pool in order snake order. This will be randomized and awarded at specific pick rounds during drafting.
T2 - All DoF and Legacy players MUST play in Round 1. Only exception is player is covered in R5 below.
T3 - RiOFL: For Quarter Finals, one random player from winning managers Round 1 playing 11 will 'forget his drug test and get suspended' thereby not being available for Quarter Finals. Two reinforcement picks to be available from loser pools.
T4 - For Semi Finals, one random player from winning managers Quarter Finals playing 11 will be 'injured' and not available for Semi Finals. Two reinforcement picks to be available from loser pools. The player suspended in Round 1 will now be available.
T5 - Refer Method of Drafting.


Method of Drafting:
M1 - The Legacy pool will be randomized and one player awarded to each manager.
M2 - Managers pick Player 2
M3 - DoF Interference Midfielder Pool will be randomized and one player awarded to each manager.
M4 - Managers pick Player 4
M5 - DoF Interference Forward Pool will be randomized and one player awarded to each manager.
M6 - Managers pick Player 6
M7 - Managers pick Player 7
T5 - Tevezobola Strikes: One of players picked till now decides he does not like you and goes AWOL to Argentina.
M8 - Managers pick Player 8
M9 - Managers pick Player 9
M10 - Promoting Youth. Recruit a player (not GK) born on or after 01-Jan-1990. Must play in Round 1.
M11 - Managers pick Player 11
M12 - Managers pick Player 12
M13 - Managers pick Player 13

Advantage Rules (Not Mandatory):
A1 - Any team using WM (2-3-3-2) or MW (3-2-2-3) for Round 1 will be awarded three bonus votes.
A2 - Any team not using 3-5-2 or 4-4-2 Diamond will be awarded two bonus votes in Quarter Finals.
A3 - Any team not using 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 will be awarded two bonus votes in Semi Finals.
 
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I like this.

Especially the Tevezobola round.

I'd suggest replacing 4-4-2 with 4-3-3 for A2.

Re: the legacy pool - what you propose is that each manager selects one GOAT type player they want to block (eliminate from the draft) and then - once 16 GOATs have been eliminated - one similar type player they want to nominate for the legacy pool. Is that correct?
 
Skizzo said:
Let's have a 64 team knockout competition with group stages, top two teams move on to a knockout round...seedings, two legged ties.

Or not. But I'm in for whatever :)
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We should also have preliminary rounds in the Newbies, laced with match fixing and high stakes gambling.

I'm up for EAP's draft.
 
Chesterlestreet said:
I like this.

Especially the Tevezobola round.

I'd suggest replacing 4-4-2 with 4-3-3 for A2.

Re: the legacy pool - what you propose is that each manager selects one GOAT type player they want to block (eliminate from the draft) and then - once 16 GOATs have been eliminated - one similar type player they want to nominate for the legacy pool. Is that correct?
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Done with 4-3-3.

No, the Legacy Pool is meant to be a good but not great player who has been recruited by your predecessor and you are stuck with him. He is definitely not a sheep, yet not a first choice for Draft games. I want to make a pool of players like Carrick, Kuyt, Hargreaves etc for this.
 
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Edgar Allan Pillow said:
Done with 4-3-3.

No, the Legacy Pool is meant to be a good but not great player who has been recruited by your predecessor and you are stuck with him. He is definitely not a sheep, yet not a first choice for Draft games. I want to make a pool of players like Carrick, Kuyt, Hargreaves etc for this.
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Sounds fair - but I'm still not sure how this pool is supposed to be formed. Could ya explain it further?
 
i suggested something a while back, on the lines of voters being allowed to post a score-line rather than just who they think will win, as it gives scopes for a draw, and also for the difference between a 1-0 and 5-0. also could allow for proper group stage matches
 
sajeev said:
i suggested something a while back, on the lines of voters being allowed to post a score-line rather than just who they think will win, as it gives scopes for a draw, and also for the difference between a 1-0 and 5-0. also could allow for proper group stage matches
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I really like this. It needs some work though. How to rate a 1-0 against a 4-3 victory?

Would it be better to give weighting to goal difference? 1 GD have 1 point 2-3 GD have 2 points and anything more goals have 3 points, perhaps?
 
0-0, 1-1, 2-2, 1-0, 2-1, 2-0, 0-1, 1-2, 0-2, 3-2, 2-3.

For instance. That should cover most scenarios (2-0 means an obvious win - anything from a convincing performance to a mauling; 3-2 means a crazy goal fest).
 
Edgar, I'd specify T6 clearly - VERY clearly. I can guarantee that even after the scandals in the present draft, someone will find a way to raise hell over this again unless the rule is 100% unambiguous. Doesn't matter what the rule is as long as it isn't possible to interpret it creatively at all. Just my tuppence.
 
Chesterlestreet said:
Edgar, I'd specify T6 clearly - VERY clearly. I can guarantee that even after the scandals in the present draft, someone will find a way to raise hell over this again unless the rule is 100% unambiguous. Doesn't matter what the rule is as long as it isn't possible to interpret it creatively at all. Just my tuppence.
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Some help? How would you word it?
 
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