Some Points About Points To Get Me Some Points

[garbageman]

Some Points About Points To Get Me Some Points
A Garbageman Production


In one of the later Town Hall questions, @Black Superman asked for suggestions about what we could change about PBSL (or about a draft prospect we liked, but I'm 62-20. It'll be a cold day in hell before I pay attention to a draft file where I have no chance at a weak green or even a yellow/yellow point guard). So, limited to the first question, I decided to suggest doing away with a part of the game that I don't much care for: training.

Now, I thought this would be met with the same level of resistance as a reasonable trade offer to the Nets. Training has become a hugely popular part of the game since @WigNosy restructured the training system to be more accessible and half the GMs here weren't around in the days before training was a thing that made any sense to do. Furthermore, back in the day, people were more able or willing to save points. Right now, there are a lot of GMs who won't let their points banks into the double digits past either training deadline.

To my surprise, people weren't wholly opposed. As much as people love beefing up their players, they seemed intrigued by the possibility that this could level the playing field somewhat for a number of reasons:

1. With training (like with all things that are point-driven), more points should equate to a better team. The more things that rely on points, the more of an advantage GMs who compete in every single points grab get. While I do think people should be rewarded for participation, the more outlets we have for points to improve teams, the more of a necessary component absolute participation plays in the league. You can't really sit back and just play the game to play the game if you want to compete.

2. Due to the necessary functions of being a commissioner, or even an admin, the folks who are running this have their eyes on player pages with slightly more info than can be gleaned from the website. While this is nowhere near as outsized an advantage as I thought it was before I joined the commissioning team, it's an advantage nonetheless, and getting rid of training would reduce that advantage, putting player gains more in the hands of TC luck than player building.

In any case, there are at least three components to being successful in PBSL that need to be balanced somehow: Luck, Skill, and Participation. You don't win a championship without at least two of these in any given season (with a few notable exceptions here and there), and oftentimes, without all three.

Luck is theoretically the most even playing field, but it has a pretty huge problem. People have been historically opposed to bad luck. That means that voters have routinely voted for measures that allow things like more accessible player protection with insurance and GMs have spent points on training. People only want one kind of luck: good luck. But if we eliminate bad luck wherever possible, then we're left with skill and participation.

I think everyone wants to win a championship, and ideally, they want to be able to credit that more to skill than luck. But in this game, skill has a ceiling that half of the GMs have hit, and the only way to maximize the use of skill is through more participation. I think I've talked in a circle now, so here are things that people do to earn points, the things they spend points on, and what those things add to the league. Now, I'm going to skip over the first point and start with the things we spend points on because that is a finite number of things:

1. Training - I talked about this above, so we know what training is. People like it because it helps GMs build their players, but this really is the most lopsided of all point expenditures. It allows those who participate more to get better faster and those who are more skilled with how the game works to get better faster and more efficiently. In it's defense, it's fun and adds a somewhat strategic element to the game. Right now, GMs can spend as many points as they want on training. Maybe we pare down what can be trained (like more restrictions, cost, or even straight up bans on athleticism training?)

2. Tax - I think the tax system here is great. It takes some time to understand how to work with, but it really does check and balance teams from going on endless runs without consequence. The only way to get rid of it would be to institute a hard cap, which (if possible) would greatly change how many aspects of this game worked. That'd be kind of exciting to me, but I feel like people wouldn't enjoy how easy it would be to lose players. I think a hard cap would cap strategy in an area where nobody has an advantage in either skill or participation. Thus, I think having a tax system that lets teams compete extra hard for a couple seasons but have to get out in time to avoid tax jail is one of the greatest checks and balances in the game.

3. Extra player insurance - Right now, we allow 3 players to be insured for free and charge 15 points for extra insurances. Before we had free insurance, more young players would get irreparably nerfed. Now, it's almost unheard of for a blue potential player under 27 to get hit without being restored. Hell, there are always a couple teams a year who have to throw insurance on a yellow potential player just because they have nobody else to spend it on. While extra player insurance is great if you never want anything bad to happen to you, I think insuring players should have to be a decision. I still stand by liking it better when we had to pay for all insurance. I think right now, everyone has the idea that they can build a team around 3 younger guys because that's who you're going to insure for free. If every insurance costs the same, every insurance decision weighs the same. Teams will have to decide not only who to build a team around, but how many players are worth spendng points on.

4. Trades - You can send up to 10 points in a trade, and I think the value of points has increased significantly in the player training era. If we do take away several avenues to spend points without limiting how many points can be earned, points won't be worth much in trades once again. The sim-conomy must have some kind of balance. We did talk about going no limit with the amount of points someone could send in a trade. That would be pure mayhem. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued by this.


So what are the ways to earn points, and are they good?

1. Points for accomplishing things in the season: These are things like leading in statistical categories, averaging double-doubles, making all league or all star teams. For the most part, it's points for having a good team. We don't do financial things like setting ticket prices and that aspect of the game, so this is the equivalent. If you put together a winning team in a big market, there are benefits that your team gets in reality (or at least you as an owner get). I think it's important to keep these points because they're directly related to playing the game. However, if the balance of points you can get comes too much from being good, it turns into a rich get richer situation, so other points need to be examined relative to this.

2. Media -- So, there are a few different types of media. The most OG of these is an article. No matter how good or bad your article is, it's really just a word count thing, and while there's no fairer way to do it, that leads to a mixed bag of results. There are articles that I think help the league more than others and articles that are really only for fun. They take a lot of time to put together (especially for a good one), and quality is only barely rewarded.

Other than articles, there are podcasts, which I think are easier to produce as long as you have the knowhow and equipment, because it's really just bullshitting with someone for an hour with minimal research beyond that. It's also arguably a more fun way to intake sim league for those with a couple hours to kill listening to people bullshit. For others who don't listen to the podcasts, the bite sized nature of an article might be preferable, but I'm guessing that there aren't a whole lot of people who won't listen to a podcast but will read the crap out of an article.

We also have preseason pressers, which I think are a fun, traditional way of earning a cool five points while getting everyone amped about the regular season. It gets harder to write one every season though, so it'd be cool to spice it up somehow. But I don't have any ideas.

Finally, there are memes. And while a few of them here and there are good, there are a lot of 30 meme runs where someone just rapid fires images with captions as fast as they can come up with to get 10 points. They're the easiest thing to look at, but there are rarely 30 different things to meme about in a season. I think we allow for too many points through memes.

3. League responsibilities - Stuff needs to get done, and people need to do them. Some jobs are more important than others because they keep the league going. Some jobs are there sometimes and not other seasons (like Pick 'Em). And some jobs are being stewards, which is basically free points and I'm happy that there's a new Bucks GM so that we don't need stewards next season unless someone quits. But most people don't do these, and the ones that do have been around long enough to know how to do them, so the barrier of entry can seem kind of high.

But the real supply and demand aspect of league responsibilities isn't the people doing the responsibility, it's the results of the responsibility. If we have a Pick 'Em Coordinator, that's a lot of points being dumped into the league. If we have an Awards Coordinator, that's a lot of points being dumped into the league as well, and when every aspect (nominations, voting) earns people points, we get a lot of weird nominations. I think that any coordinators (media, Pick 'Em, Awards, etc) can really inventory what points are necessary to go out to make the processes more valuable.

3.5 Town Hall - I don't know if this is a league responsibility or not, but it's an opportunity to add 12 points for off the cuff reactions. I like this better than memes, but I'm not sure how much value these add or how they can be more valuable. It's definitely more than NO value, but it's hard to come up with 12 unique questions per season, and it's even harder to come up with questions where the answers don't all start to resemble each other. But whether it be Town Hall or Pick 'Em, there's always gonna be some slimy bastard copy/pasting an earlier post and changing a few words around.

4 or 5. Trades - You can send points in trades, so it makes sense that you can also get points in trades. No matter what changes about any other ways to earn or spend points, this will always be a zero-sum game in the sim economy because no points are created or destroyed. I'm still intrigued by removing point caps on trades, but it would probably be wiser to raise them a little more slowly.

6. Refer a friend to sim league - This is the holy grail of points. It's super hard to convince someone to make the time investment to do PBSL, and it's even harder when I tell people "We don't do this for money, just for fun." All my friends and relatives are gambling addicts. But if there is an open team and you can swindle a cousin or two into taking that team over for a few seasons, you'll land a handsome amount of points once they're tenured.

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Now that we're almost literally a ton of words into this article about points, is there a point to it all? I think there was at the beginning of the article, but I quickly lost it. I could just post it now and soak in the sweet points that I'll make for rambling, or I could try to pull it together with some other bullshit that will earn me a few more points.

So here's some food for thought. The optimal point system in my book maintains balance. I want the opportunity to earn enough points to just barely cover my ass for tax or training or anything else, but I also don't want the league to be crammed with a bunch of unnecessary points grabs that people are putting actual effort into. Would I write articles just for funsies? Oh, hell no. But if I'm writing an article, and it's going over 3,000 words, I'm not going to stop until the article's done. Still, I don't think anyone out there is putting up 25 points of worthwhile media between articles and memes. (ESPECIALLY MEMES...EXCEPT GARY'S HAND DRAWN ONES).

As for responsible spending and budgeting, I don't want enough points to be out there for a team to be able to constantly be able to pay off 100 point tax bills. We need people to need to reset or face tax jail. And the same goes for teams that just suck forever until they amass a horde of future superstars. The league's more fun when more people are trying to compete, and I think the way to do that is a more conservative approach to the peripherals of the game.

When we have teams that are stacked with 3 or 4 purple potential players, it's going to turn a lot of teams off from competing. When we've got a healthy crop of good blue players and only enough purple players for a handful of teams to have a true superstar, I think competing is more appealing. But to make competing a more compelling prospect again, I think we need to rein in training and bring back elements that don't inflate the number of superstars the league has (no more free insurance...or at least less free insurance, I'm willing to compromise if everyone's too chicken).

If we get rid of these ways to spend points, we also need to rein back the opportunities to earn points, just so teams are incentivized to reset.

So that's just some stuff to think about. What parts of the game are your favorite? What parts of the game would you be fine getting rid of? If there's consensus, we can trim out the parts that are less necessary and more taxing for a leaner, meaner sim league experience.

[Black Superman]

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=13764&p=114346#p114346

[greepleairport]

2500+ words, +8pts
I like articles that are meaningful. Like this one.