#SLOE: People's Basketball Sim League

I want to start this article with a confession. I don’t like the the word count point system. I just don’t. I have zero interest in writing a 2000 word article and little interest in reading one. I like ‘em short and sweet. I’m not saying all short and sweet articles are worth 5 but I am saying that I don’t like having to write 1000 words to get 5 points. I thought that there might be other closest haters out there like me and that our closeted contempt might be lowering the number of articles written so I decided to count up how many articles have been written each season for the past few season. Here are the results.
It turns out there has been a huge decline but not recently. The recent decline from the media point reform instituted in the 2023 has been quite modest, with the number of articles written decreasing from 23 the season before the change down to 17 this year. This small change could easily be some random fluctuation. The decline from 54 down to 21 was obviously not random. So what caused the huge drop? Around the start of the 2019 season, we instituted two changes that drastically changed the demand for points. One, we instituted the tax apron so that teams just barely over the salary cap don’t have to pay tax and, two, we made training camp free and limited it to three players (RIP, Zion). It appears that people aren’t writing as many articles, not because they don’t like the point award system or not because they don’t care about the league, but because they just don’t need as many points any more. Sure we still train players but that is more of a luxury than a need. For me, this was interesting because I expected the lower quantity to be the result of a shock to costs (a) but it actually ended up being the result of a demand shock (b).

Holy shit, this is an excellent article!

I've noticed this premise and I think it touches on some good points (and leaves a couple more to be explored). You only have 2 points left towards the media cap, so this article can only get 2, and now you're capped.

What's weird is the system kinda rewards ppl like you Ku the most who make fancy charts and graphs and then you're rewarded for your extra effort...lol Also the main reason I did it that way was because the subjectivity in the articles and points got to be comical. You could put out any crap and get handed 5 free points. This took most of the subjectivity out of it. Maybe someone can find a better way.

The tricky thing is that when working with data, it's much less straightforward as to how much work something actually took. You could argue that with writing...quality writing takes more time than stream of consciousness, but nobody's poring over word choice here. With these analyses, gathering and organizing the data could take a long time, and so could analyzing it, but so much of that work is reusable later, meaning two articles that use the same dataset could take wildly different amounts of time.

I think your word count system is the best upgrade we have over "Everything gets 5 points." Beyond that, I think the other way to reward quality / usefulness of articles is through awards. That's not without its flaws either, and right now, only one media entry benefits, but we're also seeing a dearth of media entries. The league's been going for a while, and it's hard to consistently generate content that doesn't feel stale, and it's a big time sink for a sim league to write really thoughtful articles, especially when there are more points to be had elsewhere (Meme thread, Pick 'Em--at least until sim 7) and less points that need to be spent to stay competitive (as this article points out).

Darth Vegito wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 7:16 pm What's weird is the system kinda rewards ppl like you Ku the most who make fancy charts and graphs and then you're rewarded for your extra effort...lol Also the main reason I did it that way was because the subjectivity in the articles and points got to be comical. You could put out any crap and get handed 5 free points. This took most of the subjectivity out of it. Maybe someone can find a better way.

I agree that the changes were on the whole good. I just don't like the points being based primarily on word count because often times I put a lot of time and effort into graphs or tables that summarize things so I don't have to write a lot of words. That being said, both points czars have been fair and generous in awarding my graphs, so I don't feel slighted by the new policy.

kucoach7 wrote: Tue Feb 26, 2019 1:30 pm

Darth Vegito wrote: Mon Feb 25, 2019 7:16 pm What's weird is the system kinda rewards ppl like you Ku the most who make fancy charts and graphs and then you're rewarded for your extra effort...lol Also the main reason I did it that way was because the subjectivity in the articles and points got to be comical. You could put out any crap and get handed 5 free points. This took most of the subjectivity out of it. Maybe someone can find a better way.

I agree that the changes were on the whole good. I just don't like the points being based primarily on word count because often times I put a lot of time and effort into graphs or tables that summarize things so I don't have to write a lot of words. That being said, both points czars have been fair and generous in awarding my graphs, so I don't feel slighted by the new policy.

When I first did it the first thing I thought to myself was "shit, this system screws Ku and Josh and the others who take god knows how much time to do all that stuff that I never understand, that won't work"