[quote author=dew link=topic=514.msg5095#msg5095 date=1319114927]<br />because it is such a shortsighted and inflammatory idea. there is hard evidence on how devastating the cap scheduling can get - from all the other leagues that ever existed to IDL itself. commish scheduling obviously improved the situation a lot, so going back to relying on caps doing the extra leg work can be seen as destructive by people who prioritize the integrity of the league over novelty and experimenting.[/quote]<br /><br />I didn&#039;t mean captains scheduling. I mean players submitting avails. And considering you jumped to a conclusion of your own and called it inflammatory and short sighted I&#039;m going to assume you take that stuff back and aren&#039;t just being unnecessarily aggressive.<br /><br />[quote]tiering was discussed immediatelly after bones was made the commish in the previous off-season. it was rejected then, because the proponents (me among them) couldn&#039;t build a strong case. [/quote]<br /><br />If I&#039;m remembering correctly the board is 60% newer than when Bones was made commish. And if you still think tiering is an acceptable practice then the board potentially has a super majority for a vote. Let&#039;s talk about it again.<br /><br />[quote]you&#039;re building a complex system depending on a lot of controversial &quot;tools&quot; at every step. from top down:<br /><br />1: your ultimate goal is higher team parity, a rather nebulous concept not easily proved by numbers, especially with all the other factors at work. [/quote]<br /><br />I would say that parity in this case means parity of record. And by that metric it is very easily proved by the numbers.<br /><br />[quote]2: you plan to boost team parity by picking caps of relatively equal skill and rejecting those outside of the safe zone. this by itself is a highly controversial concept. you literally proposed that we could place the &quot;skill center&quot; low enough to attract more average caps, meaning ralphis, jenova and nostar would be rejected to make room for rexnor, dew and quiksilver, because the latter three would lower the cap skill variance and make the league more equal. shouldn&#039;t we discuss this idea first before we move on to tiering? because i don&#039;t really think it&#039;d help the league.[/quote]<br /><br />I proposed a lot of things. I&#039;m not wild about a season of lower skilled captains but I think toward the end of parity it was a valid idea. I believe that we can keep the &quot;skill-center&quot; relatively high from my conversations with players who might captain and I&#039;m willing to work to get 12 high level players as captains. I think it would help league parity and the lesser talked about league morale.<br /><br />[quote]3: to quantify the process of selecting equal caps, we need tiering. we need to vote on people like we vote on maps... and last time i checked, the board was pretty flaky in that regard too. frankly, the subjectivity involved is just staggering. how do you rank xen, for example? tier 1 with good connection, but tier 2 with bad connection and tier 3 with bad connection and a spell of xenrage? should we rank even people who obviously don&#039;t want to cap, just so we have everyone in their rightful tier? wait, i forgot - did we actually all agree on the fact that player skill equals cap skill, or at least that the cap skill addition to the player skill is negligible for our needs? i don&#039;t think we did.[/quote]<br /><br />I think the way we tier people is up for discussion. I personally don&#039;t have much of a problem doing it because I make the tiers rather vague. I think A LOT of captain skill is player skill. I think you can be as clever and dedicated as you want but if you can&#039;t shoot your team is going to struggle. I also think activity and availability is an important factor and I don&#039;t think that quantifying these things is too difficult, especially not in the vague sense that we would need for captain selection.<br /><br />[quote]your system [i]might[/i] work, but you&#039;d need all your changes applied. they&#039;re mostly superfluous taken out of context - why tier players if we don&#039;t plan to &quot;center&quot; caps or even boost parity this way? and when put together... well, that&#039;d be a very different IDL. [/quote]<br /><br />Yeah you&#039;re right, I jumped right to &quot;parity is good&quot;. And it&#039;s not something I even want to talk about anymore. It just is good. Having teams more even in any regard is positive. I can&#039;t believe we even had those conversations.<br /><br />Furthermore what other changes do you mean? You mean that I think we need to agree on a metric for picking captains? I really do. Right now we seriously just take whoever signs up. Let&#039;s figure out why more people don&#039;t want to captain and make it better. Let&#039;s pick the best captains by whatever metric we agree to. Let&#039;s talk openly about what that metric is rather than just deciding that one player would make a better captain than another, let&#039;s have a reason. One of the things that we don&#039;t acknowledge is that we already rank players in this process, we just don&#039;t vocalize it or publish it. I guess that is courteous but it&#039;s disingenuous to say that we don&#039;t.<br /><br />[quote]i also can&#039;t overlook how conveniently close this moves to demanding caps to prioritize players from higher tiers in the draft. and then threatening them or (voting on) banning them when they don&#039;t comply. kinda like it happens in IDL priv. (yes, i&#039;m still sour.)[/quote]<br /><br />Other than you being mad I kickbanned you I have no idea what this statement means. I guess if you mean that a captain that picks very poorly in a draft might be ousted then yeah, you&#039;re right. Assuming there is someone we think is more qualified the following season that may or may not be true. On the other had a captain that picks well and does badly might be ousted too. It really depends on what we decide the metric for captaincy is and the volunteers for captains we get on a season to season basis.<br /><br />[quote]uh, team names affect team parity, player skills or cap volunteering? i don&#039;t see it. it&#039;s a vanity issue and shouldn&#039;t be mixed into league system discussions, imo.[/quote]<br /><br />No one said team names had anything to do with parity. I do think it affects people wanting to captain. In my opinion naming is fun and it makes teams more personal to both the captain and the players. It also allows for some IDL community hilarity that we don&#039;t really have anymore. Again, IDL morale is at stake!<br /><br />[quote]<br />afaik we already dismiss caps who don&#039;t fit our criteria - naut got dismissed, didn&#039;t he? i don&#039;t see how dismissing all of them is needed. you yourself said we&#039;d just picked most of them again and there are usually more vacancies than immediate candidates.[/quote]<br /><br />I actually think that the idea of a seasonal captain review is good because the people who want to captain from season to season changes. If one season we have a low number of cap volunteers and the next we have a rather high number shouldn&#039;t it be at the league&#039;s discretion to pick the best batch regardless of who capped the previous season? I contend that it should be and that right now I can find 4-5 captains better than the ones we have. Instead of having to make a case for all 5, relative to their sitting captain counterpart, I think a system would be very helpful.<br /><br />[quote] i don&#039;t know what to do about this or even why bother. it will always be there, no matter how we try to gloss it over. maybe start nostar&#039;s academy for idl captains and share your wisdom, i bet some of them would improve just by hearing useful hints and example scenarios from you, one of the most successful caps of all time. i use a slightly snide tone, but i mean it - why reorganize the system to cater to worse players, when the logical way should be to help them improve to higher standards?[/quote]<br /><br />The question is not whether it will be there but how large it will be. I made this point in my previous two posts. If only I had the time to teach, unfortunately there is not glory and very little pussy in teaching so I kindly refuse. I&#039;m not even remotely suggesting that we reorganize the system to cater to lower skilled captains. I&#039;m saying let&#039;s fix it so we don&#039;t have to by picking captains that have a closer proximity to one another in skill. That would do a lot to close the skill disparity gap among captains.<br /><br />Anyway my point is that it wouldn&#039;t be hard to narrow the skill gap between captains. I think it would make the league better and more fun overall. Tiering players is one way to do it. Arranging the draft to screw good captains and reward crappy ones is another. Doing nothing is pretty much a way to do nothing and we should avoid that. 