I have now played my way through a full league in the Facebook game Dynasty Hockey. They managed to stick to their guns as far as having any given match only impact one person's stats which is a little unfortunate, but they also made it so cherry-picking weak matches isn't really feasible which is nice.
Basically how it works is there are two phases to a league. The first phase lasts 3 days and you can play 60 games total. There are 32 teams in the league and you can play each other team at most 3 times. So each team has 93 possible games of which they should play 60. Cherry-picking the weaker targets still exists here since the top 12 teams should all end up playing the same 60 games. But now it isn't good enough to merely be able to beat 10% of teams since if you're not in the top 12 of your league you'll actually have a harder schedule. (You can't play against yourself but everyone else can!) So there's real incentive to be good instead of just good enough. Also, other than advancing to the play-offs there is no reward for winning. Every game you play is worth 5 RP (game currency) regardless on if you win or lose, so even the bad teams are encouraged to play their 60 games and maybe get lucky.
The teams are split into 8 divisions of 4 and after the 3 days are up the top 2 in each division advance to the 'play-offs' while the bottom 2 get to play in a consolation play-off. This means that while 16 teams advance it isn't guaranteed to be the best 16 teams. A weaker team can get lucky with division placement and be able to squeak into the play-offs. The 3rd best team could even fail to qualify!
The play-offs are a 1 day event where you get to play 15 games and can play each team at most once. Since there are only 15 opponents you 'have' to play everyone once. Again, playing a game is worth 5 RP regardless on win or lose. Finishing with a better record gets you more cash and a better draft pick for a new player. (I ended up with the 4th pick in my draft and was able to snag the favourite player from my youth: Sergei Fedorov!) I ended up only playing 14 games in my play-off due to the way tiebreakers worked. (I was pretty much guaranteed to lose and the first tiebreaker is goal differential. I figured it was worth not earning the 5 RP to make an extra $2M bucks.
Everyone who makes the play-offs gets promoted to the next tier of league. The top 2 players in the consolation bracket also get the promotion so even if you were in a brutal division you can keep advancing. (You just earn less money and a worse draft pick.)
I wish there was a way to actually impact your opponent's record other than by making your team be hard to beat, but given that restriction this system actually seems pretty good. The final stage where you simply can't be the best without beating the best is nice. Multiple people could end up undefeated at 15-0 which is a little weird, but then the goal differential comes in and over 15 games it seems pretty likely that the 'better' 15-0 team will have the higher goal differential. And if they don't? Well, they only lose $2M and a slot in the draft.
One thing that does disappoint me is I'm unable to put together the Russian Five line. Not because the players don't exist in the game (they all do) but because the game has slotted all of Fedorov, Larionov, and Kozlov as centers. The glut at center for the Red Wings is really sad for me since I can only have 3 centers on my team. Clearly two have to be Fedorov and Yzerman but who gets to be the third? I currently have Datsyuk and Delvecchio and will need to toss one of them aside should I get a chance to draft Stevie Y.
2 comments:
While I agree that it is weird that you can't affect your opponent's record, being able to do so actually makes the piling on of weak teams much more dramatic. When everyone has to play everyone it doesn't matter, but if you are cherry picking bad teams, you'll see that the bad teams end up with records like 5-600 since everyone chose to play them and good teams will end up with records like 59-1, since no one chose to play them.
Given that, what system do you use to see who advances? If it's 3 points for a win, 1 for a tie then a top-end bad team might win because it got picked on enough to get a 65-350 record. If it's winning percentage then you encourage people with perfect records to stop short of the full season.
I'll admit you may have thought of a better system for working things out than I have, but everything I can think of has one problem or another.
The real problem is in getting to pick who you play at all. If I was just given a single next match to play then I'd be forced to take losses against good teams when I'm playing.
Another option in the league stage would be to limit the number of times a team can get challenged. You can play 60 'road' games and 60 'home' games and can still only challenge or host a given team 3 times. Though if there's a limit to the number of times you can be challenged then the winners will often be the ones who got to challenge the bad teams first.
Alternatively, why have 93 potential games and 60 played games at all? Why not have the full 93 games? If you track challenge records too then each team will have 186 possible games played. (3 home, 3 road games against each of the other 31 teams.) Default any challenges that weren't issued into a 3-0 win for the home team but don't award in game currency to anyone for those games. Then every team will end up with an actual result for all 186 games and you can pick who advances by wins with the goal differential tiebreaker.
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