The below blog in the recent blog list inspired me to weigh in on this (weigh in makes my opinion sound weighty – not really the intent!), although it's far from a direct response. Every so often, we get some push or comment on moving away from TV based matchmaking in Box and how that sounds like a good idea. I disagree. TV matchmaking is like democracy; it’s not perfect, but it’s as good as we’ve got. And I’ll invade and steal your oil… Erm, impose the best system any time.

The BB internet has always worked on equality in terms of playing a game in an open division. It’s important on many levels; whether you’re trying to protect newer players from mismatched games that serve as spp farms for a more savvy coach (just as likely when the n00b screws up his Inducements or accepts a game from silly primed Halflings with 400k to spend as it ever was in LRB4), trying to maintain the integrity of a division (what does a ranking or a w/d/l record mean, afterall, if you’re playing a wildly different selection of games to the next guy in the same open league), trying to maintain the integrity of tournaments, whatever really, equality and the better coach winning is the approach we’ve always taken, and for numerous good reasons, some of which I’ve neglected to list there for brevity.

But (they say), we can maintain equality. TV can be ditched as numero uno, let’s bring in win % / CR / some other unnatural measure to pair up coaches of even skill, Inducements will do the rest. Nonsense, says I. Those old enough and ugly enough will remember we used to have CR as a major feature of the formula. And it was rubbish. Quite apart from being massively patronising to the ‘lesser’ coach, it was very little fun lining up both knowing there should only be one winner in terms of the teams on the pitch, and the unnatural skew made it a ‘game’ because the ‘lesser’ coach was going to screw up his massive advantage, or the ‘better’ coach was going to play excellently. It was horrendous, and of course, it got binned faster than shadow eats cookies. However well you coached, having 5 skills against 15 is just rubbish most of the time. A-ha, that was because of Handicaps (they say)! They were awful, and Inducements are way better! Well, doesn’t that defeat the object of skewing the TV? Is the ‘lesser team not on a par, so the ‘better’ coach should walk the game? A-ha, but we’d only pair good coaches with good coaches, and poor ones with poor ones, so it’s fair. Do you really think we have the number of coaches in each round to pull that off? We have a set number of coaches that suits TV matchmaking perfectly.

Obviously, in the ideal World (to ‘them’), every game would pit good coach with good coach with even teams. However, we don’t have those numbers to pull that off more often than not. So you’d get good coach A with a team, and good coach B with a bunch of Inducements. What about Inducements, anyway? I think they work brilliantly in some situations, and pants in others. In a cup where you’ve gotten beaten up, it’s brilliant that in the next game you’ve a chance, every game, in theory, is a contest. If I travel (this is a situation I’ve played out, so I can appreciate it) to a friend’s house, an hours’ drive, and play 3 hours of BB, it’s great to turn up and know that even though I’m 500TV down, I have a few toys to make it entertaining. Fun on a board is vital to propagate the game, LRB4 must have been an utter nightmare. Now – these situations do not translate to a 150 game or so a day division, for three reasons.

i) Novelty. They say – wouldn’t it be nice to see more stars? More Wizards? Inducements are a part of a game! In a tournament or a league, in real life, great. Let’s have stars, wizzies, kitchen sinks, special play cards, flying saucers, whatever you like for a big game, for a game between mates, for fun, for high stakes. I put it to you, that if we had all of that stuff 150 times a day, you’d be bored out of your skull with them. There is nothing cool about Morg if you see him every day.

ii) The mechanism that is Inducements. Inducements, as a general rule (think wizards, everyone’s favourite) work as a mechanism of gimmicks. They do not level the playing field a bit by giving one a Block Guard BOB (for example), a real, tangible player that can level the playing field somewhat by clever positional play and a more even distribution of skills, they level it via random gimmicky chance. Will that Chainsaw roll a 1 and die, or will it go nuts and kill three? Will the lightning bolt gimmick work, or is it 150K wasted and a comfortable victory for the overdog? Will Sidewinder be ace, or will Loner let him down and screw you? These gimmicks are fun, please don’t misunderstand, and in the above circumstances, they really add to a game. What they do not do, in my opinion, is make a one off game in an open division fun. If I come home after a hard day’s work and play a good coach, we both know what we’re doing, and I’ve got to face a one turn Gutter Runner (for instance, similar sort of a thing to an Inducement gimmick), I know that it’s not going to be a test of our coaching, it’s going to be 50% a fun game against a good coach, and 50% what that guy does, if he turns up. If the bolt works. If the Saw kills my best player. If Morg goes nuts.

iii) Inducements don’t make it 50/50. Whether you’ve got the 600TV ‘Fling team who will then easily beat most rookie teams, or you’re 250 down, you know what, every day as a slog, I guarantee you you’ll get fed up of lop sided games with gimmicks. That time some coach got far in a Major with a young team, that time you won on TT 1000TV down, these are no events that happen every day. And what ‘they’ suggest is that we see these mismatches every day. Inducements does not equal 50/50 on the field. And 50/50 on the field is important for the health and integrity of an open division like [R] or Box. Not so in [L], probably, but that’s what [L] is for!

Let’s move on to how TV-less (or lesser) matchmaking will ‘fix’ minmaxing or Claw/MB/PO. Last one first, this is easy. Erm, what? You will have to play C/M/P in Box. And the main reasons for this are a) It’s powerful, b) People that run those teams like the fact you can’t avoid the damage you’re about to dish out to them. It’s easy to avoid the combo elsewhere, but as you can see from the teams played in Box list, people like to bash you. They enjoy it, they enjoy you can’t avoid it. You having a wizard up your sleeve isn’t going to change that. They will still delight in the one on one death blow that such a player can dish out on anything from Morg to a –AV Halfling. Changing the formula will not change their mindset. I suggest, humbly, that the 10% that adding a wizard to every game would subtract from their win % will not make a jot of difference to their life, or indeed your life when you play the next 6 games with 6 Journeymen.

As for minmaxing – coaches that do that like efficiency in their teams. Even if you relax TV matching, they will still build teams in such a manner – they will get either an excellently efficiently built team with toys, or they will get an excellently efficiently built team that will have to cope with a star or two. I don’t see how that will relax their thinking, sure it’s slightly less of an advantage than a tight TV matchmade circumstance, but it’s still going to be an advantage over a very loosely built collection of poorly skilled chaps, Inducements or nay. Will TS fix it? Probably not. We could always hone our teams to TS, if we saw fit.

TV based matchmaking, then, is not perfect. It leads the good coach to have an easier time than he would in [R]. It’s probably hard on people that are poor at building teams in the time honoured FUMBBL tradition (I don’t mean minmaxing, I mean the other end of the scale), but they probably learn quickly. It’s easy to bash the status quo, to have a ‘better idea’, but I have to admit, I’ve not seen one. When you consider the environment that we have and the number of coaches that inhabit that environment, I think TV based matchmaking is as good as you’re going to get. Until I see a better idea, I will continue to beat that drum. The grass isn’t always greener, you know.