Archive for the ‘gaming’ Category

Five Things to Consider if you want to run a Dynasty League

Posted: August 18, 2023 by datechguy in baseball, dynasty baseball, fun, gaming, online gaming
Tags: , ,

As anyone who follows me on twitter knows I’m very much into the Dynasty Baseball game, which came out of the old pursue the pennant boardgame from the pre-pc era. It’s my primary pastime these days beside watching regular baseball.

You can have a lot of fun playing in a league but if you want to run your own remember while it’s a lot of fun it’s also quite a bit of work. If you’ve thought of running your own league here are a few things you should consider:

A: Consider how much time you have:

The first thing you need to consider if you want to run a Dynasty league is how much free time you have to both run the league and play in it. Playing a game itself is not all time consuming, about 30-40 minutes per game is what’s required, but if you are scheduling games 2 days, 3 days or even four days a week can add up, particularly if you are not retired or have a family that likes to do things. Furthermore if you’re running a league you have to leave yourself enough time to put out the various fires that take place. So when deciding to run a league make sure you decide:

  1. How much time you have for administration
  2. How much time you have to actually play

What I’d do is figure how many free days I have to play and then subtract one or even two and then set whatever league you create to that length, that will assure that you have time to get it done.

B: Consider what type of league you want

There are three basic types of leagues in order of complexity

  1. Draft leagues (Hardest)
  2. Existing team leagues
  3. Season Replay leagues

All have advantages and disadvantages:

Draft leagues:

Draft leagues involve drafting players from a pool of players from the same season. Draft leagues have several advantages over existing team leagues:

  • A: You get to be GM as well as manager building your own team and are thus more invested in it
  • B You can continue the league year to year to keep up interest
  • C You can tweak the system to add realism, (trades, waiver wires etc)
  • D The Draft itself becomes an event

It’s my experience that some people enjoy the GM factor more than the games itself and that you really become invested in the teams and players. I’ve reached the point in my league that I started in 1969 that I even make baseball cards for the folks on my team to wit:

My Version of Jack Hiatt’s 1971 card

However draft leagues have their downsides:

  • A: Considerably more time to manage
  • B: Handling the rosters
  • C The draft itself may take days or weeks
  • D Keeping Competitive balance
  • E More things to go wrong

Running a draft league means, handling rosters of every single team, running a draft and trying to do it fairly and if you are having a league that goes from season to season keeping up the competitive balance from season to season. All of these require extra work and time depending on the size of your league: (My current draft leagues are 16 players for 1996 and 20 for 1971) and of course the more players the more work.

Bottom line: Draft leagues are in my opinion the most fun but if I were new I’d start with an existing league first to get my feet wet:

Existing team leagues

Having a league of existing teams takes a lot of work out of the system. The adantages are clear:

  1. There is almost no managing of rosters
  2. No trying to get people together for a draft
  3. No worrying about a change from one season to the next
  4. If more than one person wants the Yanks, or Cubs they can have them
  5. You can mix eras
  6. As soon as you have your schedule made you can start at once

Most existing team league involve GREAT teams which is the pool for tournaments. These tend to be very popular because the teams are memorable although you can spice things up as I did by creating leagues that aren’t just great teams two examples:

All pathetic team leagues: Teams in such a league all have to have a minimum loss level (90, 100 or something in between) This makes for a very odd game where you are constantly hoping for players to roll of their opponent’s cards. Also it gets interesting when one such team has a superstar. A 1967 Mets team with Tom Seaver for example. Can you picture the number Seaver produces when only facing slubs?

All Mediocre teams (the SD Jones league) I ran a league of teams that all had records from 80-82 to 82-80. This makes for an interesting league as there is enough of a mix of slubs and stars to really involve managing games.

Either way with these teams you don’t have the same roster / upkeep issues although with some of the older teams you are more likely to run into situations where a team has no pitcher eligible to use.

The disadvantages of set teams are:

  1. Teams are static no variation.
  2. No GM or Draft or Trade type fun
  3. Balance (think 27 yanks vs well almost anyone)
  4. Less incentives for teams losing to continue
  5. The mix of eras can cause anomalies

Bottom line set teams are a good option to start out but tend to be one or two shot deals. They work with teams that

Replay Leagues

With a replay league you play a team in an actual season in order.

The advantages:

  1. Very realistic. Actual team, actual schedule
  2. Schedule is pre-made so faster start
  3. The system handles trades and signings when it happens
  4. Excellent for solo league play

There are however some huge disadvantages

  1. Your season only moves only as fast as the slowest player
  2. Locked into the number of games in the season (162) games
  3. Unbalanced a bad team is always bad

A season replay league is a great choice if you want to get familiar with the game in a hurry. But you want to be sure that the players in it are committed because you can’t move to July 21 till all of July 22’s games are done. You might impose a 24-48 hour limit to get things in.

You CAN make a season replay league into a draft league but the amount of work is considerable and if you do be prepared for a season to take a full year

C: Consider how many series you want in a week:

Unless you are playing a season replay which is played based on when a day is finished. The Dynasty league system allows you to schedule up to four series a week at any time you wish to set.

As a series can be set for anywhere from 2-4 games that means as little as 2 games a week and as many as 12.

The fewer series played in a week of course the easier it is for people to play without having to resort to autoplay but that also means the slower the season goes. Also consider that a game takes 30-45 min in my experience so a 4 game series can take 3 hours while a two game series can be done in 90 minutes.

Also remember that the more series you have in a week the less likely you are to draw in players who are already in a league or two who won’t be able to squeeze in those extra games.

And the more series a week the less time to reschedule when real life insists on asserting itself over your scheduiled gaming time.

D: Consider how many games you want in a season:

Unless you are playing a season replay which fixes you at 162 games (or 154 if you play 1957 or 60 if you play the COVID season) you have the option to set any number of games.

The longer the season you play the more real it will be and the less impact injuries and suspension will have. Of course a short season the season will be and the more chance that a streak of good or bad luck will carry the day.

Also consider a short season means that you can have multiple seasons in a year while a long season will likely mean two at the most.

And if you have a draft league remember the draft takes up time between seasons it doesn’t finish in a day (unless you play face to face).

But either way remember you are the guy who is going to have to make this schedule and enter it manually into dynasty

E: Consider How many players you want to manage:

Note that I didn’t ask you how many teams you wanted in your league I asked how many players you want to manage.

A smaller league means fewer players and the fewer players you have the easier it is to have guys show up when games are scheduled and to schedule more games in a week etc.

It’s also a lot easier to come up with a schedule with fewer teams.

A small intimate league is fun but of course there is nothing like a large league with 16-20 players and a great variety of styles of play and management, plus you get less “Superteams because so many players are used. For example in my current 1971 league there are only 6 pitchers not on someone’s roster.

But keep this in mind any online league usually involves people you don’t know personally. The only thing everyone has in common is a love of baseball and a willingness to pay for the game.

There are invariably going to be the basic problems, people from different time zone having issues being free etc but you are also going to run into disputes and errors and mistakes and if it’s your league you have to make the calls. Managing people of different temperaments, different ages et/al can be difficult so do your best to impartially stick to the rules.

I STRONGLY suggest that you avoid non-league stuff in conversation or in the slack room and if you’re on social media and are angry about something in the news don’t vent in the league space (I made that mistake a few years ago in a league and it’s a mistake I regret.)

But more than that I suggest not having any kind of cash league with a prize. Once money is involved everything changes and any mistake becomes magnified

Remember in the end it’s all about having fun, make the choices to allow the maximum amount of fun for yourself and all the work will pay off.

Stop adding queer to The Witcher

Posted: July 1, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in gaming
Tags: , ,

I occasionally scroll down on my browsers news feed. I probably shouldn’t, since almost all the news “curated” for me is sensational click-bait headlines with weak, ad-packed articles. Despite this, I mistakenly scrolled down this morning to find this headline:

The Witcher’s Joey Batey and Hugh Skinner discuss making Jaskier’s queer romance authentic

Ugggggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!

And Jesus wept

For those who (somehow) don’t know, The Witcher is a series of stories by Andrzej Sapkowski written in Poland in the 1990s that was later adapted into a very successful computer game series, and after that into a moderately successful (but now quickly declining) Netflix TV series. The books started being translated into English in 2007, around the same time that a Polish video game producer, CD Projekt Red, made the first of three video games.

The video games and books were wildly popular. The main character, Geralt of Rivia, is a witcher, a human mutated by different poisons and gene-altering drugs, to become an inhumanly deadly warrior, but with no emotions and a desire to stay neutral in most conflicts. Witchers were created to fight monsters that entered the world due to an event called the Conjunction of the Spheres, which is sort of like the Multiverse. The world of the Witcher features a variety of monsters, magic and warring kingdoms, all the things you would expect in a medieval fantasy world.

The Witcher is very different from other fantasy though. As he adventures in the world, Geralt discovers that many monsters are actually sentient and simply trying to live, while humans use the fact they are a monster to place bounties on their heads in order to steal their land and possessions. In many of his quests, Geralt sides with these beings, and when humans point out that he was created to fight monsters, Geralt asks who the real monsters are. This is captured in the video games, where you get to make choices about what quests to take and how to complete them. You can side with the humans, or side with the monsters, or choose a mix, and your ultimate outcome is based on your choices. In many cases, these outcomes are radically different. There is no “right” side…you can find fault in each faction, and even Geralt’s desire to stay neutral can become a fault all on its own.

The other big difference between The Witcher and other fantasy is that it is very adult. Geralt’s mutations render him sterile, so he sleeps around a lot. He has a competing love interest with two different sorceresses (Yennefer and Triss) in the books and the game, and the video games let you sleep with a variety of female characters. The books have plenty of gory fights, and the games don’t shy away from gore or nudity.

With a big following, intriguing characters, and different fantasy world, I was super excited when Henry Cavill was announced to star in the Netflix series. Cavill actually read the books and played the games. The dude is built like The Witcher, and in the first two seasons, he perfectly captured Geralt’s character. I immediately noticed that the writing was…lackluster. We weren’t getting the “choices” themes, we had a weird back story on Yennefer that wasn’t in the books and didn’t add much to the story, and the other supporting characters were twisted a bit out of context.

Which brings me to Jaskier, which is the Polish name for the character Julian Alfred Pankratz, who goes by the stage name Dandelion. In the books he is a sharp contrast to Geralt’s dower and moody behavior, often challenging the notion that Geralt can remain neutral in the middle of the conflict between the various nations. In the video games, he’s a skilled poet, avid business man and notorious womanizer, which gets him in trouble that occasionally requires Geralt to bail him out.

No where, ever, is it implied he is gay or bisexual. You might think that because he is a poet and a snappy dresser, but the books and games don’t ever imply it.

The Netflix series used him first as the butt of a lot of jokes. While he had some good moments (the Toss a Coin to your Witcher song being the best), he is too often a dumb, scared fop of a character. Then, since he’s a poet, and apparently its OK to paint a classist brush across all artistic people, the producer decides to explore his sexuality. Never mind that they are fighting the lore while doing this, that Henry Cavill quit over disagreements about the what the writers and producers were doing to the series, and attempts to add a prequel (The Witcher: Blood Origins) failed miserably. Nope, let’s make a bisexual character, that’ll make our series more popular!!

Funny enough, the world of the Witcher actually HAS a few homosexual and otherwise LGBTQ characters in it. Cirilla, one of the main characters in the book series, at one point has a homosexual tryst with the female leader of the Rats, a group of brigands that she joins after fleeing from the school of magic. Various factions, such as the all-female dryads and some sects of elves, are heavily implied to be homosexual. Most of the more powerful sorceresses have female lovers. The Dopplers, a race of shape-shifting creatures, are portrayed as enjoying the ability to explore both their masculine and feminine sides.

There is PLENTY of existing homosexual and erotic content in the novels and video games that a producer could bring into the Netflix series, and I doubt it would cause issues. Instead, they chose to dumb down an interesting character and shoe-horn him into a bisexual role he was never meant or written for, and to the surprise of nobody, caused serious angst.

Look, if you want gay characters, go write them in your novels. Do the proper character development and make them interesting. Not surprisingly, you might find that if you follow good writing practices and make your transgender warrior an interesting character that has to overcome issues, has flaws, and follows a story arc, people might actually want to read your writing, and if you want an example, look at Japanese anime. The laziness that modern producers have in simply taking good, existing characters and placing them on the LGBTQ spectrum exhausts audiences and reveals that these producers and writers have no real talent.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

A Good Investment vs a Bad One

Posted: June 16, 2023 by datechguy in economy, gaming
Tags: , , , ,

My son sent me this link concerning a kickstarter campaign here is a screen shot of it’s progress:

With 15 days to go this project is funded nearly 5x beyond what it needs.

Of course in fairness the original Groo dice game was not only hilarious but easy and fun to play so a revival makes sense. I still have my copy from when I owned a comic book store in the 1980’s I remember it fondly and highly recommend it. Based on the response there are plenty of other people who think the same so I suspect this will be a moneymaker for Steve Jackson games.

On the other hand there are some investments that simply don’t pay off:

Those are fully stocked store shelves of this merchandise, as if no one had touched them for weeks. Nobody wanted a Pride chew toy for their pet, nobody wanted Pride children’s wear, or transgender-themed children’s toys (I had to look up what Kidd Kenn was in the blue and pink box on the last in the sequence — a rap star), nobody wanted a Pride baking kit, nobody wanted LGBTQ+-themed liquor, or LGBTQ+ cups to put them in. Notice that the liquor is already on sale. Nobody wanted rainbow kid boots.

That’s shelf space that could have been used for merchandise that people wanted to buy, and in retail, efficient use of shelf space for things that sell is the name of the game. They pay people to determine those things. These items at Target Kearny Mesa were all displayed prominently at the front of the store, no back of the store decision for them. You’ve heard of “dead-naming”? Well, this was “dead-spacing.”

UnexpectedlyTM of course.

The reality is that both of these items are dealing with a niche market. The difference is that the makers of the Groo game aren’t pretending that their market is bigger than it is so they will show a profit. These guys at Target, not so much.

Dynasty 1996 Short Season 16 team, Draft League NL West The End of the Story (so Far…)

Posted: May 13, 2023 by datechguy in baseball, dynasty baseball, gaming, online gaming
Tags: , , , , ,

Ok let’s finish our look at the 1996 league with the NL west.

NL WestWLPCTGB
San Diego133.813——
Houston87.5334 1/2
Los Angeles88.5005
St. Louis511.3138

San Diego: 13-3 .813 1st place

The good news : San Diego is hitting .303 AS A TEAM! Kenny Lofton is leading the majors in runs (21) and is 2nd in the NL in stolen bases. Mark McLemore is tied for the NL lead in doubles and Ken Caminiti leads the NL in Homers and the majors in RBI’s Ron Karkovice and Todd Huntley are both hitting .400 or better. Darryl Strawberry is hitting .385 And the pitching staff has a team ERA of 3.29 best in the NL. .

The Bad News: Not much to choose from here but starters John Burkett (2-2 5.93 ERA and 5 HR given up in 27 1/3 innings) and Ariel Prieto (0-0 7.59 ERA WHIP 2.06 and .341 avg against are underperforming dramatically.

Didn’t see that coming: Tony Gwinn hitting .297 is not a big surprise SD having six starters hitting better than him is.

Medical Report: The only thing healthier than San Diego’s batting avg is their health.

Coming Attractions: It’s off to Boston for two and Houston for four before coming home to face Chicago and Atlanta. .

Houston: 8-7 .533 2nd place 4 1/2 games out

The good news : Dante Bitchette has been dynamite .333 4 HR 11 RBI. Biggio has hit .346 and stolen 10 bases in 13 attempts while driving in 13 without going yard.. Otis Nixon has stolen 22 more leading the majors. Houston’s 41 walks allows is the 2nd lowest among major league teams.

The Bad News: While the bullpen has been spectacular the starting pitching has been meh. Tom Glavine is 1-2 with a 5.19 ERA Jamie Navarro is 0-1 with hitter batting .313 against him and a 5.56 ERA and Mike Hamptons start was so bad (0-1 6.48 ERA and .375 avg against he ended up dealt to Baltimore along with Quintin McCracken (.077 avg till he went to Baltimore hitting .333 in the AL) Meanwhile Terry Steinbach is hitting a mere .204 and so is Matt Williams .204 with only 2 HR & 5 RBI.

Didn’t see that coming: Houston relivers Pedro Borbon, Mark Dewey, TJ Matthews , Mike Munoz and Paul Spoljaric in a combined 15 appearances and 24 innings have yet to give up a run..

Medical Report: All quiet on the Injury Front.

Coming Attractions: After a quick trip to NY to face the Yanks for 2 they return for a 9 game homestand with 4 against San Diego, 2 vs Seattle and 3 vs Florida

Los Angeles: 8-8 .500 3rd place 5 GB

The good news : Mike Piazza is hitting .322 with 3 HR and 8 RBI and has scored 11 while throwing out 13 runners. Brian Hunter is batting .359 Jessie Orosco has 3 saves in three chances. Starter Ismael Valdez has a WHIP of 1.02 6th in the league.

The Bad News: Piazza may have caught 13 runners but he’s let 47 steal. Steve Decker has already committed 5 errors at third to go along with his .170 avg. Rafael Bournigal has been not committed an error in the field but is also hitting a mere .169 and Travis Fryman .175 Avg and a .197 OBP runs)

The Meh News: In 13 starts 4 of Houston’s five starters have ERA’s between 4.26 & 4.76.

Didn’t see that coming: While LA’s avg against is the worst in the NL their staff’s 124 K’s in the 2nd best in the majors with three of their starters in the top 10 in K’s of the NL. Travis Fryman’s miniscule batting and OBP avgs has not stopped him from driving in 11 runs so far this season..

Medical Report: All present and accounted for

Coming Attractions: LA has one more to play in Baltimore before they head home for 4 against the Cards, two against the blue Jays and 3 vs the Pirates before an 11 game road trip.

St. Louis: 5-11 .313 4th place 8 GB

The good news : Ray Langford is leading the majors in triples with 3. Julio Franco is leading the NL with a .403 avg, leads the majors in hits (27). Brian Jordan is hitting .303 with 2 HR and 10 RBI. David Cone is is only allowing a .191 batting avg with a 1.12 WHIP and while being 3rd in the league in innings has yet to give up a home run.

The Bad News: The Benes Brothers have been a disappointment on the mound. Andy is 0-2 with a 6.62 ERA and Alan while 1-2 has an ERA of 7.04. Willie McGee has had a horrendous .190 0 HR 1 RBI Tim Rains is even worse hitting only .071 with an OBP of .133 with only a solo HR and RBI to his name. .

Didn’t see that coming: St. Louis has only five home runs in 596 at bats

Medical Report: Mark Langston came out of his first start of the season and will not be back till late July. .

Coming Attractions: St. Louis visits Cleveland for 2 and LA for four before coming home for 3 vs Cincy and then it back on the road for 2 in Boston before hosting Houston for another 4.

Older Entries
Newer Entries