JOH™;7075858 said:
I'll go 7 days a week... make no difference to me.
I guess I would prefer this but I know how much work this sort of thing is, and having Mondays off was no big deal to me last year (there was rarely a Monday game worth playing) so I don't mind if there's a day off. Thank you so much for grading the contest again JOH, your excel skills are seriously awe-inspiring.
I would be strongly against reducing the # of plays. Less required plays = more luck. My fav thing about this contest is that it's an actual test of skill. Please do not reduce the # of plays.
We might need to look at how the Olympic-condensed season will affect the schedule. 250 plays might be tough with only 4 plays per day and fewer actual game days. On some days when there are only 2 games people might be forced to pick both sides and both totals just to not 'waste' a game day. I don't know if that's something we want to introduce into the contest, though fighting against a play count as well as against your opponents might be interesting.
For reference, if we start Oct 13, we will have 141 game days if we play 6 days a week and 164 game days if we play 7 days a week. This means if we have to make 250 plays, you must make 1.77 picks/day if we play 6 days a week and 1.52 picks per day if we play 7 days a week.
This means if we play 6 days per week we must make almost 2 picks per day, every single day of the regular season. This includes days when there is only 1 or 2 games. To me this seems higher than last year, and I doubt we will have as many people reach 300+ picks this season (though towards the end of the season of course the people who fall behind will make as many picks as possible)
We have options:
We could leave it as is, and see what happens. My guess is not very many people will be dq'd for not having enough plays, but it will be more stressful than last year.
We could reduce the number of plays required. This would help alleviate the stress of fighting against a play counter, but would introduce more luck into the game. Whether this is a good or bad thing depends on how good you think you are at capping.
We could allow more picks per day. Since there are many more game days this year with 10+ games than last year, we could increase the number of plays allowed per day to 5 or 6. This would again make it easier to meet the required plays and would NOT introduce more luck into the game, but at the end of the season people will be making as many picks as possible to try to catch the leader, and the leader will need a bigger lead than last year to be safe against someone who hits a good run.
Finally we could do something complicated like allow 6 picks on days when there are 10+ games, and 4 picks on games with 9 or less games. The only downside here is that it is complicated, and introduces more room for people to make errors and having a pick graded 'NO ACTION'.
Those are my thoughts.
hno:
