32 coaches online • Server time: 09:22
* * * Did you know? The highest gate in a single match is 243000.
Recent Forum Topics  Gnomes are trash | FDL only 3 spots lef... | Secret League Americ... |
2007-09-12 03:47:25
57 votes, rating 4.8
57 votes, rating 4.8
To Foul or Not to Foul? That is the question...
Cool articles on fouling:
http://fumbbl.com/help:ShepherdOnFouling
http://fumbbl.com/help:SynnOnFouling
[Edit: Plorg on Fouling - http://fumbbl.com/FUMBBL.php?page=blog&coach=21404]
At first these articles seem poles apart and were probably set out to argue their points from opposing corners of the ring. However, having read these articles objectively and tried to view them in the context in which they were written, I think that they are both valid and well thought-out arguments. Yes, both of them. It’s like an argument over how to eat Cadbury’s Crème Eggs “How do you eat yours?”, the problem is not how, but that they taste awful! :P (Edit: sorry, UK specific quip). My own take on these articles and the whole fouling debate is that, for me at least, the real object of discussion should not be fouling per se but whether Dirty Player (and arguably both Razor Sharp Claws & Get The Ref) is too powerful within LRB 4.
I'm still new to Fumbbl in many ways, so maybe my view is naïve but I believe I’ve played enough Fumbbl games to have a grasp of the conundrum. So perhaps a different view (or perhaps not so different, as I can’t profess to have read the vast majority of the forum posts ;-)) will help you find some common ground, a middle road. I know that in trying to write this blog my own opinions have been moulded from vague emotive responses to clearer and more refined ideas.
My stats show that I don't foul much, averaging at the moment 0.51 fouls a game in all divisions and 0.43 in ranked. There are reasons for this. During my early Fumbbl sessions it was impressed upon me that fouling was mean and not the done thing, bad sportsmanship/etiquette. First impressions often linger and mine did.
In the early days (or nights!), I was predominantly playing my Norse side Volsunga in Ranked. As my team climbed in TR, I found that it was getting bashed around by more heavily armoured opponents and being outplayed by elves. Having seen a few of my players getting stomped on by opposing Dirty Players, I thought to myself “I’ll get me one of those, that’s the ticket, if only as a deterrent.” This idea proved to be a fallacy. There is no point in getting a skill and not using it. The only deterring it did was to scare away non-Dirty Player playing teams, and if you’re going to wait for the opposing Dirty Player to foul you first before you respond, then you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of more boots than you can dish back.
So say you find yourself in a game where both teams have Dirty Player(s). As Shepherd rightly points out this can degenerate into a fouling competition (especially if the ref is "Got"), which isn't necessarily a bad thing if both coaches like that sort of thing. Certainly it seems to me that there is a skill to fouling. I, myself, am woefully bad at this and this has contributed to my aversion to fouling. Not only do I find that I get negative equity from fouling, which I think is in part due to my general lack of Dirty Player, I also find it difficult to work it into my thinking/plans for each turn. In fact, I found that trying to work a foul into my turn actually made me play worse. There is definitely a skill to gaining equity from fouls, whilst performing the vital functions of your turn and not leaving yourself vastly out of position by surrounding that ST4, AG5, Tackle, Strip Ball, Sidestepping, Wardancing, #$%@*?#%@*&$ ! that you have finally got on the ground...
Whilst generally not fouling players I have found that Synn's advice often holds true: "if someone is better equipped to foul, then don't foul back. Leave that eye on them and watch their team shrink." In fact taking this a step further I stopped developing my fouling game at all. Having gotten one Dirty Player each for my Norse in Ranked and Unranked, I didn’t get any others, I even stopped trying to foul each turn when I “got the ref”. In some games when I had “got the ref” I didn’t foul at all.
It still rankled though and the less bloodthirsty fouler could gain significant advantage by using their Dirty Player more sparingly, i.e. when the eye is not on them, which happens at least twice in a match. Risking a 6 spp lineman to get rid of the opponent's main "man" when you are 3 times more likely to get him permanently out of the game than you are to be sent off (See Note 1) is a massive advantage. It seems a no brainer. You could argue that if you do not foul with a Dirty Player in LRB 4 when you don't have the eye, assuming you can do it without positional/tactical disadvantage, then you are missing a neat trick. This of course includes those teams/people who don't start with a Dirty Player in the first place, a group to which I normally belong. The consequence of this realisation was that, all other things being equal, I stopped playing teams with Dirty Players. If I had one and my opponent also only had one that was fine. I also made exceptions with my dwarves who seemed to have a rather brutal CAS record, which was pointed out to me by a prospective opponent.
This should of course be fine. In an open league people should be entitled to decide if they don't want to play against Dirty Players and indeed against teams that don't play against teams with Dirty Players. Tolerance is a virtue, but it can also be short-sighted blindness. I am coming to realise that fouling is a key tactic in Bloodbowl, as Synn points out: "Without fouling... there is just nothing a lighter team can do about nasty Orc blitzers or claw laden Chaos Warriors. Besides... all teams can get players with Dirty Player (except stunties). The teams that get the best use of Dirty Player are the ones with lower armor. Everyone's AV is 7 on the ground."
As I mentioned above my contention is that Dirty Player is too powerful in LRB 4. I feel that this line of reasoning is supported by that fact that its power has halved in LRB 5 (see Note 2) and its effectiveness reduced even more (as explained below). Even the plain vanilla fouler lost +1 to the armour roll (see Note 3).
So making a slight detour we can see that the champion of CAS for blocking in LRB 4 is RSC, as AndyBurns graphically illustrates:
http://fumbbl.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=11520&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
The reason for this is that the +2 modifier (from RSC) on the injury roll improves your chances of a BH+ by 150%, where as a +1 modifier (from MB) only makes an improvement of about 66%. These statistics can be translated to fouling i.e. by reducing the power of Dirty Player by half, the improvement of your chances of a BH+ on the injury roll have been reduced from 150% to about 66%. The fact that RSC was removed from LRB 5 indicates further that the +2 injury roll modifier in LRB 4 is too powerful, not “broken” just unbalanced.
The reduction to a +1 modifier on injury rolls and removal of a standard +1 armour roll modifier for fouling makes it a less awesome tactic. The "3 times more likely to get him permanently out of the game" statistic is reduced down to 2 times, and that action may require you to commit a significant proportion of your team to assist in the action, in order to get the automatic armour break. This forces the fouler to be more strategic and to position his players more tactically in his fouling to remain effective. Like using chain pushes to get more blocks and crowd surfing.
Other significant changes in LRB 5 included: how Fan Factor changes were determined; how Fan Factor effected the kick-off results and the modification of “get the ref” on the kick-off chart. LRB 4 Fan Factor change determination seriously rewards those teams who can keep getting 2 TDs and 2 CAS. Getting 2 CAS every game can become quite tricky if you are relying on blocks alone. The way the “Fumbbl” system works for Fan Factor, as I understand it, is that CAS from fouls count towards the 2 CAS needed for higher Fan Factor. There is probably a good technical reason for this, maybe SkiJunkies client doesn’t distinguish “block” CAS from “foul” CAS, I don’t know. The result is that when you play against a fouling team, that can regularly score 2 TDs, they will usually have a higher Fan Factor than you. Not only do they want to foul you, but they need to foul you in order to keep their Fan Factor up. Then on the odd 1/18 chance per kick-off that the “ref is got” then there is a good chance that your team will be mauled and maybe even retired. The LRB 5 system could change this as teams would not be directly reliant on CAS to improve Fan Factor and the system would not have to determine which CAS is from fouling and which CAS is not. Fan Factor has largely been reduced in power at kick-off via the use of FAME (Fan Advantage Modifier); and “get the ref” will, in LRB 5, always work for both teams (so at least you don’t get sent off when you retaliate).
A further bonus in LRB 5 is "Sneaky Git" (see Note 4), which will predominantly help weedier AG dependant teams, as I don't feel Synn is exact with "The teams that get the best use of Dirty Player are the ones with lower armor. " Light armour can come with high AG as dispensation and tellingly higher cost to recompensate. The largest benefactors of Dirty Player in my opinion are low AV, low cost linemen i.e. Norse, Skaven, Skeles and Zons (list not exhaustive).
Looking on the site we can see that many of the more highly rated coaches on Fumbbl average at least 1 foul a game, based on the statistics tabs that I have read, but often it’s more like 1.5. These aren’t ultra-foulers, they are just normal coaches who have found fouling to be a useful positive-equity play. You could argue that within the top 30 ranked coaches on Fumbbl there are a number of coaches with low foul ratios, some even as low as 0.4-0.63 (Dalibor, DrDookums, Askrum, AvatarDM, Linfalass, Hovring and raae – at the time of writing), and you would be right. I can’t help feeling, however, that perhaps they are doing it the hard way, perhaps as PurpleChest mentions in his bio, they are seeking an elegance to their game. However, while 7 out of 30 might sound OK, fact is that only 1 of them is in the top 10 and only 3 of them in the top twenty. There seems a definite skew in fouling ratio on the front page of the coach list by rating.
I have come to comprehend that by annexing fouling out of my game I have stunted my development as a coach. It would be as if I had decided not to crowd push or stall, which are two of my most common tactics. By developing fouling, crowd pushing and stalling strategies you also improve your ability to defend against these very tactics. It has also occurred to me that we live in a world where: in "soccer" they invariably stall the last minutes (and in some cases last 10 minutes) of the game; in basketball fouls are used tactically until players are at risk of being ejected from the game; and in Rugby and American Football players are often “forced out of bounds…”
My point is this, we play "Blood"bowl. We use sneaky goblins, nasty orcs, evil dark elves and shambling skeles. It is not called NFL-bowl and the differences from the real world make it a more interesting game play. If they didn’t I guess we’d be all playing John Madden or some other such game. Fouling is part of the rich tapestry that is Bloodbowl, it is part of the "interesting and complex system" that Shepherd talks about and so removing fouling would be "reductive" too.
I feel that the changes to the LRB 5 rule set have balanced out the problems and that fouling can be considered a more palatable and respectable tactic in Bloodbowl. Really it’s not much worse than Mighty Blow, bearing in mind the number of blocks we make in comparison to fouls.
“What does all this mean?” - Not a lot really. LRB 5 is yet to come to Fumbbl, in it’s entirety. My guess is that it will take a while and that there may be a long transition period.
“So where do we go from here?” – Well, as Curro once told me, “you should do whatever you want to do.” Play how you want, with whomever you want. Just make sure you check out with whom you’re playing via their Bio, Statistics and Awards tabs or else you’ll know who to blame, in game, when you get a surprise. As for me, I’m looking forward to LRB 5 when it finally arrives to Fumbbl, but I don’t want to rest on my laurels and fouling isn’t going to go away. As Synn says “Lets face it... fouling will remain. Every major sees teams of every race stocking DPs.” So I’m working on my “F-game”, I’ve created a khemri team called “Foul Play 1978”. L-Plates on my bumpers to give people good warning of what I’m attempting to do. Although 3 games in and I’m only on 1 foul for the whole team. I’ve yet to select Dirty Player for one of the skeletons despite having 3 skills to distribute (convincing myself to get 2 blocks and a kick). What can I say? It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots to the stripes of a tiger, my F-game needs WORK!
Well what started out as partially conceived thoughts became words dumped into my bio that in turn were transformed into my first blog. It is certainly longer than I had intended and so closing in my best Jerry Springer imitation, the moral of today’s blog is: "Foul and let not foul. Not foul and let foul. Until next time, be respectful of your fellow coaches and take extra CARE of those players on the floor..."
Notes:
1) “3 times more likely to get him permanently out of the game than you are to be sent off “ – assumes automatic armour break from assists, injury roll of 10+ after +2 modification and that the coach is still on the pitch to Argue the Call if the player is caught fouling).
2) “power was halved in LRB 5” – “A player with this skill has trained long and hard to learn every dirty trick in the book. Add 1 to the Armour roll or Injury roll made by a player with this skill when they make a Foul as part of a Foul Action…”
3) “even the plain vanilla fouler lost +1 to the armour roll” – “The coach nominates the victim, and then makes the Armour roll for him, adding +1 to the score.” changed to “The coach nominates the victim, and then makes the Armour roll for him.” From LRB 4 to 5.
4) “Sneaky Git” – “This player has the quickness and finesse to stick the boot to a downed opponent without drawing a referee’s attention unless he hears the armour crack. During a Foul Action a player with this skill is not ejected for rolling doubles on the Armour roll unless the Armour roll was successful.”
http://fumbbl.com/help:ShepherdOnFouling
http://fumbbl.com/help:SynnOnFouling
[Edit: Plorg on Fouling - http://fumbbl.com/FUMBBL.php?page=blog&coach=21404]
At first these articles seem poles apart and were probably set out to argue their points from opposing corners of the ring. However, having read these articles objectively and tried to view them in the context in which they were written, I think that they are both valid and well thought-out arguments. Yes, both of them. It’s like an argument over how to eat Cadbury’s Crème Eggs “How do you eat yours?”, the problem is not how, but that they taste awful! :P (Edit: sorry, UK specific quip). My own take on these articles and the whole fouling debate is that, for me at least, the real object of discussion should not be fouling per se but whether Dirty Player (and arguably both Razor Sharp Claws & Get The Ref) is too powerful within LRB 4.
I'm still new to Fumbbl in many ways, so maybe my view is naïve but I believe I’ve played enough Fumbbl games to have a grasp of the conundrum. So perhaps a different view (or perhaps not so different, as I can’t profess to have read the vast majority of the forum posts ;-)) will help you find some common ground, a middle road. I know that in trying to write this blog my own opinions have been moulded from vague emotive responses to clearer and more refined ideas.
My stats show that I don't foul much, averaging at the moment 0.51 fouls a game in all divisions and 0.43 in ranked. There are reasons for this. During my early Fumbbl sessions it was impressed upon me that fouling was mean and not the done thing, bad sportsmanship/etiquette. First impressions often linger and mine did.
In the early days (or nights!), I was predominantly playing my Norse side Volsunga in Ranked. As my team climbed in TR, I found that it was getting bashed around by more heavily armoured opponents and being outplayed by elves. Having seen a few of my players getting stomped on by opposing Dirty Players, I thought to myself “I’ll get me one of those, that’s the ticket, if only as a deterrent.” This idea proved to be a fallacy. There is no point in getting a skill and not using it. The only deterring it did was to scare away non-Dirty Player playing teams, and if you’re going to wait for the opposing Dirty Player to foul you first before you respond, then you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of more boots than you can dish back.
So say you find yourself in a game where both teams have Dirty Player(s). As Shepherd rightly points out this can degenerate into a fouling competition (especially if the ref is "Got"), which isn't necessarily a bad thing if both coaches like that sort of thing. Certainly it seems to me that there is a skill to fouling. I, myself, am woefully bad at this and this has contributed to my aversion to fouling. Not only do I find that I get negative equity from fouling, which I think is in part due to my general lack of Dirty Player, I also find it difficult to work it into my thinking/plans for each turn. In fact, I found that trying to work a foul into my turn actually made me play worse. There is definitely a skill to gaining equity from fouls, whilst performing the vital functions of your turn and not leaving yourself vastly out of position by surrounding that ST4, AG5, Tackle, Strip Ball, Sidestepping, Wardancing, #$%@*?#%@*&$ ! that you have finally got on the ground...
Whilst generally not fouling players I have found that Synn's advice often holds true: "if someone is better equipped to foul, then don't foul back. Leave that eye on them and watch their team shrink." In fact taking this a step further I stopped developing my fouling game at all. Having gotten one Dirty Player each for my Norse in Ranked and Unranked, I didn’t get any others, I even stopped trying to foul each turn when I “got the ref”. In some games when I had “got the ref” I didn’t foul at all.
It still rankled though and the less bloodthirsty fouler could gain significant advantage by using their Dirty Player more sparingly, i.e. when the eye is not on them, which happens at least twice in a match. Risking a 6 spp lineman to get rid of the opponent's main "man" when you are 3 times more likely to get him permanently out of the game than you are to be sent off (See Note 1) is a massive advantage. It seems a no brainer. You could argue that if you do not foul with a Dirty Player in LRB 4 when you don't have the eye, assuming you can do it without positional/tactical disadvantage, then you are missing a neat trick. This of course includes those teams/people who don't start with a Dirty Player in the first place, a group to which I normally belong. The consequence of this realisation was that, all other things being equal, I stopped playing teams with Dirty Players. If I had one and my opponent also only had one that was fine. I also made exceptions with my dwarves who seemed to have a rather brutal CAS record, which was pointed out to me by a prospective opponent.
This should of course be fine. In an open league people should be entitled to decide if they don't want to play against Dirty Players and indeed against teams that don't play against teams with Dirty Players. Tolerance is a virtue, but it can also be short-sighted blindness. I am coming to realise that fouling is a key tactic in Bloodbowl, as Synn points out: "Without fouling... there is just nothing a lighter team can do about nasty Orc blitzers or claw laden Chaos Warriors. Besides... all teams can get players with Dirty Player (except stunties). The teams that get the best use of Dirty Player are the ones with lower armor. Everyone's AV is 7 on the ground."
As I mentioned above my contention is that Dirty Player is too powerful in LRB 4. I feel that this line of reasoning is supported by that fact that its power has halved in LRB 5 (see Note 2) and its effectiveness reduced even more (as explained below). Even the plain vanilla fouler lost +1 to the armour roll (see Note 3).
So making a slight detour we can see that the champion of CAS for blocking in LRB 4 is RSC, as AndyBurns graphically illustrates:
http://fumbbl.com/index.php?name=PNphpBB2&file=viewtopic&t=11520&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15
The reason for this is that the +2 modifier (from RSC) on the injury roll improves your chances of a BH+ by 150%, where as a +1 modifier (from MB) only makes an improvement of about 66%. These statistics can be translated to fouling i.e. by reducing the power of Dirty Player by half, the improvement of your chances of a BH+ on the injury roll have been reduced from 150% to about 66%. The fact that RSC was removed from LRB 5 indicates further that the +2 injury roll modifier in LRB 4 is too powerful, not “broken” just unbalanced.
The reduction to a +1 modifier on injury rolls and removal of a standard +1 armour roll modifier for fouling makes it a less awesome tactic. The "3 times more likely to get him permanently out of the game" statistic is reduced down to 2 times, and that action may require you to commit a significant proportion of your team to assist in the action, in order to get the automatic armour break. This forces the fouler to be more strategic and to position his players more tactically in his fouling to remain effective. Like using chain pushes to get more blocks and crowd surfing.
Other significant changes in LRB 5 included: how Fan Factor changes were determined; how Fan Factor effected the kick-off results and the modification of “get the ref” on the kick-off chart. LRB 4 Fan Factor change determination seriously rewards those teams who can keep getting 2 TDs and 2 CAS. Getting 2 CAS every game can become quite tricky if you are relying on blocks alone. The way the “Fumbbl” system works for Fan Factor, as I understand it, is that CAS from fouls count towards the 2 CAS needed for higher Fan Factor. There is probably a good technical reason for this, maybe SkiJunkies client doesn’t distinguish “block” CAS from “foul” CAS, I don’t know. The result is that when you play against a fouling team, that can regularly score 2 TDs, they will usually have a higher Fan Factor than you. Not only do they want to foul you, but they need to foul you in order to keep their Fan Factor up. Then on the odd 1/18 chance per kick-off that the “ref is got” then there is a good chance that your team will be mauled and maybe even retired. The LRB 5 system could change this as teams would not be directly reliant on CAS to improve Fan Factor and the system would not have to determine which CAS is from fouling and which CAS is not. Fan Factor has largely been reduced in power at kick-off via the use of FAME (Fan Advantage Modifier); and “get the ref” will, in LRB 5, always work for both teams (so at least you don’t get sent off when you retaliate).
A further bonus in LRB 5 is "Sneaky Git" (see Note 4), which will predominantly help weedier AG dependant teams, as I don't feel Synn is exact with "The teams that get the best use of Dirty Player are the ones with lower armor. " Light armour can come with high AG as dispensation and tellingly higher cost to recompensate. The largest benefactors of Dirty Player in my opinion are low AV, low cost linemen i.e. Norse, Skaven, Skeles and Zons (list not exhaustive).
Looking on the site we can see that many of the more highly rated coaches on Fumbbl average at least 1 foul a game, based on the statistics tabs that I have read, but often it’s more like 1.5. These aren’t ultra-foulers, they are just normal coaches who have found fouling to be a useful positive-equity play. You could argue that within the top 30 ranked coaches on Fumbbl there are a number of coaches with low foul ratios, some even as low as 0.4-0.63 (Dalibor, DrDookums, Askrum, AvatarDM, Linfalass, Hovring and raae – at the time of writing), and you would be right. I can’t help feeling, however, that perhaps they are doing it the hard way, perhaps as PurpleChest mentions in his bio, they are seeking an elegance to their game. However, while 7 out of 30 might sound OK, fact is that only 1 of them is in the top 10 and only 3 of them in the top twenty. There seems a definite skew in fouling ratio on the front page of the coach list by rating.
I have come to comprehend that by annexing fouling out of my game I have stunted my development as a coach. It would be as if I had decided not to crowd push or stall, which are two of my most common tactics. By developing fouling, crowd pushing and stalling strategies you also improve your ability to defend against these very tactics. It has also occurred to me that we live in a world where: in "soccer" they invariably stall the last minutes (and in some cases last 10 minutes) of the game; in basketball fouls are used tactically until players are at risk of being ejected from the game; and in Rugby and American Football players are often “forced out of bounds…”
My point is this, we play "Blood"bowl. We use sneaky goblins, nasty orcs, evil dark elves and shambling skeles. It is not called NFL-bowl and the differences from the real world make it a more interesting game play. If they didn’t I guess we’d be all playing John Madden or some other such game. Fouling is part of the rich tapestry that is Bloodbowl, it is part of the "interesting and complex system" that Shepherd talks about and so removing fouling would be "reductive" too.
I feel that the changes to the LRB 5 rule set have balanced out the problems and that fouling can be considered a more palatable and respectable tactic in Bloodbowl. Really it’s not much worse than Mighty Blow, bearing in mind the number of blocks we make in comparison to fouls.
“What does all this mean?” - Not a lot really. LRB 5 is yet to come to Fumbbl, in it’s entirety. My guess is that it will take a while and that there may be a long transition period.
“So where do we go from here?” – Well, as Curro once told me, “you should do whatever you want to do.” Play how you want, with whomever you want. Just make sure you check out with whom you’re playing via their Bio, Statistics and Awards tabs or else you’ll know who to blame, in game, when you get a surprise. As for me, I’m looking forward to LRB 5 when it finally arrives to Fumbbl, but I don’t want to rest on my laurels and fouling isn’t going to go away. As Synn says “Lets face it... fouling will remain. Every major sees teams of every race stocking DPs.” So I’m working on my “F-game”, I’ve created a khemri team called “Foul Play 1978”. L-Plates on my bumpers to give people good warning of what I’m attempting to do. Although 3 games in and I’m only on 1 foul for the whole team. I’ve yet to select Dirty Player for one of the skeletons despite having 3 skills to distribute (convincing myself to get 2 blocks and a kick). What can I say? It’s hard for a leopard to change its spots to the stripes of a tiger, my F-game needs WORK!
Well what started out as partially conceived thoughts became words dumped into my bio that in turn were transformed into my first blog. It is certainly longer than I had intended and so closing in my best Jerry Springer imitation, the moral of today’s blog is: "Foul and let not foul. Not foul and let foul. Until next time, be respectful of your fellow coaches and take extra CARE of those players on the floor..."
Notes:
1) “3 times more likely to get him permanently out of the game than you are to be sent off “ – assumes automatic armour break from assists, injury roll of 10+ after +2 modification and that the coach is still on the pitch to Argue the Call if the player is caught fouling).
2) “power was halved in LRB 5” – “A player with this skill has trained long and hard to learn every dirty trick in the book. Add 1 to the Armour roll or Injury roll made by a player with this skill when they make a Foul as part of a Foul Action…”
3) “even the plain vanilla fouler lost +1 to the armour roll” – “The coach nominates the victim, and then makes the Armour roll for him, adding +1 to the score.” changed to “The coach nominates the victim, and then makes the Armour roll for him.” From LRB 4 to 5.
4) “Sneaky Git” – “This player has the quickness and finesse to stick the boot to a downed opponent without drawing a referee’s attention unless he hears the armour crack. During a Foul Action a player with this skill is not ejected for rolling doubles on the Armour roll unless the Armour roll was successful.”
Comments