First, let me throw some stats at you. Crabs subforum - 37k posts All other current SR subfora - 53k Of the top 10 most active players in the current season, 7 are Crabs: 1 HT Davis 2 JHF Howe 3 G Furball 4 JD Hurricane 5 GIMH Martyn 6 ZJ Brumby 7 OX Gbagbo 8 SIA Yates 9 BE Force 10 RG Cribb The Crabs are now significant favourites over the Spartans and bigger favourites over the other teams than the Spartans have been in the past 2 seasons (if the Crabs put their best XV out). If there is going to be a hiatus over the off-season, then this gap will only increase - the Crabs post in their sub-forum first and CricSim second whilst most other teams look to CricSim first and their SR sub-forum 3rd or 4th in the list. This has been exacerbated by the CricSim hiatus as a significant number of former top SR players have gone inactive, meaning they deteriorate whilst the Crabs improve (an average SR team has about 13 active players at the moment, whilst the Crabs have 25). So, if there is to be a Season 6 - should anything be done about the Crabs. Can anything be done about the Crabs? We've basically had a dominant team for the last 2-3 seasons, and I've never thought it was ideal for the sim (I would have signed for another team this year if I hadn't already read the tea leaves regarding the ascent of the Crabs). So, what are other people's thoughts. Here's the potential ways this could be addressed: Do nothing. We've had a dominant team before, it's someone else's go Disband the Crabs and look for a new 6th Franchise to replace them in order to spread Crabs players across the existing teams. The Crabs treat their subforum like the CricSim Pub - so maybe weight the posts in their subforum less (say, 50%) to reflect the fact that other teams don't get the benefit of SR sim post count increases from posting in the CricSim Pub Bring in a salary cap of some type - possibly only for the top 50 players in order to equalise the sim across the board Start from scratch with 6 new teams. Not a favoured option from me, but one that should be in the mix I guess. Any other ideas that people have I'm sure there's someone out there who will say "I told you so" about the Crabs, but there's no doubting that they've been a success and good for the site overall.
Cull a different team and strengthen both first and second division. :ninja: edit: provided the crabs don't sign any of them
Is it possible to give us full weighting in threads regarding the sim and to basically count the rest of our posts as 50% or less? I think that'd be best.
Yeah it's a tough one really. I guess the difference between the Crabs and the Spartans is that I can't see an end to Crab dominance. If their activity has been so huge since both their inception and cricsim's hiatus then I don't know what'll stop it. They'll continually get better relative to the rest - and everyone else will be playing for second. That said, I certainly don't think it's fair to the crabs and those who've busted a gut to bring them back to the pack, they've earnt their place on the top. I reckon starting afresh with 6 new teams will see us lose most of the crabs and a salary cap would too. I think the only option there is the 50% one. While it mightn't be fair I think it'd bring them back to the pack (but only temporarily, eventually they'll get back up imo)and given they use it as a pub, the actual rugby wouldn't matter much to them. Or alternatively you could keep it as is, but reduce the skill gap between each post rank; bring the teams a little closer. Then also code in an 'upset chance' - say a 5-10% chance that a big favourite is going to have a rank day. We see it irl, 1.10 favourites sometimes just have nightmare days. Coding in a chance that one team will rockup and just have a bad day isn't unrealistic, while it'd give everyone else a chance 1/10-20 times.
I want 80% of the posts the Spartans have made in OT moved into the subbie please, and 1/3 of my CW post count too while we're at it.
How about rather than weighting posts in our subforum less, you weight those in the public forum more? Surely that'd be a better measure of who is genuinely interested in the success of the sim. Worth bearing in mind that at this stage we haven't won anything yet. Surely there needs to be some reward for the improvement that has been shown before any talk of bringing us back to the field becomes an issue.
Their CW post count hasn't counted at all for this season. That's already gone. And as for the posts in OT, there's nothing stopping anyone creating pub-type threads in their own subforum, but then we come back to the argument that the general activity level on here is much less than it has been in the past, which has impacted much more heavily on non-Crabs than on the Crabs themselves.
You won the Reserves grade last year and would have gone unbeaten this year if you had a reserves kicker. Double-weighting for posts in the SR forum might help to some extent, but the point about the Crabs being more active in general as for some SR is the primary sim whereas for everyone else it's a most secondary still applies.
The sim already has a luck quotient in it which varies in blocks of x minutes. But your post summarises things quite succinctly. Do too much, and we might lose the Crabs (or some of the Crabs) players. Do nothing, and the sim becomes even more of a procession than is has been in the past. The adjustments I made to bring the pack closer together this season (higher weighting for current season posts, making post rank variances calculated based on a Ln function) have all actually benefitted the Crabs because of how they post. Another potential Crabs option is that they have to find x new signings a year. So they can keep the bulk of their squad, but have to have some n00bs. Basically, as things stand their seconds probably wouldn't come last in the SRC. So, an extra option is to double the number of teams and have squad sizes of 15 and have 2 divisions with promotion and relegation and force all existing teams to split in half.
I'm of the belief that if they're posting more in their subbie than anywhere else then it's actually hurting the activity of CricSim as a whole. Let's just take an extreme and say every member of a SR club just stopped posting everywhere else because they wanted to post in their subbie for whatever reason. CricSim would effectively be dead beyond those subbies. That's not a good thing. Not sure how serious Marcuss is, but he does have a point. The idea of the Crabs was to bring in more people to CricSim. It has achieved its goal. It doesn't need to exist anymore. If some of them, particularly ones who we never see posting anywhere but somehow has 20 posts per day, don't want to stay here, then I don't see what good would come from enticing them to stay. What I don't understand is why they aren't just posting on CW.
Some of them literally don't post at all on CW any more. As for why they can't discuss some of what they do on the wider CricSim, I think I understand why, but you'd have to ask some of them their reasons. And, for the record, guys like Howe, Furball, Quaggas and a couple of the others would probably still be in the top 10 with their non-Crabs subforum posting (Howe in particular nearly has more SR posts this season than me, some of which is due to him doing some of the sim-broadcasting)
Yet if we don't win first grade this season, which isn't out of the question, we'll be penalised before we've won anything with true meaning. I could see merit in spreading out our reserves players if you're worried about the potential impact of new players coming up against a dominant side, but stripping the abilities of our firsts side is a bit over the top in my opinion. I've spent every season at the least active CricSim club and have no doubt that my postcount would be higher if I'd spent some time at certain other clubs, but I've never argued that other subforums should have their activity discouraged.
To be fair, a pretty large number of the Crabs are fairly active in the actual Cricsim side of the site (when it's running). I guess the difference is that, as Heef noted, we go to the Crabs subbie first then the rest of the site next. When activity is down on the whole then it's no surprise we're just like everyone else and don't post as much. It's just that we have somewhere else to post that keeps us coming back, even if it isn't part of the main site.
I think completely dismantling the side is the wrong way to go about it. If subforum posting is the issue, weigh the posts so it's not much of an issue like you suggested - or eliminate subforum posts counting at all.
I would tend to agree, but it's clear that the Crabs use their sub-forum in a very different way. It is the primary forum visited for 90% of their members. It creates a very different dynamic. As I've said previously, if there is a S6, there'll probably be a gap from July to November. In this time, other clubs will probably post half a dozen posts a month in their sub-forum at most. The Crabs will post thousands. By the start of S6, the Crabs are likely to have more posts than the other clubs combined. It isn't sustainable.
I don't see why there's panic over a side that isn't even that good yet. Spartans being the only side that could possibly win anything for years is the number one killer of this sim, but the Crabs actually looking like they might a successful club is enough to bring culling the team into the equation. What a joke. Do a quick count of Union discussion and sim discussion threads since the start of season 4. Myself, Brumby, Quaggas, Weeman and Hurricane (plus you and Mariner) will be on top. Not that any of us are the best players in our position yet despite that. Alternatively, try removing any Spartans sub forum posts, not forgetting a couple thousand Crabs posts from Cribbage, and see how good you are. I was once told that the reason the Spartans deserved to dominate SR was because the sub forum was so good and they had made the team themselves.
I think some of the Crabs guys are great and contribute in a positive way to CricSim, but I can look at a list of their players and I daresay I'd struggle to recognise most of their names in any context outside of SR. That is the problem. In my mind, post ranks are a way of rewarding activity that is at least in some way related to the sim in question. You do get threads that aren't directly related but are aimed at trying to get the rest of the members more active. When you've got a situation like the Crabs where the majority of their players post everything, related or otherwise, in their own subbie, then they're not contributing to CricSim or even SR. From what it sounds like they're just posting what song they're listening to or what movie they just watched. These are all things that everyone is doing elsewhere, because we actually want to engage with the rest of the forums.
