Can't they just get on with seizing German assets in the country as war reparations?

I've run a complete simulation of ESEA Season 18 and there were some interesting results. One of the main grey areas is default wins/forfeits so I'm interested in people's opinions on this. My default approach to them is to ignore forfeited games - there was no game so no points, and because of the potential for forfeits to make the fantasy game more predictable - if you know it's coming up you can guarantee yourself x points by grabbing cheap players on the team that will win.

However there are some downsides, if a team ends up getting more defaults than another then those players end up scoring fewer points and it's probably pretty easy for a fantasy team owner to get caught out expecting a game only to find it doesn't count with no notice.

Any strong feelings either way anybody? Or just shit happens?

Because you'll be buying players the pricing will reflect the balance of the players where appropriate, although individual skill is probably the biggest factor.

Not really practical IMO for a number of reasons, and makes it impossible to know how your team are doing without a calculator.

This reminds me of something I wanted to include, bonus points for crushing the opposition by a huge margin (although this creates a pain with payload when it comes to HL). It is a problem, and even including negative stats like deaths cancelling frag points doesn't completely mitigate it.

I have come up with some alternatives but they all have their flaws. The biggest problem with them is that they aren't intuitive, you can't just look at the log or match page or whatever and work it out for yourself, you need to get a spreadsheet out or something which divorces people from the proceedings.

I think looking at things that blanket reward teams for a fast and easy win is probably the approach that makes the most sense to players. I'm not sure where that point is, maybe 2 or 3 points per player for each round difference to the winning team.

It does bring up some other problems, teams dropping, logs failing, etc, but in those cases I think you just have to accept shit happens.

I wouldn't want to open up pay-to-win options, but it would be nice if there were ways to support the site/generate some prizes. I'll have to give it some thought and try out some concrete ideas.

OK, dropping updated to brutally punish medics for their failure

Is it the whole idea or the 25% to modders you don't like?

If their mod is popular then they will be able to become pro/semi-pro mod developers. That will allow them to introduce far more professional levels of mod support. It also means that if they don't someone else will.

Let's talk about scoring

This is still in development, if I make a good run at it I might have something ready for the upcoming ESEA/ETF2L seasons.

At the moment I'm looking at something like this for each player:
+3 points for being on the winning team
+2 points per player for each round difference on the winning team
+1 for a kill
-1 for a death
+2 for popping uber
-3 for dropping uber
+1 for a medic kill
+2 kill by a medic
-1 for every other team member for every 5 times their medic dies
+2 for being top fragger
+2 for doing top damage
+2 for having the best KAD
+1 for longest killstreak
+1 for every 5 airshots
+1 for capturing a control point

I've had some suggestions for player of the week stuff but I think that would be a little complex to implement as a first step.

I'm not sure whether to put damage in there, something like a point for every 250 damage or so. The possibility of Conch spamming makes it a bit silly though. Is there anything else anyone would like to see? I'm trying to make sure it's workable from both ESEA stats which are pretty vanilla and a logs.tf page so anything too exotic probably won't be workable.

Presumably modders will be both motivated and funded to keep their mods functioning

It's automatic as soon as you stray from any bet that doesn't reflect the broad result, spread, exact score, etc. The other problem is that TF2 prize pools are generally so low that corruption could potentially outweigh the actual prize in many tournaments. You're right that it provides an incentive to potentially act outside of normal competitive behaviour though, and in such a way that it puts the average punter at a severe disadvantage.

A possible alternative would be to enhance the complexity of the bets, for example exact score in an MGE match would be much harder to guarantee, even if Mike sat on 19 points, throwing points until he could get an exact match he'll never know for sure that he can finish off his opponent at will. Similarly Froyo could bet easily they would win, but not by exactly how much on each map.

OK, you can split your malice with the other punters who decided to switch.

Obviously in an ideal world it would have been impossible to do this, but on the positive side everyone has a clearer picture where they now stand with minimal harm done.

Surely forcing nullified bets robbing other users of their winnings is malicious?

I know someone who wants to make sweet love to her.

I've hired. I only trust genuine nerds with programming jobs.