Team Gammon

[RickrInSF]

As some of you already know, i an amature programmer and have been working on a pet project - Team Gammon. The first try was a complete bust, having a captain responsible for the two other players was never a good idea. So i decided to make it more like flg, where everyone has to register, and all matches will be reported and confirmed. So..... Rev 2 is ready for beta testing.
The format is three players on a team, each player playes three bg matches, one with each of the other players. If a team wins 5 out of the 9 bg matches, they win the team match.
Since, the players do not play the same match lengths, where you place your players (player 1, player 2, or player 3) matters.
Read the rules for a much more complicated explination.

The looks are still a little rough, i simply went with the defaults for this web site so far, if there is enough interest in Team Gammon, i will improve the looks and i welcome all input and or critisizm. There also of course may still be bugs, so please bear with me, i am only a beginner.

Link to main page (please refer people to here) http://www.anncordova.com/Backgammon/TeamGammon.aspx
Please sign up (one account per email) and try it out, i will try to be around most of the weekend to activate accounts, for questions, comments, suggestions and/or general abuse. (and to fix any bugs that may arise, check home page or here for announcements on known bugs and or fixes)

[RickrInSF]

I think there may be a misconception that if you sign up, you are committing yourself to playing league or games, you are not. If you sign up, it only allows you to create teams and then challenge other teams to matches, league play or tournament play is not ready yet.

[RickrInSF]

Woo Hoo! i now have 6 people signed up. This makes a match possible. I'm not sure how many match possilities there r now. but i know with each three players, there r six teams possible.

[RickrInSF]

ok people, please help me out,

there are 6 possible teams for each 3 players

how many distict matches are possible?

between pairing there are 36 possible matches?

so 6*6*6 possible matches with 6 players?

[RickrInSF]

I now have 8 players registered, but no teams created. Has anyone besides me tried? if you have tried, was it self explanitory or do i need instructions somewhere? Did you try and not succeed? or did no one try because they don't know where to start?

I sense a resistance to commitment here at FIBS
First - Signing up at Team Gammon does NOT automatically join you in a team or league, it merely lets you use the site.
Second - creating a team does NOT commit you to playing any games with that team, it allows you to issue challenges and accept challenges - everyone on the team must accept a challenge match, including the two other team members of the challenging player. When/if i start a league, teams will have to register (meaning all three players will have to accept).

So, please people try it out, there is NO commitment to signing up or creating a team!

[sixty_something]

i tried to find who the other registered players are, but could not find a list amywhere obvious .. commitment is probably not as much a problem as distraction and confusion over something new .. remember my comment about herding cats?

now, i am somewhat confused about what a team is .. reading your second point, seems to imply that one must be on a team, but you are "NOT commit[ed] ... to playing any games with that team" .. so, maybe a little more explanation wouldn't hurt

btw, beginning tomorrow, i'll be out of town for a week .. so, i'm not committed to anything until i get back

[RickrInSF]

when you try to create a team, the drop down lists will display all avail (registered and active) players (i will make this alphabetical soon

[RickrInSF]

oh yea, as to what a team is - a team is three players (order matters, remember the same three players can have 6 different teams). A team may or may not have any experience, or played any matches. A team needs ALL players to accept being on that team, for it to become active. A team requires a unique name. A team's initial rating is the average of all team members.

You may be on as many teams as you want, but you may not play a match until you belong to a team You may create a team to play another team, and never use it again, or you may never use it in the first place, accepting matches or registering to be on league are separate.

[diane]

Ok, this helps - will give it a go 

[RickrInSF]

ok, this is likely to fail like the other team efforts in the past. That is the reason i didn't start with league play (and is the reason many other pages i have ideas for, i have not put the work into). If people don't like match play, why join league? So, i started with match play, if enough people enjoy it and participate i will gladly start a league, along with most suggestions on how to make the site better (including couples team gammon, tournament play, etc). To me, this is an exercise in programming. I believe i have an idea that is good, maybe even great , but if it doesn't survive match play, then i will concede that it wasn't that great

So, i'm asking people to try it out, sign up and try it. If you don't like it, you don't have to do anything, nothing happens without players accepting.

If it DOES survive match play (ie i get enough players interested), then i WILL commit myself to making the site work.

[RickrInSF]

Woo Hoo! i now have 11 people signed up! moonshadow and BackgaMother were both able to create teams, all players must accept for the team to become active, pls check your Create/View Teams to see if they invited you.

[RickrInSF]

Another milestone, we have an active team (meaning all three players have accepted). "Triple" is blotsalot, RickrInSF, and BackgaMother, if we get another team that does not have any of us on it, we can play a match.

I have brought back Angelbot to advertise team gammon, when fully functional, i plan for her to sign on to fibs every 23 hrs, and if no one talks to her in 5 min or so, she will issue a random message with team gammon url in it.

If someone that is already signed up on team gammon (and a few others), there will be a unique message, any and all suggestions are welcome.

Anyone else shouting to angel will get random "personalized" message (a message with thier username in it somewhere).

please help me with suggestions for her to shout, i can put them all in and use them randomly

[RickrInSF]

another milestone, the second team is now formed - "The Calithumpians" - moonshadow, diane, and WildThing (from the home page, you can click on Complete Team List to see the teams that are formed)

we also have two matches in the challenge stage (both "Triple" vs. "The Calithumpians")

ok people, we r almost to the fun part!

[RickrInSF]

finally, we are to the fun part (playing backgammon)! woo hoo! The Calithumpians vs. Triple - it is a 9.7.5 match, so it must be won with 5 games.
First round:
9 ptr. moonshadow vs. BackgaMother
7 ptr. diane vs. RickrInSF
9 ptr. WildThing vs. blotsalot

for those looking ahead - Second round:
7 ptr. moonshadow vs. RickrInSF
7 ptr. diane vs. blotsalot
5 ptr. WildThing vs. BackgaMother

third round played only if needed

members:
http://www.anncordova.com/FIBS/TeamGammonMatch.aspx?13

[RickrInSF]

team gammon strategy:
(from here on out i will refer to a backgammon match as a game, and a team gammon match as a match)
i will use the current match between "The Calithumpians" and "Triple" as example.

Round 1:
Team 1 Player 1 vs Team 2 Player 3 - 9 ptr
Team 1 Player 2 vs Team 2 Player 2 - 7 ptr
Team 1 Player 3 vs Team 2 Player 1 - 9 ptr

i expect most first rounds to end with one team winning two games, the other team one game. Your strongest player should go in the player 1 slot, so, your best player in the longest game should beat a player 3. (player 3 should be better at the long games, not always ranked 3rd, but if the teams are about equal - player 3 will usually be ranked lower than other teams player 1)

so in the first round the "swing" game will most often be player 2 against player 2

of course if either team wins all three games, it will probably not go past the second round.

moonshadow beat BackgaMother so "The Calithumpians"  are ahead with one win. (points are not important with 9.7.5 matches and above, it always takes 5 games to win) - this is the "expected" result (by expected result or when i say usually, i mean the higher ranking player wins and both teams are of about equal rank)


if blotsalot beats WildThing the match between diane and me will decide who goes to the second round with the advantage, if WildThing pulls off the upset, I can still "save" the round from total disaster by beating diane.

[RickrInSF]

feedback please!

i begged diane for critisizm and she forced me to look at how poor a job i did with the menu structure, so first project when i get back home (i'm bird sitting will be the menu, it takes me time for it to look good, so bear with me.

but, what i'm having most fun with is angelbot, the ability to integrate angel's ability to shout, respond to shouts, tells, and response to tells gives me many ideas.

but first:

please help me with suggestions as to what she should randomly shout if no one talks to her
please help me with suggestions as to what she should say if you shout to her
please help me by telling me if ANY thing angel says is obnoxious or if the whole idea is obnoxious

[sixty_something]

Rickr, i love your enthusiasm, but beware you are treading on thin ice letting a bot shout .. look at all the criticism MissManners gets, think about how you feel when you see NacciBot spam (or my tourney spam), remember JokeBot, and even don's lyric bot which was quite cool, imho .. so, good luck if you choose to put angel into the shouts fray .. she and you may need to toughen up

i had some ideas regarding how a bot might be able to help with tournament participation:

• Build a "subscription" list of anyone who plays in tourneys for sending reminders in FIBS messages 24 hours in advance of a tourney .. of course, such a "subscription" list would need a cancel function and an ability to not leave more than a few messages when a user has not logged in for a long period of time
• an InviteBot when a tourney opens .. it would be nice to send tells to anyone that might qualify for a tourney .. such a bot would need settings such as Exp, Rep, rating, and phone user to qualify the invites as well as an ability to subscribe/unsubscribe
• ReminderBot (Tom has this implemented in TourneyBot when a long running tourney is ongoing, TourneyBot will advise on login of whom you amay have an unfinished tournament match) - you could do one for Team Gammon matches
• PhoneBot - a bot that identifies phone users for sending them tells specific to tournaments for phone users only (or tourneys where they might be welcome), article links at fibsboard,
• much more, but can't recall at the moment

[RickrInSF]

i agree bots shouting can be obnoxious, naccibot no longer bothers me, i simply gag it. MissManners used to bother me, but i find her too usefull to gag. This is the reason i have asked for some feed back before implimenting angelbot completely.

I think most team gammon tournaments will be run "league syle" (not all at once, but reporting win/loss whenever played - dailygammon style - kinda) so, if angelbot is used here, it will be in tells only. Tournaments and league are a long way off, there needs to be many more players first.

Right now, the only (valid) reason i can think of angel to shout is to advertise, i have tried to make angel seem more alive than other bots, my attempt and making her liked more than gagged If/when there are enough players/teams, angel will (probably) quit shouting (unless prompted) completely. Until then, i plan for her to be able to shout every hour, but only shout on her own every 23 hrs (to try to get everyone aware of team gammon).

The first tell command i will work on will be a "tell angelbot report", angelbot will come back with something like "RickrInSF has 0 invitations to join a team, 0 challenges that need acceptance, and 1 active match"

As for phone users, they will be treated like everyone else, they will not be able to join if thier repbot reputation is bad. I play many phone users without problems.

[moonshadow123]

rickinsf

Several days ago, while watching a FIBS match, several of us were discussing  "Team Gammon" and you asked for feedback.

I had found the site to be extremely confusing and difficult to navigate, but I didn't think it fair to state that without making an effort to explain why I found it confusing or without offering a few suggestions as to how it could be improved.

Although I declined give a quickie superficial response in kibitz, I agreed to put something here on fibsboard, where I can give a more thoughtful and hopefully constructive response.

1.   The name "Team Gammon" is a confusing choice for the project name as it infers "Team Gammon" is one of many "teams", including the current team Callithumpian or team Triplet, when in fact "Team Gammon" is not a team at all, but a league.

"League Gammon" would perhaps be a more logical and semantically apt descriptor, as a "league" can be comprised of "teams" but a "team" cannot be comprised of "leagues".

2.   The use of "match" to describe what is actually a tournament is confusing, especially how they are used in menu headings. When one team comprised of 3 players challenges another team to a series of matches, as for example a 9-7-3 match length format, that competition  cannot be called a "match".

Two teams of 3 players each playing individual matches in successive rounds of play until a certain number of points are accumulated and a victor declared would best be described as a "tournament".

For the sake of clarity and consistency I suggest a changing wherever you have used "match" or "matches" to "tournament".  "Complete Match List" would therefore become "Complete Tournament List", "View Your Matches" would morph into "View Your Tournaments", etc.

Team is to league, what match is to tournament.

3.   I found navigation to be difficult and not very intuitive.  This is not related to programming per se, but more to do with organizing information in a manner so that it is readily accessible. With that said, and after having spent some effort thinking about how to improve site navigation, I've come up with the following suggestions for possible consideration.

The menu headings facilitate navigation and are hopefully organized to avoid going down dead end cul-de-sacs. For the information on each page I've put actual links from the current site to indicate what information would go under a particular grouping of menus.

==========
HOME PAGE

SIGNUP   RULES   LOGIN

==========
TEAM PAGE
HOME   PROFILE   RULES     CREATE TEAM   TOURNEYS   LOGOUT

http://www.anncordova.com/FIBS/TeamGammonTeamList.aspx

==========

CREATE TEAM PAGE
HOME   PROFILE   RULES    TEAMS   TOURNEYS   LOGOUT

http://www.anncordova.com/FIBS/TeamGammonUserPage.aspx

==========
TOURNEY PAGE
HOME   PROFILE   RULES   TEAMS    CREATE TOURNEY    LOGOUT

http://www.anncordova.com/FIBS/TeamGammonActiveMatches.aspx

==========
CREATE TOURNEY PAGE
HOME   PROFILE   RULES   TEAMS    TOURNEYS    LOGOUT

http://www.anncordova.com/FIBS/TeamGammonNewMatch.aspx

==========


Hope this is helpful and constructive,

moon

[RickrInSF]

Thank you moonshadow,
I appreciate the time you spent for the feedback.

Team Gammon is just my "brand name" for team backgammon, i think i've invested too much in it to change it now, but in hindsight, i should have named it "Team Backgammon", i just thought team gammon was easier to say and type.

I resist changing matches to tournaments, only because i plans for team tournaments and team leagues, and i wouldn't know what to call them if i called a team match a tournament. As per earlier post, i myself have a problem with the term "match", so defined the terms "match" and "game" for use in this post (game = backgammon match, played on FIBS, match = team match, scheduled and reported at Team Gammon)

I'm working on the menu, i know it sucks. I will use your suggested format (except the term "tournament") at the bottom of page, and try to make something that works with theme at top of page.

here r some of my thoughts for angel to shout:

Team Gammon is like a tournament for 6 people! wraaak! Sign up now! http://www.anncordova.com/Backgammon/

Team Gammon is like wind under my wings. wraaak! Sign up today! http://www.anncordova.com/Backgammon/