Thursday, November 22, 2012

Thoughts on the 2012 VTES Leagues

I had intended to blog about the league more, but that fell by the wayside, and got replaced by the game reports. I'll intend to do better for the next league.

Having now run two leagues, I think I can safely say it was a good idea. It's given a bit more structure to the local VTES games, and ensured that we keep having regular socials, which is needed to keep the game alive. It's also allowed me to fiddle with several deck ideas in fairly serious competition without the risks of a tournament.

Keeping the league running is fortunately fairly low-effort, and I've gotten a lot of the score management and tracking reasonably automated (working on which has been a useful "compiling" project). I'm not sure we've quite got the length of the league right yet - people seem to get a bit burnt out both times, so we should maybe shorten it a bit more, but I'd like to avoid long breaks in the game, simply to help keep interest up.

I'm not sure if it's accomplished my other goal of improving my play level. I have had a couple of games where I feel I've played really well, and made some good decisions in some somewhat non-obvious positions, but I've also made a number of really stupid errors, and thrown away a couple of potential game wins as a result.

On the other hand, I did manage to top both leagues, which suggests I'm doing something right. However, I partly topped the league by simply playing a lot more league games than everyone else. I feel somewhat guilty about that, as I feel I've been gaining an unfair benefit from the way the league rules were setup to not penalize people playing lots of games, and, as the main driver of the league, I'm partly responsible for the rules we chose.