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Ria posted:Well, if I remember correctly a while back TwoEvils wanted to get rid of the responsibility of doing that but nobody wanted to take up the mantle. *shrug* I'm not saying that TwoEvils is the best thing, but it's better than nothing. If that makes any sense... I agree, it's better to have a bad name registry than no name registry. It's just frustrating to see girls bang their heads against it when the sport has outgrown the current solution.
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Feb 16, 2011 20:04
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Ria posted:It is frustrating. There a lot of things about this sport that are very frustrating from a logistics past-the-fan-wall perspective about this sport. On many fronts. Absolutely. I do the same, and my girlfriend has a similar struggle, being a home-league caliber player who is in a city/league very focused on travel team and national ranking type things. She wants to skate because it's fun, doesn't really care about rankings or travel, and it seems there's less and less room for that as time goes on. At least in our local league.
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Feb 16, 2011 21:21
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Ria posted:Yeah, I used to have friends in another league that just wanted to play. Just play, you know? Have fun, do the outfits, have the names, be dorky, make a ruckus, play the sport. That's it. The professional sport, they said, killed their enthusiasm. I can kind of understand why now. Pity, though, that league died a ear or two ago. =/ Yeah, that's happening in leagues everywhere. Not all of them fold of course, but every league that has any success at some point has to address that divide. You have, say, 100 girls who just want to play to have fun, or found derby because it's empowering or pro-women, or like the aesthetic even if they aren't great at the game. Some of them are pretty good, great even, but they are there primarily because they love to play derby and have fun. Then from that group of 100 you have maybe 10-20 who rise out of the group and are really good. Your travel team gets ranked, high even. Those 20 girls want to win a national championship. Sometimes the direction the league needs to move in to facilitate makes it less fun for the 80 girls who just want to have fun. You can't split the league, because then there's no one to volunteer to work at travel team bouts. It's certainly possible to do one without forsaking the other, but it's not easy, and some leagues just never really get it together. If my girlfriend liked any other sport this wouldn't happen. If she loved to play basketball, she could go anywhere. The park, some friends, join a club league. She could walk to a gym with her basketball and be guaranteed at least a shootaround. You can't do that with derby. You need 10 girls, and a track, and gear and insurance and refs. There's no "pickup games" of derby. Well, there sort of are, in the challenge bouts at ECE or Rollercon or whatever, but those are few and far between.
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Feb 16, 2011 21:35
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WindyMan posted:This is a good example of the structural problems roller derby is going to face in the next few years. If you think of popular team sports, they exist on many different levels, like recreational, amateur, professional, etc. Even within them there are other sub-levels, as it were. Like, if you wanted to play basketball you just need a park court and some friends to play pick-up games, or you could go to your local Park&Rec and join a rec league. Yeah, agreed. We have girls that make tryouts and then, due to a combination of waiting for assessments, waiting for drafts, and the occasional poorly-timed injury, who have been on the league for a year or more before they ever get to play in a home bout. It's not everyone who gets stuck like that obviously, but its a handful of girls. Girls who are certainly safe on skates and could play today if they were allowed to. That's a year of making practices, paying WFTDA dues, and getting slobberknocked at scrimmage practice by a nationally-ranked travel team. If that doesn't suck the enthusiasm for the sport out of you I don't know what does. And of course when a new girl comes in who looks like the next superstar, somehow all the assessment dates and draft schedules line up perfectly and she's on the travel team in under a month.
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Feb 16, 2011 21:59
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Ria posted:
This is very true. If 95% of a sport or hobby is great, the thread will still be filled with the 5% that pisses you off, and I don't want to scare people away from a great sport due to insider griping that occurs in every sport/hobby/scene/whatever.
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Feb 17, 2011 17:33
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Current scuttlebutt is that WFTDA is considering beta-testing a ruleset which eliminates the concept of minor penalties. Any thoughts on how this would work? Would current minors just go away and become legal, or would they all get upgraded to majors, or what? I can certainly see the benefit in having less ticky-tack calls to make, but some stuff needs to be illegal but really isn't a big enough deal to warrant time in the box or a power jam.
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Feb 18, 2011 17:07
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I have a question about back blocking vs tripping. Take the following situation: Red Jammer skates directly into the back of Blue Blocker. Blue Blocker stumbles and falls, causing Red Jammer to then trip and fall over her. Is that a backblock on Red or a tripping on Blue? Because I have seen it called both ways. I would think it would be backblock on Red, since she was the one who initiated the whole situation, but maybe I am wrong.
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Feb 18, 2011 20:55
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Ria posted:The legality of a block resides with the initiator of that block. The red jammer would get a major back block due to it being of a "major" intensity (the phraseology escapes me at the moment, both in losing relative position within the pack and for making the skater fall). Does the situation change if, say, the Red jammer is significantly better than the blue blocker, such that Blue attempts to booty block Red, but bounces/slides off, falls, and Red trips over her? Assume the block itself was legal but ineffective. Is it basically the ref's call on whether Blue was falling as safely as she could?
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Feb 18, 2011 21:23
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WindyMan posted:
And the latter is more likely to happen than the former, because the "good" skaters are almost by definition the ones who have a more serious drive to play and compete and win, while the recreational skaters are only going to fight so hard for what they want to be recreation.
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Mar 3, 2011 22:16
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Redfont posted:What'd they do that for? That seems like an important thing, to be able to recognize the point at which it's better to cut the whole thing off as opposed to letting the other team get any more points. Just curious. For tryouts, it's more important to watch people skate for two minutes than it is to use strategic jam calls or clock management. It's so they can say "tryouts involve skating for 3 jams" or however many, and be sure that won't be three 10 second quick called jams.
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Mar 7, 2011 23:01
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WindyMan posted:"Strategy" is just a word people that people throw around, as if it means something. If a game situation changes, the strategy changes. If the rules change, the strategy will still be there. You say as if something changes from the known to the unknown, suddenly all aspects of strategy will disappear? Please. People keep saying this as if that is what people are arguing and it's not what anyone means. Different rules systems can have room for different degrees of strategical depth and differing amounts of variety. To give an extreme example, there are more strategical options in chess than there are in tic-tac-toe. If you add complexity to a rules system, you add layers of potential strategy. If you remove complexity from a rules system, you may remove those layers. Please stop defining strategy however you want just so you can dismiss people who are opposed to certain rules adjustments.
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Mar 30, 2011 18:35
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WindyMan posted:Coaches and analysts make big money planning and talking soccer strategy. But your analogy would lead me to believe that there is no strategy in soccer due to the rules being simple. Rules complexity and strategical depth are not mutually inclusive. And really, why should they be? There’s a reason why soccer is called “The Beautiful Game.” Correct, it's not a linear thing where more complexity is always better or deeper. Sometimes simple systems are better, cleaner, whatever. I guess I was mainly reacting to a prior argument in this or the last thread where someone stated that "strategy" was just whatever people do within the current rules system, and rejected the idea that changing a rules system could possibly decrease the amount of strategical options available. I apologize if that isn't applicable to the current discussion. quote:I'm not dismissing them. It seems to me that I'm the one being dismissed. I've made the best case I can make about why I believe the pack rule should be changed and why I think it would make derby better. As a rebuttal, I’m getting “it would take away from the strategy” or “it would give a team a default advantage instead of making one by strategy.” What does strategy have to do with tweaking the rules to make the game possibly better? Strategy has everything to do with tweaking the rules, I really don't know how you can think otherwise. Making the game better is the end goal of course, though we could probably argue forever over what exactly "better" means here. More fun for the skaters? More fun to watch? Easier to officiate? I'm sure there are some people out there who simply want to watch skaters go fast in a circle, and the optimal ruleset for those people is much different than the optimal ruleset for someone who likes to watch slow derby, or someone who actually skates, or a ref. I'll freely admit that while I an a pretty dedicated fan and watch a lot of derby, I don't know as much about it as you, and I really have no idea how your proposed change would affect the overall game after people have gotten used to it. Like I said, I think I knee-jerked into the previous discussion about the word "strategy" and misunderstood your post.
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Mar 30, 2011 21:49
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It is worth noting that I am generally against setups in any sport where there is ever a tactically sound reason to intentionally commit a penalty. I don't like poodling/cougaring in derby for the same reason, though I don't really have a better alternative. I hate intentional fouling in basketball, and I was really glad when they made Pass Interference in football a spot-of-the-foul situation rather than 15 yards because it fixed that loophole. I think the ruleset should discourage breaking the rules as a valid tactic.
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Apr 1, 2011 19:47
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WindyMan posted:stuff about pack changes The reason I don't like "most skaters equals pack" is that it brings the game back to where it was a few years ago, where all that mattered was speed. If your 4 can control where the pack is simply by being the fastest girls on the track, that sort of devalues every other aspect of skating. I don't think there's a group of 3 girls in the country who can beat, say, Oly's first liners in a straight footrace, and I don't want to make it completely impossible to score on Oly in a 4-3 situation. Not that I have any issue with Oly in particular, they are just the biggest name speed team I could think of.
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Apr 3, 2011 00:53
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Spookydonut posted:As I've said before, the skaters make the rules. Pre-emptively to what? Spookydonut posted:OSDA Rules make me laugh uncontrollably. Derby elitism in this thread.
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Apr 6, 2011 15:25
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scorpiobean posted:Do you do OSDA stuff? I'm genuinely curious because I don't know much about OSDA and I'm even inspired to look up the OSDA ruleset. My girlfriend who retired from her WFTDA league is toying with the idea of joining a much more casual OSDA league, though she hasn't yet and I haven't actually seen any games. I know a handful of people who skate OSDA though. The pivot thing is strange and I don't really understand it. I get the feeling it will make sense if I actually watched a bout. Also lead jammer changes back and forth throughout the jam based on who is actually in the lead at the moment.
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Apr 6, 2011 20:56
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ODC posted:No. Pivots can become the Jammer if their Jammer is stuck in the pack and the other team's Jammer becomes the Lead Jammer. Right, but there's no star pass or anything, so visually to someone walking up in the middle of the jam they are the pivot. I'm not sure if there is any visual indication that the star is no longer the jammer or what.
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Apr 6, 2011 21:41
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Spookydonut posted:
OSDA rules ARE similar to early WFTDA rules, on purpose. That's why it's called Old School Derby. They think it was better before, for skaters, for fans, and for refs. The current WFTDA ruleset is TOO COMPLICATED. It requires too many officials with too much training who are too good at what they do for it to be feasible at the current level of the sport's growth. There simply are not enough competent referees in the world to support the number of WFTDA leagues that spring up every day. And a complicated ruleset that is officiated poorly or inconsistently is worse for everyone than a simpler ruleset that can actually be enforced properly. I think it is good that WFTDA is acknowledging that minor penalties might not make the game better and are looking at alternatives. Minor penalties make the game harder to follow, harder to play, and harder to officiate. They don't really bring anything to the table. There are of course some things that need to be adjusted if you get rid of them, and I haven't read the rules update so I don't know if it was well done, but the concept is not ridiculous. Also, just because WFTDA tried something and found it ineffective doesn't mean that it is ineffective for all variations of the sport forever and ever. Maybe stationary refs doesn't work for flat track but works fine with some modification for banked track. They aren't doing it because gently caress YOU DAD, they're doing it because they think it works better for them.
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Apr 8, 2011 20:00
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Spookydonut posted:I don't mean downgrading the call, I mean when you slot it into your scale of impact (every referee should have a scale), if it doesn't meet the criteria for a particular penalty. This is another thing I disagree with. I don't think minor penalties make the game safer at all. To me, if you backblock someone and it affects their skating at all (like making them noticeably wobbly even if they don't fall) that should be a penalty. A real actual penalty with impact, so a major. If you backblock them and it doesn't affect them in any way, then it shoudln't be a penalty at all. Same goes for low blocks, forearms, whatever. Either it has impact, in which case it should be a penalty, or it doesn't, in which case we shouldn't care. The only problem here is that it doesn't discourage people from taking soccer-style flops to draw penalties, but I that already happens and I don't really know if there's much to be done about that.
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Apr 8, 2011 23:10
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ODC posted:This is why I love the single whistle starts of OSDA. What would be the problem with doing the same in WFTDA? I think the problem would be articulated by "hurf durf lol osda"
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May 4, 2011 14:53
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WindyMan posted:So yeah, I guess it does make sense that pivots don't need to line up on the line. But in that case, what's the point of having pivots or a thing called a "pivot line" at all? Well, the line could just as easily be called the "pack line" or something, the name doesn't matter too much. But you're right, there is not really any point in having a pivot at all under the current rules.
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May 24, 2011 04:02
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Mr. Powers posted:I think you still need an outlet for a jammer who has been stuck jamming due to penalties for three jams for her star. I think that outlet is "stop getting penalties". I don't mind the star pass as a rule, but I don't really have much sympathy for a jammer who is tired because they can't stay out of the box.
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May 24, 2011 14:56
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Mr. Powers posted:You might think it's an edge case, but I'd say it happens in 50% of the home team bouts/scrimmages I ref. Usually in the second period. It might even just be major/major/major, usually careless mistakes rather than poor hitting form. I think I have seen a jammer skate 3 jams in a row due to penalty issues like, once ever.
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May 26, 2011 04:38
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Ria posted:Yeah I think I've seen it a couple times, but it's more the "two in a row" syndrome. Especially when poodling. Poodle-serve-whoops-major. Jammers don't poodle though. That would defeat the purpose. And also be impossible.
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May 26, 2011 16:47
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Mr. Powers posted:Jammer with three minors stands in front of jammer line. Pack whistle blows. Jammer whistle blows. Jammer is given fourth minor and directed to the penalty box. There is a rules clarification that a blocker starting behind the jammer line is considered way in front of the pack. I would imagine that a jammer starting in front of the pivot line would be considered way behind the pack and not out of position (just dumb). They will definitely get a minor for touching past the jammer line, though. Fair enough, it's not impossible. It would still be rather silly because the point of poodling is to clear your minors when you aren't jamming so you dont risk a power jam.
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May 27, 2011 07:15
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Spookydonut posted:Never say poodling. It's a stupid name and confusing for most people. It's no worse sportsmanship than intentional fouling in basketball which is a completely accepted tactic that no one questions. But yes, poodling is not as cool a term as cougaring.
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May 27, 2011 22:44
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WindyMan posted:The thing is, a lot of people call it poodling. That's the accepted vernacular for a lot of people, including those at DNN. Along with "cougaring," it's a tongue-in-cheek term for "collecting minors." They aren't "washing their hands of their minors". They still go to the box, albeit at a time of their choosing. More importantly, they are one step closer to a 7-penalty ejection, which is a big concern for many skaters. The minors still counted, they did what they were supposed to do. It's confusing to people who don't know derby, but if you don't know derby then by definition the whole sport is confusing to you. People learn pretty quick what a jammer is and other derby rules, this one isn't that much harder to explain: Newbie: What is that girl doing behind the jammer line? Vet: You go to the box if you get 4 minor penalties. She has 3 and wants to serve the penalty now instead of risking it later when she's jamming, so she's lining up illegally to get her 4th. It's called poodling for some reason. There, now they aren't confused about poodling ever again. It's no more confusing or counterintuitive than any other procedural penalty, like clockwise blocking. I'd much rather have to explain poodling to someone than try to explain clockwise blocks, destroying the pack, or the back block/low block uncertainly principle. Cougaring might be an inappropriate term for some, but honestly I think that is oversensitivity. Roller derby is a sport built on irreverancy and punk rock and if the term cougar offends anyone then they really just need to suck it up, it's not a big deal. And poodling isn't an offensive term to anyone, in any case.
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May 27, 2011 23:49
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Spookydonut posted:The rules are really just a set of things that players should not do. Intentionally breaking the rules is what I would consider bad sportmanship. Do you feel the same way about intentional fouls in basketball?
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Jun 1, 2011 15:44
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Spookydonut posted:I literally do not know anything about intentional fouls in basketball. I know nothing about field hockey.  In basketball, if you are down with little time left, and your opponent has the ball, it is very common practice to intentionally foul. This gives your opponent foul shots, but stops the clock and puts the ball back into open play, giving you a chance at it. You're effectively trading those 2 high-probability points away in return for not letting your opponent run more time off the clock.
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Jun 3, 2011 21:58
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Mr. Powers posted:What is the technicality? I haven't heard of this at all under WFTDA rules. I think she means starting farther back from the jammer line, and timing it so that you are passing the jammer line at a full sprint just as the blockers clear the line and the ref blows the jam whistle.
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Jun 8, 2011 23:40
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Mr. Powers posted:This is basically how sailboat races start. Everyone wants to be heading full speed at the line right when the race starts, and there are lots of loops back and forth. You don't really have the option of looping back and trying again, though. Well if it works it's great. It's like jumping the apex: risky and people fail it more often than not, but the reward is pretty nice. Also refs hate it.
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Jun 9, 2011 15:22
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FirstPersonShitter posted:Have you guys heard about how WFTDA are trialling a new ruleset with no minor penalties? While I think it would make my life a lot easier refereeing, depending on which minors they upgrade to majors and which they just scrap could end up with either really dangerous games or ones where everyone is sat in the box all the time. Yeah, the beta test bouts are starting here and there. There's a Charm City vs. Windy City bout at ECE under those rules, which should be interesting. Charm is already a procedural-penalty heavy team, so I wonder how well they will adapt.
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Jun 20, 2011 00:44
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Ria posted:Hear, hear. Did a game a month or two ago that was just like this down in Maryland. They were incredibly nice, and sweet, and seemed to have the heart of derby in them. What league? It sure as hell wasn't CCRG.
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Jun 20, 2011 19:38
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Ria posted:I was front inside pack for the Three Rivers intraleague bout. It was fun! Ah, cool. I think their bench coach skates for the local men's team.
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Jun 20, 2011 19:59
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Ria posted:I remember him mentioning that. They sure did, yeah.
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Jun 20, 2011 20:17
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WindyMan posted:focus on skating and skills instead of socializing and afterparties. Those don't need to be mutually exclusive.
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Jun 22, 2011 21:27
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WindyMan posted:They don't, but they do. I have a blog post coming up in the next few days that will illustrate how I feel about this. I've read a lot of blog posts from a lot of people about a similar topic and I don't know exactly how you feel about it but I think a lot of the people who present a "the social aspect doesn't matter its a sport" view are really arguing from an unfair place. I'm biased about this because my of things that are going on within CCRG and how they affected my girlfriend. She was a pretty good player: contributed solidly to her home team, and would likely have been a travel team skater somewhere like DC, but was nowhere near good enough to be a travel team CCRG skater, and she was fine with that. She's not a fat girl, but she's bigger than the standard female athlete, and has never been good at most sports. She was drawn to derby because A) girls with different body types can succeed and thrive, and B) she liked the culture and the DIY attitude and the FUN that surrounded the sport then. That fun is almost completely gone from CCRG, and she's not the only one to have noticed. The league is geared almost totally towards the travel team gunning for a championship run. Home team activities are ignored, travel team skaters rarely skate for home teams anymore, and girls who aren't good enough to be on a top-ten national travel team are expendable. Every season, a new crop of girls shows up, 1 or two are immediately fast-tracked to the travel team, and the rest enter a holding pattern of practice, assessments, volunteering, and getting discouraged before they are chewed up and spit out after a year or two when they wise up and realize they are being used. I know girls who have been on the league a year or more and have never skated in a bout. More and more girls are leaving, and every one of them says the same thing: I miss when it was fun. They just want to play derby and have fun doing it, and there's no place for people like that in Baltimore right now. I don't think this model is sustainable, and I wonder if the people in charge even do, or whether they just think they can ride it out and win a trophy before it all falls apart and we have a Rocky/Denver style league split. These girls will never be good enough to compete on the level that our travel team is competing at. But that's a really, really high level, and to say that they can't enjoy the culture and the identity and the rollergirl atmosphere anyway because they aren't gifted enough to be the best in the country is, well, lovely. I know that's not what you're saying, but I have heard enough people say it that I get twitchy about the sports vs fun debate.
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Jun 22, 2011 23:39
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WindyMan posted:But here's the thing: A lot of WFTDA leagues are trying to have it both ways. They want to have the athletic sport and the culture of fun wrapped up into one neat little package called roller derby. You can't have one without the other in sports, since only one team truly has fun: The team that wins. They won't because it's not true at all. You can play a sport and love to compete and still have fun when you lose. Maybe not if you lose every single time, but not everyone is so obsessed with winning that it defines the entire game for them. That opinion, that you can't have competition and also fun, is the very root of what is rotting away at CCRG. It's ~15 girls who want to win so badly that they are sucking the fun away from ~80 other girls and basically killing the game for them. When I say these girls just want to skate and have fun, I don't mean that none of them care about winning and they just want to skate in circles and be nice to each other. They want to play the game they love and yes, of course trying to win and get better is part of that. They just don't care about being national champions or getting their asses kicked by national champion contenders in scrimmage practice. Your last sentence there is just so wrong-headed I don't even know where to begin. E: by last sentence i mean the "only the winners have fun" one, not your actual last sentence. JoshTheStampede fucked around with this message at 04:33 on Jun 23, 2011 |
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Jun 23, 2011 00:23
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WindyMan posted:I hate to break it to you, but those bold parts? That's how sports work in the real world. Sure, but in other sports if you aren't good enough to play at the top level, you can play (actually play, not just practice), at a lower level. If I'm not good enough to play in the NFL, I can play in the CFL, or the UFL, or Arena League, or a dozen other semi-pro leagues, where I would get to play real honest to god football with people at near my own skill level, and play the sport I love. These girls can't do that. We have 100 girls who want to play roller derby and are safe to skate. 15 of them are world-class, and good for them, but there needs to be somewhere where the other 85 can do something too. I'm not saying they need to use a little league model and let everyone play together regardless of skill level. In fact, that's what the higher-tier people THINK people are saying, and the "This isn't Little League, ladies" response is about as cliche and snide as they get. But the rest of the girls, the ones who have proven they are safe to bout, should be bouting and practicing and having fun and having their parents come see them, and being supported in their endeavors, and instead the entire league is focused on the travel team and the home team skaters are used as volunteer labor and get treated like poo poo. Now, I know of plenty of other leagues with highly competitive travel teams that also support and have great home leagues that everyone enjoys and get good turnout (Gotham and Philly, to name a few), so this is not a problem that is unavoidable. It's just a trap CCRG has fallen into. When I say girls have been on the league a year and haven't skated a bout, this is not because they aren't good enough to be on a home team. It's because they keep making assessments harder and harder in order to use them as travel team pre-tryouts. There's plenty of girls who have been skating on home teams ofr a couple years, and doing just fine, who look at the assessments now and say "I don't know if I could have passed this". Basically I think your hypercompetitive outlook is everything that is wrong with roller derby right now. You seriously think that when you're at a certain level you have to give up fun to win and I think that is sad. quote:If there's going to be another "split," as you suggested, it had better be the WFTDA to initiate it. They need to make an officially sanctioned "pro" league or something like that to let skaters know that there's another outlet for those few who want to take it to the next level. Otherwise, a vast majority of skaters are going to be left behind once everyone realizes a one-size-fits-all model really doesn't. That's what the home league is supposed to be for. I don't have a problem with the travel team being world-class, and pushing for better and better results and trying to win a trophy. That's what they're supposed to do, they're the top level of the sport in the country right now. They're the CCRG All-Stars, which is sort of a misnomer now that they aren't playing on home teams but whatever. JoshTheStampede fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jun 23, 2011 |
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Jun 23, 2011 17:11
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downtimejesus posted:How do you make the assessments harder, I dont get it? By assessments I mean the system of ranks or stars that leagues give out to determine when a skater can skate, when they can scrimmage, when they are eligible to be on a team and bout, etc. In CCRG, there was originally the following steps: You tried out for the league, and the tryout tested basic skills like crossovers, skating a certain number of laps, some very basic blocking techniques, how to fall, etc. Then you progress through yellow, orange, and finally green "stars", with yellow meaning you could participate in full contact practices, orange meaning you could scrimmage, and green meaning you could be drafted onto a home team and were eligible to bout. They have since eliminated one star, I think yellow, but the concept is the same. Note that you can only assess when they hold an assessment practice, so you may be months between stars, depending on how many other girls need to assess as well. The fact that assessments magically get scheduled faster when there's an obvious rockstar waiting to assess is another issue. Basically, the goal of the green star was to ensure that the skater was safe to bout, that she was not a danger to herself or others on the track. It measured basic competency, not how good you were or how well you understood derby strategy. They have since changed it such that the baseline is not whether you are safe, but whether you can "contribute meaningfully to a home team". In short, you have to be good enough. There are separate travel team tryouts, and those are and have always been difficult, as they should be, since the travel team is ranked and competitive. But I don't think there should be such a barrier of entry to home team (again, HOME TEAM, not WFTDA sanctioned) bouts.
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Jun 23, 2011 19:50
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