I’m working on a fantasy water polo system and wanted to see if anyone had opinions on how scoring should work.
At a high level, the problem that I’m trying to solve is that we can typically expect the final score for a match to be accurate. We might be able to get the scores by quarter and maaaybe the scores by player. There are very few instances where I think we can reliably get accurate stats for saves, steals, assists, etc.
I’ve considered a fantasy league format where participants draft teams (USC, Princeton, etc). Each week, the participant picks one match for their drafted team and they are awarded points based on the goals scored as well as some modification applied for results.
For example, let’s say that I drafted USC (Fight on!) and I picked them to beat UCLA. Later that week, USC beats UCLA 10-8. My fantasy would get 10 points for the goals scored and 2 points for the goal differential.
Curious to hear other thoughts here.
In the meantime, I’m building out the scaffolding for managing a league.
Each week I get to pick 4 teams, one for each category
If my 4 teams have to be distinct it’s a bit more interesting
Even more interesting would be to pick a best and worst in each of those 4 categories for a total of 8 teams
Could score each category on a 0 to 1 scale for each where you get a 1 if you picked the best in a given category out of the fantasy players that week.
Eg 10 fantasy participants, I pick USC over CSUF for biggest goal differential, they do a +14 which is third best that week, so I get a 0.7 on goal differential for that week.
I may be wrong but almost every team I looked at this year kept a pdf or interactive pdf of their stats on their pages that were updated throughout the season.
Those are the official stats the teams are using, so outside of delays on updating them they should give you all the basic stats updated over the course of the season.
I will say that I don’t know how often they are updated but most of the premier teams seemed to keep them up to date weekly.
@NLM I love these ideas!
I’m probably a week or two from getting a simple prototype that just does ‘goals scored’ and then I’m gonna start figuring out how to implement these.
It looks like I’m still on track for a play-test for the women’s season. Stay tuned
Yes, I think we can probably get our hands on most of the data if we’re high-intent on this.
I have a couple game design things that make we wonder how to handle:
I believe Harvard(?) does not release individual statistics like that until the end of the year. Would we simply exclude their plays for being drafted.
How should be handle the case of a team not reporting for a week? (ie, the SI is out sick or some other human factor)
As a player, is that just ‘part of the game’ where you need to have a sense of who is better at reporting?
This would really make the game “how well do you know water polo?” haha.
