Own-goal football (2022) • Hacker News Board

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#111

Post by fineIllregister » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:13 PM UTC

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #85

smcl wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly in rugby they have a concept called a "penalty try" - effectively when there's a particular infringement against a team in a scoring position, the referee awards the points to the attacking team as if they had gone ahead and scored. See here for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAq-xp54j1w The play gets repeated a couple of times and explained in some detail throughout but you can see what ha…

Exactly the same concept exists in NHL hockey by the way. In particular, if a player attacking an empty net (because the goaltender has been pulled late in the game to add another skater) is interfered with from behind, or a thrown stick disrupts his shot, the goal is just awarded on the assumption that the attacker would have almost certainly scored.

A similar concept exists in American football, but it is rarely invoked.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_act

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#112

Post by smcl » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

drowsspa wrote: post #102

dylan604 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between actually getting work done and looking for a way to provide an answer, I've had a hard time getting a link to send. The closest I've come is a scoring method called 10 Point System where it's slight different in W=6 points, D=3 points, bonus point per goal (max 3), bonus point for shut out. So I could have mis-remembered the points I initially stated. It's been 10+ years since I've participated in those tourn…

I think the lesson here is just "American-specific rules", not "Central Europe specific rules". In Latin America I never heard of it either

The user also made another comment detailing some interesting reasons why some rules may have come about. Definitely some interesting stuff, even if I don't think it'd be too palatable back home.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#113

Post by munificent » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #101

munificent wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meta-game of game design: how do you design a game whose mechanics lead to incentives that align with your intentions is a fascinating area. It also has deep connections to policy design in politics. In the political arena, it gets so much more complex because you have disagreement on intentions and people deliberately obfuscating their intentions. So you've got people arguing over legislation who are trying to a…

A closely related question is: Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing? I used to think think the answer was yes, but Spelunky 2 made me doubt; in Spelunky using a bomb or a rope is rarely optimal, but it can make things simpler and more fun. I think it's a well designed game, so the fact that optimal play and fun play are different is making me think.

> Should playing the fun way, and playing the optimal way be the same thing?

This is something that game designers, especially in roguelikes where there is a lot of procedural generation and combinatorial gameplay experiences, think about a lot.

There are all sorts of related questions:

* What should the space of optimal strategies look like? A single point that players should try to discover and optimize for? A region where there are a variety of equally valid ways?

* What are the discincentives for non-optimal play? Should it just be boring, or should the game actively punish the player for not following an expected strategy?

* What to do about strategies that are extremely effective but not fun? In roguelikes, that's things like "farming" where you find an easy to kill monster that breeds and just mow through hundreds of them to grind XP. Should the game try to avoid those scenarios so that players don't have to make an uncomfortable choice between maximizing versus fun, or should that be up to players?

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#114

Post by tunesmith » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:15 PM UTC

munificent wrote: post #13

divan wrote: post #7

Sports is one of the most fascinating and underexplored examples of Goodhart's law (collapsing correlation between the metric and a goal). One of the most widely known examples of this is a London 2012 badminton scandal, when tournament design led to misaligned incentives for teams (it was beneficial for them to lose a game, to meet with less formidable opponent known beforehand). But there are dozens of such cases a…

The meta-game of game design: how do you design a game whose mechanics lead to incentives that align with your intentions is a fascinating area. It also has deep connections to policy design in politics. In the political arena, it gets so much more complex because you have disagreement on intentions and people deliberately obfuscating their intentions. So you've got people arguing over legislation who are trying to a…

I like the idea of a two-phase game, where for the first phase (most of the game), you're motivated to play your hardest for the entire duration, because the score imbalance wouldn't mean you win, but would just mean you have that much more of a relative advantage in the second phase.

And then the second phase could be evenly-matched, or it could be David and Goliath, but then still anything could happen.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#115

Post by tavorep » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:16 PM UTC

karmakurtisaani wrote: post #68

Adding to the discussion on the rules set in soccer, I've always found it bad design that the referee has only yellow and red cards for penalizing individual players. Especially the red card is a hard penalty, which leads to the referee having too much influence on the outcome, and to counter that, the referees don't like to give out cards too easily. Now, the consequence of that is for example that players fake inju…

Those who dive can be penalized though. In the Europa League Final just yesterday a player on Roma got a yellow card for simulation trying to get a penalty call. Can the refs do better at catching these? Yes. But to say there's no recourse or it's not penalized is just wrong.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#116

Post by smcl » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:22 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #107

drowsspa wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That must be very US-specific, it just sounds American. But the 3 point thing definitely has nothing to do with this oddity of scoring

then why not 1-0 scores?

It's a good question but I don't think there's any good answer other than "1-0 or 2-0 doesn't feel like punishment enough". Interesingly, for two-legged cup competitions a forfeit likely won't result in a 3-0 loss, but a disqualification instead. So if you're winning 4-0 or 5-0 and can't be bothered showing up for the return fixture, you can't just forfeit and win 4-3 or 5-3 on aggregate, you have to fulfil the fixture.

And additionally, not showing up for a game might not even cause you to forfeit. Estonia didn't turn up to a European Qualifier against my national team, we didn't get a walkover and had to replay (which we won 1-0): https://twitter.com/90sfootball/status/1297216969326780416

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#117

Post by permo-w » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:26 PM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #76

permo-w wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Football would be a nightmare if players were hanging out in the other team's box, waiting for the ball to be hoofed upfield to them so they could tap it into the back of the net this is the commonly-held wisdom on offside, but I’m a little sceptical of it. 7-a-side, 5-a-side and futsal manage just fine without the offside rule (admittedly on smaller pitches). I suspect that 11-a-side would just look different with…

Field size makes all the difference. Try to play on full-size football field for 90 minutes and you start to understand a lot of weird rules and tactics in football.

I’m saying this from a position of having played plenty of 11-a-side football in my life

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#118

Post by throwbadubadu » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:27 PM UTC

> Football has a lot of strange rules – like Ted Lasso, I still don’t understand exactly how the offside rule works

Aw, come on, you cannot start a soccer article with that :(

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#119

Post by dylan604 » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:34 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #110

dylan604 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to tack on more as I've knocked some cobwebs loose, the UIL also did their penalty shoot outs similar to hockey where the ball was put in play some 20 yards out and the attacker allowed to dribble the ball and the keeper was allowed to challenge. In the early days of the MLS, they did this as well. When MLS did away with that non-sense, the UIL followed as well. US Soccer (official FIFA member) was apparently so…

Ahhh I see, so some of the experiments might have not even been deliberate in the end. Either way that's an interesting bit of history, I'm glad to have learned about it! I'm about to re-enter the game aged 37 years old (not played in ~1.5 yrs) this weekend with trials for a little local very-very minor team here. No idea how it'll go but I'm curious to see if my legs can carry me for one more season :D

it was never the legs that failed, but it was always the gut/diaphragm. as a defender, i'd make sure that the run we're about to make when that ball comes over the top was done at my pace using all of the dark arts i could muster.

good luck!

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#120

Post by kevinmchugh » Thu, Jun 01, 2023, 10:38 PM UTC

smcl wrote: post #83

kevinmchugh wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that soccer in the US could support a promotion/relegation system but basketball, baseball, and football could. NCAA and MiLB are popular enough that lower leagues could be sustained.

I think the greater worry is that the gap in quality and finances between any second tier and the NBA or NFL would be so enormous that you're virtually guaranteed to bankrupt any relegated team (decreased TV money, sponsorship, merch, gate receipts) and to completely crush any newly promoted team. That is unless you dumped a huge amount of capital into building or subsidising the second tier for a few seasons at leas…

Where I think the American system breaks down is that the value of teams is in the branding and the exclusive status. Just being in the league means the franchise is worth single digit billion dollars, and that floor will hold no matter how long a team is bad.

It can't happen because that floor is useful to the owners, I imagine if by some miracle it did the NFL would split into two leagues. There's a bunch of non NFL football that could also fit into that lower tier, arena, cfl, fcf.

The NCAA is the other force keeping this from happening. The Sooners saturate the need for an Oklahoma football team, there doesn't need to be a second or third tier team there. But it'd be more interesting and competitive if these leagues were integrated together.

I also would hope promotion/relegation would help with the tanking that's so noticable in the NHL and NBA but don't know enough about drafting/recruiting in European football (and there's probably much simpler solutions there)