Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Own-goal football (2022)

generalist.academy

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 185 posts

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#171

Post by karmakurtisaani »

linhvn wrote: post #71
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…

If you fake injuries, or fall in the penalty area, you might get a yellow / red card. So no cheaties here, especially with VAR now in place.

But that's my point exactly. Imagine the following situation: you're the referee of the world cup finals, 60 minutes left in the game, a key player of a team clearly fakes an injury and they already have a yellow card from before. What do you do? Let the harmless violation pass and silently approve of faking injuries, or punish the player harshly and potentially decide the result of the game there? With stakes this high, I bet you feel the pressure to let it go.

If you say you would give the red card, what if it wasn't an obvious faking of an injury? The problem clearly is that you can't give a slap on the wrist penalty, it's all or nothing.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#172

Post by karmakurtisaani »

tavorep wrote: post #115
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.

See my reply on the other comment, where I clarify the issue.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#173

Post by culturestate »

Kuiper wrote: post #121

This brings to mind one of my favorite TV shows, One Outs. It's about the strategies that a clever and "unsportsmanlike" player brings to a baseball team, exploiting the rules while violating the spirit of the game. As one example: in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings. If the weather is bad and teams are unable to continue due to rain, a wants their runners to be declare…

> in order for a baseball game to be considered valid, both teams must play 5 innings ... if one team is behind and knows there's a high chance of rain later in the day, the pitcher can begin drawing out the length of innings by intentionally giving up hits.

There are two bigger strategic wrinkles here:

1. Both teams only need to complete five innings (which is stipulated in the rulebook as making 15 outs, because baseball) if the visitors have the lead. If the home team has the lead after the visitors make 15 outs, then it's considered a complete game with only 4.5 innings played.

2. The batter can refuse to take first base, even in the event of a walk, and be called out instead. In the past you could game this, but with the pitch clock and limits on pitcher substitutions and mound visits, there's now a hard upper bound on how long an inning could be intentionally drawn out.

---

I'm actually more interested in how the teams might go about this without the umpires noticing, because the umpire crew chief has complete authority over the game. Once they realize what's happening they can just tell both teams to knock it off and, at their own discretion, suspend the game anyway.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#174

Post by emkemp »

shusaku wrote: post #141
pubby wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one boggles my mind because broadcasters don't want games to go into overtime. A 3-point system where overtime win/losses are split 2/1 emphasizes winning in the final few minutes, which is exciting to both viewers and businessmen. Maybe one day they'll switch.

The NHL’s overtime is pretty efficient though. There’s a short commercial break, then 5 minutes of 3-3 which is exciting and has a high probability of goals. Then a well paced shootout if it is still tied. So perhaps broadcasters are ok with a little extra time if they keep a large audience.

Note for the casual hockey fan: The NHL overtime system is different in the playoffs, since the playoffs requires clear winners and losers.

(Game 1 of the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals featured four overtime periods; and the tie-breaking/game-winning goal was scored after 139 minutes and 47 seconds of total game time, at 1:54 am EDT.)

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#175

Post by permo-w »

leni536 wrote: post #139
permo-w wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

something similar could arise even without double goals in extra time. let’s say your opponents have a man sent off, and you’re up by 1 with minutes left to play, but you need 2 or 3 to qualify. an own-goal to give yourself 30 extra minutes to score those few goals against a weakened opposition is probably the best choice it’s "no draws" rather than "double goals" that creates the unusual incentive. double goals just…

This incentive would be eliminated if goals earned in extra time didn't count towards goal differential at all. The perverse incentive is because the goal differential is comparing apples to oranges with comparing a score of A-B with a play time of 90 mins to a score of X-Y with a play time of 120 mins. Counting the extra time goal as two makes this even worse.

under normal football tournament rules, the reason this doesn't happen is because only zero-sum games go to extra time and anything else simply ends in a draw (i.e. no goal difference change)

you are correct that if they simply didn't count extra time goals towards goal difference the problem would also be fixed, but that would feel artificial as counting extra time goals as normal goals is typical in football - for example, extra time goals always count towards aggregate scorelines, whether the previous legs had extra time or not. it is comparing apples to oranges, but that's the expected behaviour, whereas forcibly avoiding draws is equally at fault, but not the expected behaviour in football

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#176

Post by xg15 »

Sometimes you can find examples of metagaming even in the design of metagames itself.

For the largest part of the soccer world cup, the metagame is straightforward - win matches, don't lose - and casual viewers can easily follow by just concentrating on the match at hand and having some superficial knowledge of the rules.

Except for the final matchday of the group stage: That's when everyone suddenly becomes a master strategist and soccer expert and there are complex discussions everywhere about groups, tables, ranking criteria, tie breakers, victory pathways and hypotheticals as people are trying to keep track of the different ways how their team can make it out of the group stage.

Then the knockout stage begins and the game is suddenly very simple again.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#177

Post by robervin »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #164
freetime2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find clock management to be an interesting aspect of the game in American Football, because literally every second counts. It's one of the things that separates elite players and coaches from everyone else. Tom Brady, for example, was renowned for his ability to move the ball down the field and score in the last two minutes of a game. Sure sometimes it means the game is effectively over 2 minutes early if the leadi…

>And the rare games that end with 0 seconds on the clock on a game winning touchdown or field goal are truly memorable. Doesn't feel rare anymore, and I'd argue it's a manufactured phenomenon. Weather plays almost no role in games any longer, with the majority of stadiums indoors and played on perfectly consistent synthetic grass. The game has tilted notably in favor of the offense, with roughing the passer, pass int…

I don't believe the average sacks per game has changed much. Haven't crunched all the numbers but this has sacks back to the 2003 season [0]. I generally agree though, the NFL wants a consistent and exciting product; for a while now that seems to mean high scoring, offensive games.

https://www.teamrankings.com/nfl/stat/sacks-per-game?date=20...

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#178

Post by munificent »

voldacar wrote: post #160
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…

It's bold to assume that politics is about policy design.

Politics is absolutely about policy design, but there are many many higher-order social emergent phenomena on top that obscure it.

Imagine you had an organization in Washington DC called "Other Congress". It has the same giant beautiful buildings as Congress. It has the same rules and and parliamentary procedure, the same number of members, the same election schedule. In other words, it is 100% identical to normal Congress. It even passes bills. Except... those bills have no force of law. It's all make believe.

That Other Congress would never attract any significant traction or participation.

Note that this sounds sort of like a shadow cabinet, but it's not. The whole point of a shadow cabinet is to act as a social mechanism for influencing the real cabinet.

It may be that an Other Congress would end up functioning sort of like a shadow cabinet. But even then, the only reason anyone would participate in it is to affect the real Congress, and the reason they do that is because real Congressional policy carries weight.

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#179

Post by playingalong »

smcl wrote: post #116
dylan604 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fixtu…

Not really disqualified. 3-0. And sometimes it matters a lot whether it's 3-0 or 2-0.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2014/aug/08/celtic-rein...

Re: Own-goal football (2022)

#180

Post by NikolaNovak »

bombcar wrote: post #161
NikolaNovak wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me a decade to realize my best friend and I play friendly games differently. It was most obvious in magic the gathering - he would consistently optimize the same deck week after week, whereas I'd be bringing new decks with new and fairly general mechanics all the time. Similarly, he only ever played one character in smash bros or overwatch whereas I would heavily rotate. Ultimately his goal was win percentage…

Sounds like he was a Spike and you were more of a Johnny or a Timmy: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/timmy-johnny-...

Absolutely! I ended up getting the "Timmy the power gamer" unglued card and put it on a landyard :-P - but in reality I'm a mix: I'm in it for fun like Timmy, but less with big creature and more with deck building and creative wins with unpopular cards that rarely pay off, like Johnny.
Post reply on HN