About Schedule.
It's easy (for me ) to re-arrange the schedule if we don't want that the best teams win easily the 8-10 first games.
If we want something else, just tell me.
I'm glad it's easy for you, if we don't end up using Playpass for some reason. MrJ made Playpass sound very tempting and functionable option too. I'm not sure I'd start using it any time soon, but there do seem to be some of us here that are trying to get things started, so league commissioner(s) job(s) doesn't need to be one man show(s) anyway.. :)
I don't know Playpass and it's functionality either (it would be nice to hear from you who have been using it, that what kind of options and possibilities it offers in terms of, well, everything) but as far as I understood (and remember from what I read from MrJs' post) so far, the match generator in Playpass appears to generate matches randomly(?).
I don't remember if someone mentioned there was a possibility to alter match schedule generator some way, or does it always stay random - and does it take into account same league level team strengths on users request when creating match order for round robin league?). On the other hand does my memory serve me that demars you wrote that Playpass created almost the same kind of match schedule than what was created by your own system?
Making match schedule random has good and bad sides, like I wrote before. S(ome more educated people than me have written quite a lot about it in reddit for instance). If it's random, someone will always "suffer" from unfair timing on those most important matches in a given season, compared to some other team in the league. On the other hand randomness tends to equalize over a long period of time. And if match fixture is randomly created, it is highly unlikely (read: next to impossible) that for instance worst team would face teams in this (unfair sounding) order: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, then 5th etc. (which order would practically extremely probably ruin their season early on).
However, I can't waste this good opportunity to say that I think all the games matter in this league, whether or not you've lost your chances for playoffs for that season.
We are creating our own amazing piece of Buzzerbeater history (and I want to keep this going indefinitely!), and hopefully things will grow even bigger in the future. Having said that, 14 is an excellent number to start with!
And if we'd change the match order manually, then at least I find it very difficult to evaluate which changes in fixture would make it better and keep changes equal to all teams (because the order of which you face teams does have effect to some extent I think). I might be overthinking this or thinking the wrong way, but I tried to make something in Excel and failed miserably when I tried to change match order while keeping record which match needs to be transferred to which week and whether or not the balance of schedule remains fair and equal after this and this change....
It's very difficult to explain, but experiment was hard. Just as a rough example (if you haven't tried it in Excel yourself), when you for instance change five matches (out of 7 weekly matches) from, say week 3 to week 6, and another four from week 1 to 5, then few other from week 2 to 8, and 6 matches from week 4 to 1, and then four from week 5 to 1, etc. etc., you might be lost at that point whether or not:
A) all matches are still surely played (or did you create duplicate matches some week, and/or is some match now missing altogether)
B) did this really improve the balance/sensibility of the match order, and
C) very importantly, if it did improve balance, did the match order remain equally fair to all simultaneously?
This last point, C), I find quite hard to make sure when you alter things manually, because 1 change affects everything else. But maybe it's because I have quite little experience and knowledge about this side of league creation..