Support for divisions and multiple leagues

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as the title says...

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Nimda...@gmail.com on 19 Apr 2009 at 8:34

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r73 has an initial implementation of this.
Please give me some comments on it...

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 19 Apr 2009 at 12:56

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- Division and league delete from admin section needs deletion warnings.
- Division and league specific standings/statistics.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 19 Apr 2009 at 1:05

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Files missing. See issue 86.

Original comment by henrik.s...@gmail.com on 23 Apr 2009 at 8:34

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Issue 86 has been merged into this issue.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 23 Apr 2009 at 9:08

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Yes, I forgot to add them properly, thanks. Will do it this weekend when I get 
home
to my dev. computer.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 23 Apr 2009 at 9:08

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Issue 87 has been merged into this issue.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 23 Apr 2009 at 5:30

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Sorry about having created that new issue about the missing files, I hadn't 
seen 
that it was already noted here.

Now that I've updated my test environment, it looks like different divisions in 
the 
same league still play in separate tournaments, is this correct?  So if I had, 
for 
example, a North division and a South division within my league (which always 
runs 
as FFA because we use open, flexible scheduling), I'd have separate FFA 
structures 
for the North and for the South?  I can see how this would work for other 
leagues, 
but it won't do much for mine.  

We currently have all teams lumped into one large league, because the coaches 
wanted 
the ability to play cross-over regular season games between teams that would be 
in 
opposite divisions, if we implemented divisions.  To do so right now, as I can 
tell, 
a North vs. South match would have to be put into one division's tournament or 
the 
other, thus putting the out-of-division team into the other division's 
standings for 
one single game. And when we come to our playoffs, even if they're designed to 
pit 
the top teams from each division on either side of a bracket to come to a 
best-of-
North vs. best-of-South final, the playoff games would still need to go in one 
or 
the other. Am I understanding the functionality of the currently implemented 
system 
correctly?

For divisional splits to be useful for my league, what I'd need is the ability 
to 
have one single tournament into which all matches got scheduled, but have a 
specification for each team (as opposed to each match) as to which division the 
team 
was in.  Then each division would have a separate standings list that would 
tally 
results for the teams in that division from all the matches they'd played in 
the one 
overall tournament, regardless of which division their opponent came from in 
any 
given match.  Then the playoff rounds (manually creating quarterfinal pairings, 
semis, and the final within the FFA structure) would stay within the one single 
tournament, as well.

I'm not necessarily saying it needs to be implemented that way; I'm sure it 
would be 
fairly complex, and my coaches have been satisfied enough having all teams 
lumped 
together as one that I'm not sure if they'd really want to be able to split 
divisions anymore, even if we could. But if we were to use divisions, that's 
how it 
would have to be done. If it isn't (or can't be) set up that way, we'll just 
remain 
a single, large division in a single league.

Original comment by lahat...@gmail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 11:57

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I am by no means an league or tournament arranger expert, but isnt dividing 
teams
into two divisions, and then let teams play each other no matter what division 
they
are in, a purely US phenomenon? I would never expect to be able to arrange 
games with
two teams from different divisions, unless its a single FFA match.

Or do I miss the point here?

Original comment by syko...@gmail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 2:26

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Yes, it's a U.S. thing; what generally happens in American sports is that the 
league
as a whole will be divided into two conferences (National and American for NFL,
Eastern and Western for NBA/NHL), and those conferences are further divided into
divisions.  A team will play most of its games against teams within its own 
division
-- for long seasons like NBA/NHL, they'll play inter-division teams many teams; 
for
the shorter NFL season, you play all your inter-division teams twice (they're 
the
only opponents you play twice). Then they'll games against teams from other 
divisions
within the same conference (but not as many as their inter-divisional games), 
and
then will play some games against teams from the other conference (the least 
number
of games of all, though).

In Blood Bowl terms with my league, what we would want to be able to do *if* we 
ever
wanted to use a divisional set-up is this: we'd divide the league's teams into a
North and a South division -- this would be based on where the coaches were 
actually
physically located, as our league covers a fairly large geographic area (there 
are a
few different clusters where a bunch of coaches live close, but then there are 
other
coaches who are 30-60 minutes drive from their nearest opponent). So by 
geographical
limitations, most of a team's games would be against other teams in its own 
division.
 But if circumstances allowed an opportunity to play someone from the other division
-- he had business that put him on the other side of town, or was just willing 
to
drive further to play an unfamiliar opponent -- then we'd want to have that game
count for each coach, but count within their own division rather than having the
match-up pairing be forced into one division's tournament in which once of the
coaches would be a rare participant.  The winning coach would need to have his 
league
points for the win counted within his division, but the losing coach should 
also be
marked with a loss in his (as our league scores by win = 3pts, draw = 1 pt, and 
first
tiebreaker is winning percentage*).

Again, I'm not too worried about getting this kind of set-up built into the 
tracker
-- I'm sure it would be complex and our league isn't really missing it right now
anyway, so it would probably be too much effort for too little reward.  But 
Nicholas
wanted feedback, so I just wanted to explain why the league/division structure 
as
added -- even if it functions just fine -- won't be used by our large league.

* Whichis why I'm also modifying our my league's tracker to calculate winning
percentage based on counting a draw as half a win, as it makes a difference -- 
but I
think that style of calculation is also an American thing to do.

Original comment by lahat...@gmail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 3:42

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Don't worry about it Mike, I'm not that strict regarding mess here :-).

Just a quick pre-comment: I implemented this because of multiple requests from 
you
guys and some others who are not active here at code.google.

Yes, Mike, the implementation of divisions and leagues are simply a further
separation of data. Imagine the obblm matches structre as a tree with... 
- obblm as the trunk, 
- the 1. branches as leagues in obblm,
- the 2. branches as divisions within leagues,
- the 3. branches as tournaments within divisions,
- the 4. branches as matches within tours.

OBBLM is currently only able to "handle", in a very broad sense, one branch at 
the
time. This means that a given tournament may only be a node of _one_ parent
(division) - there may of course be multiple nodes (tournaments) under each 
division
representing, for example, a tournament for each season, or whatever the leagues
decides on. I Hope I explained it well enough?
Anyway, for your specific situation, yes, you are right, you would have to 
create two
separate tours since obblm, at the moment anyway, can't generate stats across
multiple tournaments (which I assume would solve your problem - having a 
combined
standings table?).

What you are really requesting is that teams should have a "belong to X 
division ID"
- property saved in mysql along with the other team stuff (name, coach ID, ...),
which one could then sort against. This is entirely possible, but what if a team
moves from south to north division? There is no way of keeping track of the 
change
history of team-division-IDs, if you see what I mean. This would destroy past
statistical rankings, which I can't allow.
Instead I guess I could make a "combine X, Y and Z tournaments and generate a 
common
ranking table"-feature, but you would constantly have to select the tournaments 
in
question in order to see that table, which is annoying?

I think it is best for your league, as you yourself say, to continue using one 
big
division for now.

I agree Sune, I've never come across such a scheduling here in Europe.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 4:03

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... and thanks for the feedback Mike.
As it is now, you can easily continue by simply using one league with one 
division.
For your league the only effective difference is that you'll be having two new
bars/lines at the top of the tournaments page. Nothing else.

The reason I made the league separation layer too was that Fabio plans on using 
obblm
to set up a huge national web-portal in which multiple leagues are tracked.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 27 Apr 2009 at 4:12

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TY Nicholas and TY all of You Developers from Outer Space,

The release candidate v.0.38r85 is up and running at my League site
(obblm.treemme.org) and is fully functional (RRS Bug fixed)

I already tested the Leagues and Divisions Admin commands, moving Tournaments 
between
newly created divisions inside the renamed existing League.

The major implementation we next will need is a way to filter what is shown on 
the
Home Page, thus allowing League Managers to show in their own Home Page only the
Results and Tournaments of their corresponding League/Divisions.

To achieve this, you have probably to manage, like you done for Tournaments, the
allocation of Users to Leagues, so a single OBBLM install would allow the 
management
of thousands of Coaches in hundreds of Leagues.

Let me know if You plan to change further the translations.xml file, so I can
complete my initial work on it, and release it to you for the final 0.38 
RELEASE.

TY very much to all of you for the GREAT work you've done.

Fabio

Original comment by Fabio.Mo...@gmail.com on 28 Apr 2009 at 4:56

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Good to hear.

I can't see how personal front pages prohibits you from using obblm with many
leagues. It's possibly, but impractical - yes.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 28 Apr 2009 at 7:16

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No no, now I can use it with as many leagues I wish...

ONLY, without having filtered HP by Leagues, You end up an Home Page long a 
mile due
to the showing of ALL tournaments of every Leagues... this is why I asked this
implementation.

But look further for future improvement... by now it's ALL RIGHT.

Go for it...!
(1 reroll 1, Down, Armour Roll 10, Injury Roll 10, Damage Roll 62, Dead, Use
Apotecary, reroll 67, I said DEAD!!) - Typical roll sequence in my Matches.

Original comment by Fabio.Mo...@gmail.com on 29 Apr 2009 at 1:26

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Nicholas, when you say:

"What you are really requesting is that teams should have a "belong to X 
division ID"
- property saved in mysql along with the other team stuff (name, coach ID, ...),
which one could then sort against. This is entirely possible, but what if a team
moves from south to north division? There is no way of keeping track of the 
change
history of team-division-IDs, if you see what I mean. This would destroy past
statistical rankings, which I can't allow."

I agree fully on all points: the property of assigning teams to a particular 
division
would be necessary for the league set-up I described -- but it also wouldn't 
work
very well due to the possibility of division-switching breaking things.  So I'm 
not
even going to worry about it.  :-)  We'll just continue along same as always,
essentially pretending the new "League" and "Division" designations aren't even
there, and that will be just fine for us.  

Everything's working great as it is now (that is, when my coaches aren't 
accidentally
choosing the wrong skills or buying the wrong players, and then coming to me to 
fix
it all! ;-) ) so we won't need any extra functionality in this regard. Doing 
anything
else will be way too much work for far too little reward, and totally not worth 
it
for anyone involved.

Original comment by lahat...@gmail.com on 30 Apr 2009 at 8:02

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Good. I was hoping it wouldn't bother you too much :-).

By the way Mike, fetch the final release of 0.7 - it's out now.

Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 30 Apr 2009 at 8:29

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Original comment by Nimda...@gmail.com on 30 Apr 2009 at 8:29

• Changed state: Fixed