Some suggestions for the war auction. This going to be quite long, so please bear with me.
#1:Max number of biddable people, max bid, number of players in a team and starting vault - I'm not sure how to properly call these numbers, so let me call them "variables". Instead tweaking only one of these variables, I think all of them should be changed. As mentioned by others, obviously the number of participants will be the base when tweaking these variables. Unfortunately, I have no suggestion for the number itself, but I'm suggesting that we have a sets of numbers for these variables which will depend on the number of participants.
Visual representation:
| # of participants | ~60 | High | Medium | Low |
| Starting vault | 290 + 10 | High | Medium | Low |
| # players in a team | 5 | High | Medium | Low |
| Max bid | 14 | High | Medium | Low |
| Max # diff bid | 15 | High | Medium | Low |
*the second column is as per current rules
#2:With the possibilities of having the same amount of participants in war #8, maybe a slightly drastic changes is warranted. I'm not entirely sure if this is plausible. In any case, below is an overview of the suggestion.
A. Stating favourite elements is mandatory and number of options are increased (let's say to 5).
B. Blind auction will somewhat automatically choose the first 3 players in each team.
C. The remaining participants will go through the normal open auction process.
So, let me refined the above points a little bit.
A.
- Bans still works as usual with a slight restriction now since there are 5 mandatory favourite elements. So, the max number of bans is 7.
- The order of favourite elements has its value.
B.
- Obviously, generals should be able to bid more people in this blind auction. Perhaps something as high as 15 names?
- Again, the order of the names has its value too.
- Everything here is FREE. Blind auction won't cost any cards.
- Although I hope we could create a formula that won't allow ties (since both the names' position and favourites' position have their own values), if there are ties, the position of the favourite elements will be the deciding factor.
- Worst case scenario here is when all 12 generals send the same list. Simplest solution to this is to increase the names to 12*3=36. But, I think this could only happen if the generals deliberately trying to make the WM's life miserable... >_<
- This is more of a fun point, but I think another approach to tackle the above situation is by having an added clause saying that if any particular name appears in more than 6 lists (e.g. entropy, death, gravity, earth, life and fire have Playerawesomesauce1!! in their list, Playerawesomesauce1!! is automatically dropped from everyone's list and have to go through the open auction process. The number can be tweaked - maybe increase it all up to 12.
C.
- After the blind auction, the 3 names that made into each team will be revealed and the fight for getting the remaining 2 players will begin.
- The remaining participants is a combination of highly sought players and.. newbies. It's a bit sad huh? I'm not sure if this should be an issue or not.
- Obviously, the max number of biddable people needs to be lowered since generals only need two more people. Perhaps something as low as 5?
- To make it more interesting, remove the limit for max bid. So, we could see something like "General of fire bids over 9000 cards1!!" Well... that's a bit unrealistic, but you'll get the idea.
I think the biggest problem for this suggestion is the distribution of the favourite elements. I don't care much about back-room deals or whatnot, but for some who against it, this suggestion evidently promotes it. In fact, my basic idea was to allow generals to pick their own teammates freely but still hoping to keep the whole auction process by maximizing the best part of the auction - watching how high would it
go.
The next problem is to create/find the perfect formula to calculate those two values - the order of favourite elements and the order in the list. I'm not really worried about this since we have lots math/googlesh**t experts here. In fact, I already have something rough in an excel and would gladly share/discuss/refine this idea if needed.
