Austin Improv

Taking all suggestions here for development of the Fantasy Micetro League as joked about on another thread and now apparently gaining some steam as a plausible marketing tool.

For those of you unfamiliar with fantasy sports - the basic idea is that you have a "team" which consists of a roster of players (not necessarily from the same team in real life). You get points throughout the season depending on your players' individual performances each week. Depending on the league, there are various scoring methods. It's something you can play for pure fun with a small amount of effort or you can spend a lot of time researching, projecting and burying your head in matchups, statistics and probabilities. Never, ever, EVER is actual gambling for money involved.



Here is my starter post from the other thread:

OK - I was joking around with Ted a bit, but now you've got me thinking. The simplest way to do points would be straight off of the board. If someone got, say, 7 and went out in the first round then the score would be 7 for the week. Maybe we spice it up by adding a bonus point or two for each round survived with a 10 or 20-point bonus for the winner. How many rounds does Maestro usually run - 6,7,8?

The real challenge would be figuring out how to have a roster since the players change every week. You'd either have to have a draft every weekend or have a deep enough roster from one draft to be reasonably sure you could "start" someone(s) every week.

Also, how long would the "season" be? 2-3 months?

Some suggestions have already been made. I'm not going to port them all over here but y'all who posted on Jessica's "No signup thread" feel free to repost below. I'd ask Bob - but he's kinda gone. Brad - can you do this?

I'm quite familiar with fantasy leagues (at least for football) so I'm going to start researching the practical aspects of this. I'll post more as I go.

Feel free to chime in and give me your questions/thoughts/ideas - yes, even the negative ones.

People who have expressed interest as of 10 PM:

Brockman
Ted
Brad
Wes
Kareem
Peter
Bryan
Dav
Justin D.

All the thoughts from the other thread in sequential order. You can gather the context without seeing quotes of quotes:

improvstitute wrote:It is actually possible to create a fantasy league in Joomla - though I am not sure how customizeable it is. If anyone is serious about creating a fantasy micetro league, then this might be something to look into. It could actually be alot of fun.

Wesley wrote:What's wrong with that, if it ups attendance? Besides, I doubt any prize we'd offer would be worth enough to actually bring out people looking to truly influence the outcome of the shows.

I'm all for individual improvisers building fan bases that come out to see them and cheer them on.

kbadr wrote:Could just count one show per month, or the top two shows per month. Or something. *shrug*

hujhax wrote:Me, I just want to ensure that Maestro has *some* sort of illegal gambling going on behind the scenes. We can all get behind that, right?

bradisntclever wrote:I've seen it be as short as four rounds (last week was one of those) and as long as 6-7. Typically, I'd guess 4-5 rounds.

LuBu McJohnson wrote:I'd like to play! Totally understand if I can't, but I'd like to.

fbillac wrote:This is too funny! I will be happy to facilitate the FML any way I can. I agree with Wes though. Use the shit out of this to promote AIC shows, troupes, etc. Push folks to the AIC website for webcasted highlights. Create a stat tracker...go nuts!

-Dav "Founder of the FML"

mpbrockman wrote:OK - I'm going to put some thought into the "FML" and do a little research. In the meantime, I'm going to start a separate thread for this under AIC marketing - sorry Jessica for hijacking the sh*t out of this one.

Justin Davis wrote:Me too and me too.

With enough people interested, it may be hard to do anything like a draft. I could see a pick 'em, where you try to guess what order the top 3 finish in. Whatever we do, I'd hate for it to be anything that involves predicting who gets booted out early.

I'm game to help organize it, though I don't know what software we could use. I could also set up a quick blog for some weekly analysis and "the storytelling" aspect people are looking for.

We definitely need someone who can keep score each week. Maybe make sure the directors keep track. I saw Troy did an excellent job with that at the last Maestro on Saturday.

Either way, it will be fun to keep track of how many total points people wound up with each week.

So here is what I am thinking as a mitigation for players who don't play for a week or two. Score them an average score based on previous performances, minus a ghost player modifier.

Effectively FML teams would be small consisting of 3 to 5 members. I like the idea of actual board scores but I think there should be some nice bonus points added for big laughs, solid scene work and just general good play. Then again, the audience scores really account for all of that.

Folks in the tech booth could be instrumental with score keeping and such. David had a really cool blog that kept real good track of various performances, though I have not viewed it for a while.

If we turn this into a marketing vehicle (which I truly think is a viable idea) staffing the show or just paying that extra bit of attention in current roles would be encouraged. did I mention I really like the idea of opening this up to the public =). It is high time Maestro got its own website and the FML could be just the impetus to get it going.

-Dav

bradisntclever wrote:With enough people interested, it may be hard to do anything like a draft.

You're a super-genius, Brad! Thanks for porting this stuff over here!

I think I can figure some ways around the draft issue. There may even be a way to do it as a single night thing with audience involvement as Matt proposed.

The reason I think it might be cool to do a longer term season tho', is that it would be interesting to watch longer term point accumulations. Like in fantasy sports, consistency is often more important than a one-week killing. Someone who finished in the top 5 pretty regularly would tend to win out long term over someone who won one night and then left after the first round for the next 3-4 outings. That's where the strategy bit comes in, which is half the fun.

I think that's why I'm going to have to get the scores from some Maestros over several weeks to tweak the point system so it's balanced.

Also, doing it as a single night thing might defeat the marketing intent as the plan is to encourage repeat attendance - people coming back to see "their players" as Wes mentioned.

I'm thinking right now that the entire pool of improvisors belongs to everyone. When the cast list goes up - everyone would have to have their picks in by a deadline, say, Friday at 6PM. Yes, multiple people would be able to play the same person - but since we'll allow for say, 3 roster spots per person there should be enough variance to keep things interesting. Again, I'll need the results of several Maestros to see if that number of roster spots needs to be increased to increase variance. That would also eliminate some of the trickier aspects of fantasy games by avoiding trades/waiver wires and all that stuff.

I'm also thinking that both improvisors and audience members could participate without contaminating the Maestro show itself. I'd like to see this function as a "value-added" thing rather than an end in itself.

Multiple roster spots also insures that no one zeroes out the week, and if one of your "players" calls in sick at the last minute - guess what? It's just like the real thing when Belichick or Parcells start f**king with their injury reports and your guy doesn't take the field after being listed as "probable".

Ah, random thoughts. Give me some time to crystallize this and I'll talk to you, Brad, when I've got a structure in place and have gotten some more feedback, input and numbers to crunch. Maybe you can suggest a way to use some software I'm not familiar with to dress it up/make it more readily web available. At this point my level of sophistication in that dept. reaches to the point where I could design an Excel spreadsheet to track everything - but that's about it. Not very fancy.

It's also possible that we should have a 4-6 week test run using only interested improvisors as players with the understanding that the system may need to be tweaked before we run it with audience members.

Then again, I may be able to sim it with a random number generator.

How many spaces (points) does the Maestro board have? 30-40? Somewhere in there?

mpbrockman wrote: How many spaces (points) does the Maestro board have? 30-40? Somewhere in there?

It's either twenty-five or thirty spaces.

This sounds awesome. I can't wait to see this go down.

This is freaking brilliant. I want LeBron and Favre on my fantasy micetro team.

HerrHerr wrote:

mpbrockman wrote: How many spaces (points) does the Maestro board have? 30-40? Somewhere in there?

It's either twenty-five or thirty spaces.

Thanks. That raises another question. Do the last players' markers regularly go off the end of the scale? I can't remember - I need to factor that into the scoring system.

I see Dav and I xposted. So we both realized that a multiple player roster would make this work more effectively. We just need to find the best number for good variance and I think the 3-5 range is correct. I'd like to try with 3 for simplicity's sake, but my intuition says we'll need 4 or 5 to avoid too many ties.

Style points would be cool, but I think that's too subjective. We'd actually have to have a judge or a panel of judges deciding who got what style points. Friction lies thataway. I would vote to stick with the easily quantifiable: i.e. points from the board, bonus point(s) for surviving a round and/or winning. As I mentioned above - this may need some tweaking before it works acceptably. I'd want it to be reasonably competitive and not have constant blowouts.

Something else I thought of. To keep the "FML" from contaminating the actual Micetro show, each players' roster choices should be confidential (at least until after the show when you may share at your discretion). We should have a commissioner who receives the roster choices and tallies the point totals for the week and keeps track of the running point totals over the season. Maybe we should have two commishes who keep track independently and confer to check each other's work and keep things honest to avoid accusations of favoritism etc. Results could be made available each Sunday evening or something along those lines.

I'm also thinking this should work as a total points league (the person with the most points at the end of the "season" wins). Having to deal with week by week individual matchups and devising a workable playoff bracket system seems unnecessarily complex. At least it does for now.

One more question - when do Maestro cast lists normally get posted? We'd need that to be fairly regular if we were to have a deadline for roster submissions; which I think will be necessary for this to work. Then again, as long as your roster is turned in before "kickoff". The totals can be worked out the next day. Maybe that's not that big an issue, but I'd hate to be the one to tell an audience member who couldn't make the show until 15 minutes after it started that he/she gets a big, fat zero for the week.

Oh hell, Ted. I went over to look at Joomla! but I don't understand much of what I'm looking at. I'll try reading a little more tomorrow but I think I'd be in over my head plus it's 240A and I really ought stop thinking about this and get some sleep.

mpbrockman wrote:Oh hell, Ted. I went over to look at Joomla! but I don't understand much of what I'm looking at. I'll try reading a little more tomorrow but I think I'd be in over my head plus it's 240A and I really ought stop thinking about this and get some sleep.

Looks like that extension in Joomla is no longer available. It probably had a ton of bugs that the creator couldn't fix. Oh well...back to the old fashioned way.

I have more thoughts on this. I will post them later today when I have more time.

Players almost never go off the end of the board. And we are supposed to have the cast list up on Thursday. Though it sometimes takes a little longer than that.

I would love to have a "maestro" page with all sorts of interesting stuff on it. Maybe we could even have a score card/ some kind of writing thing that ties in with the fantasy league so the audience could keep track that night and then go to the site to look up their players. I know it is usually done all on the computer, but that element might bring in more audience members. I would love to see a function where you check off something and as soon as the cast list is posted it goes out to all the people who are keeping track. That might really bring in a more regular audience! Plus, it would be a lot of fun!

Jessica wrote:Players almost never go off the end of the board. And we are supposed to have the cast list up on Thursday. Though it sometimes takes a little longer than that.

Thank you and thank you. I worry about the limited window that gives us for roster submission. Hmmm...

Jessica wrote:I would love to have a "maestro" page with all sorts of interesting stuff on it. Maybe we could even have a score card/ some kind of writing thing that ties in with the fantasy league so the audience could keep track that night and then go to the site to look up their players. I know it is usually done all on the computer, but that element might bring in more audience members. I would love to see a function where you check off something and as soon as the cast list is posted it goes out to all the people who are keeping track. That might really bring in a more regular audience! Plus, it would be a lot of fun!

Good ideas all (many features you mention are available on actual fantasy sports sites), but I'm no web guru - so I don't know what the feasibility level is. If a web page comes into existence it would be cool to have columnists, be they regular or intermittent contributors, that can write up reviews and analysis in the manner of fantasy sports writers like Gregg Rosenthal, Matthew Berry et al. That would be great fun!

One thing worth pointing out is that the cast list posted on thursday and the ultimate cast who performs is not always, or even regularly the same. You always have 1 or 2 people who can't make it, and there's often deliberately a few spots left open for last minute additions. So you might want to take that into account somehow.