You said it right there. They string themselves out to not go out of play. Split pack, out of play, either way they can't block the jammer. It's the same thing.
We're so happy to have her in Minnesota. Not only is she a great skater, but she's a hard worker behind the scenes and has a great positive attitude even when she's snarking.
People want to change the rules to fight strategies before teams have a real chance to figure out how to combat them within the current ruleset. Let stuff shake out. If something isn't completely broken to the point the game isn't playable, give people a chance.
You are already starting to see ways to fight passive offense, and it will only get better. Just like you're starting to see adjustment around scrum starts. This doesn't mean that passive offense will go away, just that people will learn how to manage having it used against them.
Passive isn't really about splitting the pack. Against a team who know's whats up, passive is about making the other team string themselves out to not go out of play. This misconception irks me.
I can relate to this article a lot. I also pick up on things very quickly. Everything I've ever done takes me no time to master. But not derby, and that's what I love about it. Two years in and I've cried about three times, but I've never given up and I don't plan on it any time soon! Thanks Jasmine for writing this!
All that talk about no unintended consequences coming by diminishing power jams is completely untrue. The less important you make power jams, the more likely jammers aren't going to care about getting penalties. The less they care about penalties, the more penalties they commit which is A. dangerous and B. will just create more power jams (whether you reduce them to 15 or 30 seconds or one lap point) which nullifies the whole idea. That's two unintended consequences, I'm sure there are more. It's kind of ridiculous to say that changing something would have NO unintended consequences. That's just never going to be true.
But, all this fear of unintended consequences is pointless. Things need to change so change them. That doesn't mean you don't think things through and put as much work into them as possible but you can't fear what might happen, otherwise NOTHING will ever change.
Onto your criticisms of the rule change I presented, they just aren't accurate:
1. Destroying the pack does not take away a jammer's ability to score on a lap. They just can't score during the no pack. So, if a team took a knee, the jammer would just hang behind them until they got up and reformed the pack and then begin scoring. So, you can say, well, that would still be worth it for the defensive team. NO IT WOULDN'T. Picking up a major to hold a jammer back for 3 seconds is worth it? Not even on the last jam of the game. "Well, they could keep the pack destroyed by staying on their knees." Sure, but after about 15 seconds, their entire pack would get sent to the box because they're not reforming. Only worth it on the last jam, but there are already ridiculous strategies you can use in the last jam to prevent a jammer from scoring or help your jammer score so talking about the last jam isn't relevant.
2. About the defense being able to runaway pussy. That's ONLY true if the offense lets them. Both teams control the speed of the pack. If the defense starts running away, all the offense has to do is continue skating at the same speed. The defense will potentially pick up pack destruction majors. The offense is just maintaining the speed of the pack. This isn't WindyMan's the "front of the pack is always the pack" idea, pack is still controlled by both teams here. And, as it is now, neither team can increase or decrease the speed of the pack without the other team's cooperation or by good blocking. That would still be true.
And BTW, "A pack skating at full speed during a powerjam will almost completely negate the effect of the jammer penalty...And that's obviously not a good thing." I thought you wanted to negate the effect of a jammer penalty? Isn't that the whole point of making power jams less meaningful?
> A pack skating at full speed during a powerjam will almost completely negate
the effect of the jammer penalty to begin with because it takes so much time
to make up ground against a fast-moving pack (even if you're Atomatrix).
And that's obviously not a good thing.
A fast moving pack is bad for the team on the power jam. But it's good for the team killing the power jam! There's two sides to it.
I believe (and so does USARS) that if a team of blockers cannot keep containment on at least one of their opponents during a power jam situation (that is, blockers don't block) then that team should lose the privilege of pack speed control. Strictly from a competition/fairness standpoint, why is this a bad thing?
Also, contrary to popular belief, a runaway pussy pack is completely counterable:
1) Prevent it from happening in the first place by keeping blocking position forward in the pack at all times, such as a pivot or other player with a dedicated role of pack containment/control.
2) An individual skater is almost always faster on the track than a group of skaters; that individual can therefore catch up to the pack and peel off a goat to slow the pack down immediately. (This happened quite a bit during the USARS SW regional, actually.)
3) If teams are equally fast, the rear team can use whips to accelerate blockers forward into the other team, something the forward team cannot do without slowing down one of their players.
4) Have the jammer call off the jam once they recognize their blockers have lost pack containment. Although, this is only possible if there is always a lead jammer on the track with the ability to call it off. (Maybe there always should be.)
>Any time a defensive skater gets trapped behind an offensive wall, if they
have any clue, they'll commit a major penalty (a cut, for example) and allow
the rest of their team to control the front and start the process of winding up
the pack speed. That is, by far, the game-theoretically dominant strategy.
This happened a few times at the USARS Southwest regional, actually. If you watch the (I think it was the) Grim Reap-Hers vs. SINtral Valley game (http://www.derbynewsnetwork.com/live/bouts/2012/09/2_group_b_vs_3_group_0) there was one where the Reap-Hers had a single goat behind a 4-wall, but then that goat got a penalty. That immediately redefined the pack to the SINtral blockers at the front of the pack, at which point the sped it up. I noticed (and I believe I commented on the webcast) that all 4 Reap-Hers players basically put "all their eggs in one basket" and relied on that goat staying back there, instead of hedging their bets by putting at least one player forward to guard against that possibility.
Sure, SINtral got an advantage as a direct result of a blocker penalty. But they still had to serve that blocker penalty, which in USARS rules is a pretty significant disadvantage by itself. And had the Reap-Hers played better defense while on offense, it may have never happened in the first place.
I completely agree with your position that no-packs are a significant problem in derby, and the community should be actively thinking about ways to disincentivize pack-splitting (if that's even possible, which I'm not sure it is), but it is equally clear that powerjams are a massive problem that need to be fixed.
"NOTHING has changed with power jam rules (except the jammer swap) and nobody used to complain about them. And, now all of a sudden, they're the worst thing in the world."
This statement simply isn't true. For many years, a large number of people have recognized the horribly disproportionate impact of powerjams on derby bouts (just because we didn't have 35 point jams back in the day doesn't mean the effect of powerjams wasn't substantial), and have anticipated the exact scenario that the sport is in right now. I can remember conversations about this with members of various organizations as far back as 2008-2009. It has been obvious for some time that this is where we were headed, but it took the implementation of passive offense by well-known, visible teams to wake up the derby world to the problem. The rules related to powerjams have always been terrible and they need to change if the sport is going to have any chance of remaining watchable.
But there's hope, because here's the great thing about most of the proposed changes to powerjams: they have no unintended consequences. We know, for certain, that shortening jammer penalties to 30 seconds (or more appropriately, 15 seconds) won't open up a loophole in the rules or create some sort of dominant strategy that will make the sport more boring. It's super simple, and the results are predictable: we lessen the impact of powerjams and we blunt the effectiveness of passive offense. Those are both unquestionably great results.
Likewise, having jammers serve their penalties in the next jam (as a blocker) is such a simple tweak that it has no unintended consequences on the rest of the game. And to the extent that there are consequences, they have already been tested in the banked track environment and worked through (see the last-jam rules that deal with this issue).
The opposite is true when you start screwing with pack definition and scoring rules. If there is any lesson that has been learned over time, it's that messing with pack definition rules nearly always have unanticipated consequences. Take your example of not allowing jammers to score in a no-pack. I've only given it about 30 seconds of thought and already I can see that it is potentially a dominant strategy (from a game-theoretical perspective) for the defensive blockers to take a knee and create a no-pack right as the opposing jammer is about to score in a power jam. One destruction of pack penalty is well worth the five points that will be saved on that pass. Obviously, the jammer has some defenses to this strategy, but it's easy to see how a skilled team could badly manipulate this rule, particularly in end-game scenarios where it is advantageous.
Also, once a defensive team gets up front under your proposed rules, it will be nearly impossible to prevent the pack speed from being wound up to a sprint because the offensive team will be forced to maintain a pack by staying in range with the defensive team (or risk not scoring at all) and the defensive team will be running away at full speed as soon as the offensive team starts to engage. A pack skating at full speed during a powerjam will almost completely negate the effect of the jammer penalty to begin with because it takes so much time to make up ground against a fast-moving pack (even if you're Atomatrix). And that's obviously not a good thing.
Because I know some people are going to jump in and claim that skilled teams will be able to goat an opposing skater and control the pack, I will address that argument here. Any time a defensive skater gets trapped behind an offensive wall, if they have any clue, they'll commit a major penalty (a cut, for example) and allow the rest of their team to control the front and start the process of winding up the pack speed. That is, by far, the game-theoretically dominant strategy.
Also, the argument that a great offensive team will be able to jump forward and goat a defensive player once the defense has the front is completely hollow. After teams practice defending the front of the pack (which they will, constantly), they are almost never going to give up a goat after establishing their position up there (unless there is a huge skill gap between the teams).
Those are just two immediately obvious problems with the no-pack, no-scoring change you presented. I bet the rules committee could come up with another ten over the course of a half hour discussion. I want to be clear that I'm not trying to demean this particular idea. I think that any time we mess with pack definition, there will be 10 different things that pop up, which is why I think we should start to make rules changes in areas where we can ensure that all other things remain equal and we don't have to guess about the consequences.
One minute jammer penalties are the worst rule in sports (besides allowing a team to stop the clock with an official review when they have no timeouts left). Stop the madness. And God bless you, Lex, for writing this article.
You're clearly arguing against no pack/slow pack/stopped pack/split pack (I say split pack, not because I think it's in the rulebook but because it describes a very specific strategy and no pack scenario, whereas just saying no pack could be a number of things) and openly admitting that power jams used to not cause massive point swings and yet you're still arguing for changing penalty rules and not arguing to change how no pack situations work? It just doesn't make sense.
Split packs ARE THE PROBLEM. Power jams are NOT the problem. Split packs cause power jams to be absurd, it's not the other way around.
Everyone tries to blame power jams, as if limiting those will change anything. It won't. Blowouts will still happen. Blockers still won't touch each other. Scrum starts will still be going on. It changes almost nothing about the game.
NOTHING has changed with power jam rules (except the jammer swap) and nobody used to complain about them. And, now all of a sudden, they're the worst thing in the world. Hmm...maybe it's not because power jams just simply exist, maybe it's because of the new strategies teams are implementing in those situations. Make those strategies impossible or not advantageous and suddenly those ugly massive scoring power jams go away. The ugly 4-wall vs 4-wall regular jams go away. We go back to having a real pack that actually has blockers from each team blocking each other.
The fix: jammers can't legally pass when there's no pack. It's that easy.
I really meant no offense by the ref comment. I have to remember not everyone gets me! I love my WRD refs. They are professional and fair and wonderful support system to me and my team. What I meant to convey is that the audience participation part should remain intact but in a more healthy way. There was a lot of commentary about good/bad calls and I like that part.
During the westerns championship bout I was sitting next to a roller girl who was cheering for roller girls on both teams.... sometimes during the same jam! I thought that was pretty awesome.
But, yeah, it was a little disheartening to see Onda Sligh pull of an awsome spin move and see Rettig to Rumble stand up at turn 3 to cheer, and then awkwardly sit back down as she was the only one cheering... and lots of others jeering.
You said it right there. They string themselves out to not go out of play. Split pack, out of play, either way they can't block the jammer. It's the same thing.
We're so happy to have her in Minnesota. Not only is she a great skater, but she's a hard worker behind the scenes and has a great positive attitude even when she's snarking.
People want to change the rules to fight strategies before teams have a real chance to figure out how to combat them within the current ruleset. Let stuff shake out. If something isn't completely broken to the point the game isn't playable, give people a chance.
You are already starting to see ways to fight passive offense, and it will only get better. Just like you're starting to see adjustment around scrum starts. This doesn't mean that passive offense will go away, just that people will learn how to manage having it used against them.
Passive isn't really about splitting the pack. Against a team who know's whats up, passive is about making the other team string themselves out to not go out of play. This misconception irks me.
I can relate to this article a lot. I also pick up on things very quickly. Everything I've ever done takes me no time to master. But not derby, and that's what I love about it. Two years in and I've cried about three times, but I've never given up and I don't plan on it any time soon! Thanks Jasmine for writing this!
When is voting? Or who already won?
All that talk about no unintended consequences coming by diminishing power jams is completely untrue. The less important you make power jams, the more likely jammers aren't going to care about getting penalties. The less they care about penalties, the more penalties they commit which is A. dangerous and B. will just create more power jams (whether you reduce them to 15 or 30 seconds or one lap point) which nullifies the whole idea. That's two unintended consequences, I'm sure there are more. It's kind of ridiculous to say that changing something would have NO unintended consequences. That's just never going to be true.
But, all this fear of unintended consequences is pointless. Things need to change so change them. That doesn't mean you don't think things through and put as much work into them as possible but you can't fear what might happen, otherwise NOTHING will ever change.
Onto your criticisms of the rule change I presented, they just aren't accurate:
1. Destroying the pack does not take away a jammer's ability to score on a lap. They just can't score during the no pack. So, if a team took a knee, the jammer would just hang behind them until they got up and reformed the pack and then begin scoring. So, you can say, well, that would still be worth it for the defensive team. NO IT WOULDN'T. Picking up a major to hold a jammer back for 3 seconds is worth it? Not even on the last jam of the game. "Well, they could keep the pack destroyed by staying on their knees." Sure, but after about 15 seconds, their entire pack would get sent to the box because they're not reforming. Only worth it on the last jam, but there are already ridiculous strategies you can use in the last jam to prevent a jammer from scoring or help your jammer score so talking about the last jam isn't relevant.
2. About the defense being able to runaway pussy. That's ONLY true if the offense lets them. Both teams control the speed of the pack. If the defense starts running away, all the offense has to do is continue skating at the same speed. The defense will potentially pick up pack destruction majors. The offense is just maintaining the speed of the pack. This isn't WindyMan's the "front of the pack is always the pack" idea, pack is still controlled by both teams here. And, as it is now, neither team can increase or decrease the speed of the pack without the other team's cooperation or by good blocking. That would still be true.
And BTW, "A pack skating at full speed during a powerjam will almost completely negate the effect of the jammer penalty...And that's obviously not a good thing." I thought you wanted to negate the effect of a jammer penalty? Isn't that the whole point of making power jams less meaningful?
> A pack skating at full speed during a powerjam will almost completely negate
the effect of the jammer penalty to begin with because it takes so much time
to make up ground against a fast-moving pack (even if you're Atomatrix).
And that's obviously not a good thing.
A fast moving pack is bad for the team on the power jam. But it's good for the team killing the power jam! There's two sides to it.
I believe (and so does USARS) that if a team of blockers cannot keep containment on at least one of their opponents during a power jam situation (that is, blockers don't block) then that team should lose the privilege of pack speed control. Strictly from a competition/fairness standpoint, why is this a bad thing?
Also, contrary to popular belief, a runaway pussy pack is completely counterable:
1) Prevent it from happening in the first place by keeping blocking position forward in the pack at all times, such as a pivot or other player with a dedicated role of pack containment/control.
2) An individual skater is almost always faster on the track than a group of skaters; that individual can therefore catch up to the pack and peel off a goat to slow the pack down immediately. (This happened quite a bit during the USARS SW regional, actually.)
3) If teams are equally fast, the rear team can use whips to accelerate blockers forward into the other team, something the forward team cannot do without slowing down one of their players.
4) Have the jammer call off the jam once they recognize their blockers have lost pack containment. Although, this is only possible if there is always a lead jammer on the track with the ability to call it off. (Maybe there always should be.)
>Any time a defensive skater gets trapped behind an offensive wall, if they
have any clue, they'll commit a major penalty (a cut, for example) and allow
the rest of their team to control the front and start the process of winding up
the pack speed. That is, by far, the game-theoretically dominant strategy.
This happened a few times at the USARS Southwest regional, actually. If you watch the (I think it was the) Grim Reap-Hers vs. SINtral Valley game (http://www.derbynewsnetwork.com/live/bouts/2012/09/2_group_b_vs_3_group_0) there was one where the Reap-Hers had a single goat behind a 4-wall, but then that goat got a penalty. That immediately redefined the pack to the SINtral blockers at the front of the pack, at which point the sped it up. I noticed (and I believe I commented on the webcast) that all 4 Reap-Hers players basically put "all their eggs in one basket" and relied on that goat staying back there, instead of hedging their bets by putting at least one player forward to guard against that possibility.
Sure, SINtral got an advantage as a direct result of a blocker penalty. But they still had to serve that blocker penalty, which in USARS rules is a pretty significant disadvantage by itself. And had the Reap-Hers played better defense while on offense, it may have never happened in the first place.
My long post below was meant to be a response to thebigchuckbowski's post, but I was too dumb to correctly hit the reply button.
I completely agree with your position that no-packs are a significant problem in derby, and the community should be actively thinking about ways to disincentivize pack-splitting (if that's even possible, which I'm not sure it is), but it is equally clear that powerjams are a massive problem that need to be fixed.
"NOTHING has changed with power jam rules (except the jammer swap) and nobody used to complain about them. And, now all of a sudden, they're the worst thing in the world."
This statement simply isn't true. For many years, a large number of people have recognized the horribly disproportionate impact of powerjams on derby bouts (just because we didn't have 35 point jams back in the day doesn't mean the effect of powerjams wasn't substantial), and have anticipated the exact scenario that the sport is in right now. I can remember conversations about this with members of various organizations as far back as 2008-2009. It has been obvious for some time that this is where we were headed, but it took the implementation of passive offense by well-known, visible teams to wake up the derby world to the problem. The rules related to powerjams have always been terrible and they need to change if the sport is going to have any chance of remaining watchable.
But there's hope, because here's the great thing about most of the proposed changes to powerjams: they have no unintended consequences. We know, for certain, that shortening jammer penalties to 30 seconds (or more appropriately, 15 seconds) won't open up a loophole in the rules or create some sort of dominant strategy that will make the sport more boring. It's super simple, and the results are predictable: we lessen the impact of powerjams and we blunt the effectiveness of passive offense. Those are both unquestionably great results.
Likewise, having jammers serve their penalties in the next jam (as a blocker) is such a simple tweak that it has no unintended consequences on the rest of the game. And to the extent that there are consequences, they have already been tested in the banked track environment and worked through (see the last-jam rules that deal with this issue).
The opposite is true when you start screwing with pack definition and scoring rules. If there is any lesson that has been learned over time, it's that messing with pack definition rules nearly always have unanticipated consequences. Take your example of not allowing jammers to score in a no-pack. I've only given it about 30 seconds of thought and already I can see that it is potentially a dominant strategy (from a game-theoretical perspective) for the defensive blockers to take a knee and create a no-pack right as the opposing jammer is about to score in a power jam. One destruction of pack penalty is well worth the five points that will be saved on that pass. Obviously, the jammer has some defenses to this strategy, but it's easy to see how a skilled team could badly manipulate this rule, particularly in end-game scenarios where it is advantageous.
Also, once a defensive team gets up front under your proposed rules, it will be nearly impossible to prevent the pack speed from being wound up to a sprint because the offensive team will be forced to maintain a pack by staying in range with the defensive team (or risk not scoring at all) and the defensive team will be running away at full speed as soon as the offensive team starts to engage. A pack skating at full speed during a powerjam will almost completely negate the effect of the jammer penalty to begin with because it takes so much time to make up ground against a fast-moving pack (even if you're Atomatrix). And that's obviously not a good thing.
Because I know some people are going to jump in and claim that skilled teams will be able to goat an opposing skater and control the pack, I will address that argument here. Any time a defensive skater gets trapped behind an offensive wall, if they have any clue, they'll commit a major penalty (a cut, for example) and allow the rest of their team to control the front and start the process of winding up the pack speed. That is, by far, the game-theoretically dominant strategy.
Also, the argument that a great offensive team will be able to jump forward and goat a defensive player once the defense has the front is completely hollow. After teams practice defending the front of the pack (which they will, constantly), they are almost never going to give up a goat after establishing their position up there (unless there is a huge skill gap between the teams).
Those are just two immediately obvious problems with the no-pack, no-scoring change you presented. I bet the rules committee could come up with another ten over the course of a half hour discussion. I want to be clear that I'm not trying to demean this particular idea. I think that any time we mess with pack definition, there will be 10 different things that pop up, which is why I think we should start to make rules changes in areas where we can ensure that all other things remain equal and we don't have to guess about the consequences.
One minute jammer penalties are the worst rule in sports (besides allowing a team to stop the clock with an official review when they have no timeouts left). Stop the madness. And God bless you, Lex, for writing this article.
You're clearly arguing against no pack/slow pack/stopped pack/split pack (I say split pack, not because I think it's in the rulebook but because it describes a very specific strategy and no pack scenario, whereas just saying no pack could be a number of things) and openly admitting that power jams used to not cause massive point swings and yet you're still arguing for changing penalty rules and not arguing to change how no pack situations work? It just doesn't make sense.
Split packs ARE THE PROBLEM. Power jams are NOT the problem. Split packs cause power jams to be absurd, it's not the other way around.
Everyone tries to blame power jams, as if limiting those will change anything. It won't. Blowouts will still happen. Blockers still won't touch each other. Scrum starts will still be going on. It changes almost nothing about the game.
NOTHING has changed with power jam rules (except the jammer swap) and nobody used to complain about them. And, now all of a sudden, they're the worst thing in the world. Hmm...maybe it's not because power jams just simply exist, maybe it's because of the new strategies teams are implementing in those situations. Make those strategies impossible or not advantageous and suddenly those ugly massive scoring power jams go away. The ugly 4-wall vs 4-wall regular jams go away. We go back to having a real pack that actually has blockers from each team blocking each other.
The fix: jammers can't legally pass when there's no pack. It's that easy.
I really meant no offense by the ref comment. I have to remember not everyone gets me! I love my WRD refs. They are professional and fair and wonderful support system to me and my team. What I meant to convey is that the audience participation part should remain intact but in a more healthy way. There was a lot of commentary about good/bad calls and I like that part.
During the westerns championship bout I was sitting next to a roller girl who was cheering for roller girls on both teams.... sometimes during the same jam! I thought that was pretty awesome.
But, yeah, it was a little disheartening to see Onda Sligh pull of an awsome spin move and see Rettig to Rumble stand up at turn 3 to cheer, and then awkwardly sit back down as she was the only one cheering... and lots of others jeering.
I'm happy to see that the photo resonates with some one else.
This is a classic. I hope you won't mind when I put this on the front page ;)
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