NAF Committee Meeting March 4, 2018

Committee Meeting March 4, 2018

Attending: President Gaixo/Nate, Vice President Tojurub/Torsten, Tournament Director Purplegoo/Phil, Treasurer Geggster/Paul, League Director Valen
Apologies: Membership Director Rolex/Massimo

Meeting started at 21:00 CET / 20:00 UK time / 3 p.m. ET

1. League Director Report (LD)
Michael Franchetti (Vanguard) is taking over as the NAF OBBLM Lead from Steve Arthurs. The next update will come in about 2 weeks and will be hosted/posted on NAF site – this patch will be applied to NAFBBLM and be available for leagues that are hosted privately.

2. Membership Director Report (MD)
MD not in attendance but 2018 gifts have been ordered and will be available from the date of this year’s NAFC as usual. Paul and Torsten to handle receipt and initial distribution of the gifts.

3. Tournament Director Report (TD)
– Phil reported that he approved 67 tournaments in February alone and that one tournament could not be sanctioned as the TO insisted on banning the Leader Skill.

– Two replacements were announced as RTC: Matt_le_fou taking over in SW France and Yogibedlambear for SE England, including London. Yogi knows the strongly developing scene of BB2016 very well.

– The density of tournaments is increasing and is causing headaches in some areas for approving tournaments, most prominently in the UK. Similar issues are happening in NE USA and SE Canada in springtime. So far, Phil’s recommendation to the TOs and NAF reps in these areas are to encourage early submission of tournaments to the NAF database, so he can see overlap (spatial/time) early and start working with the TOs to resolve this.

– The committee had a short discussion about changing the approval process. Phil mentioned that some countries have a sort of pre-approval process with their local staffers (e.g. France) to avoid tourney collisions.

– South America Major
All committee members were discussing the wish of the South Americans for a Major. All were in favor of giving them a Major at one point of time, but all were the opinion that there must be a certain sustainability in place to avoid similar situation as with Spike! and CanCon and their low numbers. There was a discussion in the past of moving the Australian Major from CanCon to the much larger Eucalyptus Bowl. Also the constant fear of the Spike!-Organizers of them getting stripped a tourney. Torsten brought up a proposal after the last committee meeting to have certain procedure in place of awarding a continent one or two Majors based on tournament participation and active membership numbers, also with the possibility to take away majors if the numbers fall below a certain threshold. After longer discussion the following was decided: Once South America attracts 40+ coaches to a single tournament, that tournament will be awarded Major Status in the following year.

– Items for Charity events
In the past Lycos has given TO items from his personal fund to support charity events. Nate would like to revive this idea since many charity events (including his own, for the record) have asked for things in the past years to support their charity. Phil brought up the idea that the NAF will organize a donation box at larger tourneys, e.g. Eurobowl, where TOs can donate left over goodies from their tourneys and maybe given a raffle ticket for something, e.g. World Cup pitch. Paul mentioned that the NAF used to produce items for such purpose before WC1. Torsten mentioned that a manufacturer being used for the World Cup has suggested the production of items for the NAF and their members to use. The committee members agreed in pursue this topic in general and that we will collect ideas offline over the next weeks.

-Glicko ranking / alternative ranking
Phil reported that Nick is continuing to work on the new ranking system, based on Glicko algorithm. This system will allow decay and a different progression of coaches, e.g. if coaches start a new race, the starting value will be based on their existing races. It will also allow new coaches to be ranked higher faster if they beat several stronger coaches in short period of time. At this point it is not sure if the member-website can host this ranking, but it is known that the World Press page can be upgraded with an add-on for $44 to allow these rankings to be hosted with a drop-down menu (for filtering and selection). Nick will talk to Elyoukey about hosting this algorithm on the NAF server and ways to interface it to the members. It was made clear that this ranking will NOT replace the current classic rankings but will be an additional ranking for the members. It was agreed that the NAF should spend the $44 for the add on and that the new ranking should be developed over the next weeks and months to a maturity that it can be presented to the public. Phil mentioned that based from these new rankings some special spin-offs can be hosted by TheTacklezone website.

– Thoughts of TD after 3 months
Phil has extrapolated that more than 1500 tournaments will be sanctioned in the current TD term (2 years), which is about double from what Nate had done in the previous TD term. Each tourney takes 10-25min (on average) to verify and approve this will be an enormous time block for future Tournament Directors. Phil suggested to have a TD-team build up to assist the TD with the sanctioning. Gavin brought the NTC/RTCs up to help here, but there was a concern that some TC might be more easy-going than others and that this would lead to too much regional variation. If a team will be put in place, the TD must rely strongly on every team member to follow the same course of action as himself. This will be discussed in more depth at some later committee meeting.

– Phil mentioned that the tournament application interface needs a facelift since some things, e.g. Latitude and Longitude are useless. He will create a template which will show better was is needed and used and will present this to the other committee members. Nate will approach the website developers to see what an update of this would require, and also discussing the general path forward with them for future development assignments.

– Online Tournaments
Strider and a Hungarian online TO approached Phil if there was any merit in sanctioning more online tournaments. The committee was convinced that allowing this would cause an uncontrolled, exuberant, unhealthy growth of online tournaments and it was decided that the current approach of one NAF-online tourney every 2 months is sufficient.

– Tournament Series Pins
There will be two more series this year and since the minimum order number for the pins is still higher than the number of series, we will order the same amount for 2018. Nate will send Torsten the info about vender, etc. to order the pins for this year.

4. Treasurer report (Tr)
The committee members congratulated Paul for being elected again to be Treasurer for the next two years. Paul mentioned that the accounts were published, thanked Nate and Torsten for the prequel announcement in regards to the website. It was interesting to see relatively few questions about the accounts. Nate and Phil mentioned that there were some comments about the website spend on Facebook, but that some people who work in programming confirmed that is was a fair price and that the discussion was resolved happily.

5. World Cup report (VP)
The rules document proposal was discussed. In general the rules were approved, though some minor changes in presentation were requested. The rules can be presented to the public at Dungeonbowl with the note that rules might be amended/changed based on the next NAF tournament rules review, e.g. new Star Players or race positionals. On a side discussion it was decided to have the NAF-tournament-rules review done by end of October each year, announce it on November 1, and go into effect on January 1. Therefore, the World Cup rules will be entirely official by November 1, 2018.

6. Any other business (all)
– Nate contacted GW about the NAF hosting certain documents, e.g. rosters and a list of all Starplayers (incl. cost, but no stats for those that are only available in Deathzone Season 2). There is a draft made by Nate and Phil and it was submitted to GW for review.

– Phil talked to Alex (Leipziger) at Waterbowl in regards of Media officer. He was interested in the Social Media part, but not the Website part of it. Nate will get him in touch with Jim Luft and Alex Turner to decide how responsibilities might be shared.

7. Next meeting (all)
22. April 2018, 21:00 CET

Meeting ends at 23:30 CET/22:30 UK time/ 5:30 p.m. ET
Minutes taken by Tojurub.