Recent changes to the way league rebuys work is causing some friction (and extra work for scorekeepers) in our weekly league. I write to offer some constructive feedback and request a way to access the previous functionality.
Some context:
Chester County Disc Golf operates as a 503(c) non-profit where $40 league dues fund awards in the league, but also are the primary source of revenue for our organization.
In our league, we require players to submit scores on a card that contains at least one other league player, to ensure a level of integrity that our players have come to depend on.
To support that requirement, we implemented a bit of hack by creating a “Witness” division. This enabled players to play with friends, but not count a round as their official score for the week (using rebuys).
Divisions (we have six) are assigned outside of Udisc as part of regular league admin, where players are relegated/promoted based on performance a few times throughout the season.
Issue:
Prior to a recent release, players could choose their division round-by-round.
After the recent release players can no longer change from Witness to their competitive division and vice versa.
The best score is used, which may not be the one they meant to count.
Impact:
We now need to communicate with each player that submits more than one round before weekly results can be finalized.
Because a player’s weekly rank impacts the points awarded each week, we can not finalize results for any/all until we have tracked each of these players down to have a conversation.
Asks:
Please consider a way to support a “witness” type round.
Please communicate changes like this ahead of release.
Please consider making “breaking changes” during a part of the year where league activity is much lower. Changes to the export format are another recent example of sudden and material changes that I see have caused some headaches.
Considerations on rebuys specifically:
Could you roll back this change?
Could there be a flavor of rebuys that is “provisional” (i.e. don’t count as an official round for scoring, but are logged along with the scoring rounds)?
Could league admins have a way to set rules for which round(s) to count when rebuys are enabled (e.g. [first | last | bestN | all ]).
Could players playing multiple rounds be forced to choose which is official?
We don’t necessarily need to support “Witness” division as we had it, but do want to offer a way to achieve the same outcome for our players and our league.
Thanks for reading and for all that you do. Love UDisc.
Hi @jeffreyfiore, thanks for your feedback around this. I just wanted to follow-up to let you know our team saw and will take this feedback into consideration for future improvements.
A few questions for you:
Do you allow players to chose their best round? If not, what score would be used?
Can players score a non-official or “provisional” round? How/when would they decide this?
Are players not able to find/play with someone that is buying into the league? We have a similar rebuy model in my club, but it’s required that you play with at least 2 others that are also playing a league round.
We do not let players select their best round. We used the round that players specify as their “official” round.
Players (could) specify which round was their official round by “Checking In” to their competitive division. Ours were A, B, C, etc.
If a league player had already played their official round or was planning to do so later, they would check in to a special division (“Witness”) on the same card as a player shooting their official round. Where the official-round player checked into div- A, B, C etc.
All witness rounds were discarded before points were awarded for the event.
Our events are a week long where a player can play any time, as long as they have another leauge player on the card (origin story: covid/social distancing)
This was admittedly a “hack” that leveraged the ability-to-change-divisions-mid-event loophole that UDisc recently closed.
In the end, what we are missing is a way for players to be on the same card as another league player, but not necessarily have all the players’ scores on that card count as the official score submitted for that event. Hope that makes sense.
Happy to explain further if that would be helpful.
Thanks again - it means a lot that you are following up.
@jeffreyfiore this is really helpful, thanks for providing this context. I can definitely see the value in being able to change divisions for this type of format. This is not something our team is able to fix in the near term, but we will keep this in mind for future updates and appreciate your feedback around this!
Please keep in mind, that the ask is not necessarily a requirement for division switching, but to enable the player pick (before they start play) whether that rounds should count, or not count toward final results in the event.
