I have to say I am happy to see the new rules about GE caption changes. I think this will help to prevent people from sandbagging at the last minute. I also think this encourages people to be a little more involved in the sport of things.

As I have said to other long term FDC directors...I think the GE captions are the bread and butter of your score. Personaly I would like to see us have to stick with our GE choices the entire season. To me this is like when a real corps announces their show. Real corps decide in december/january time what they are going to play for the rest of the year. I would say that most corps do not do any MAJOR rewrites of their show during the season. For our purposes I think changing your GE caption is like being able to suddenly change your show and have your "corps" learn a whole new program...which to me is not realistic. I hope that the new rule helps to make things a much tighter race for the top.

As and aside I would like to thank Josh, Kevin and the rest of the mods/staff for keeping this going. I know I look forward to it all year.

I second!

amen to that!!

I have no problem with the rule change in regard to sand bagging, but a major element of strategy has been revealed. Personally, I had tons of fun watching people that didn't get the secret to good scores. You could almost see the frustration on the screen. Now with this rule change, it is basically a giant "HERE IS HOW TO SCORE WELL" sign posted for everyone to see. Yes, competition is fun, but watching people flounder around and then figuring out was fun too.

I agree with you to a certain extent. I mean I have had up and down seasons since we started this FDC thing so this is not that raveings of someone who is angry about not winning. I mean honestly though...how slow would you have to be to not understand that the GE captions are a HUGE part of the score. I mean I would think all FDC directors are reading their FDC manual thoroughly and paying close attention to things like scoring systems and rule changes...( I hope my sarcasm is getting across here).

You are right it does take away the ability to take a certain mount of joy in someone else's mild fantasy suffering...
But I think we needed something to help prevent the sandbagging that happened last year. Some poeple were clearly not actively invovled in the "day to day" operations of their corps and more or less chimed in at the last bit to come from a near dead last finish to taking first place.

people dont read the rules, and the scores involve math.

I still dont think its enough. I still stand by a spending points for placement rule.. earning a caption change doest help all that much when youre already winning nearly every show youre attending. it helps those behind you. whats preventing anyone from continuing to sandbag? theyll just be doing it with less certainty now, but still possible.

IF we use last year as an example, its history, it happened, im not trying to be arrogant, or unappreciative here, but it seemed I had more gold medals than any other two groups combined, and all I got for it was caption changes that I couldnt, or didnt need to use. And yet I was beaten by a group that I had 20+ pointed up until aug 1st.and beaten by a large margin the day before.
Am I wrong to expect a little bit of competitive momentum, it exists in real life, why not FDC?

Back to the GE thing, theres still more to it than just getting a high GE score.

Obviously there is more to it than goo GE scores. But the GE scores are generaly speaking earning you the most points. The other captions are really just going to tweak things. I think this is a good start to changing the rules and we can see how this works this season.

Other fantasy leagues that i'm in start you off with a base salary, then after every 5 shows you compete in you get a point towards your salary. There are limits to how many shows you can get. This makes it where the salary is always changing. Also, it is set up that no two corps can have the same captions, and the first corps to have "said Captions" would be allowed to keep them. This discorages the sand-baggers from waiting till the last minute to change captions cause they are not guarenteed to get them.

I dig our system of caption choices I, like many others, do not like that people can easily sandbag at the last minute. The way things panned out last year was lame...and I was not in the running for a first place finish at ALL and I still thought it was lame.

Just for the record, I'm pointing out that I still fully support this rule change.

I want to ask if the July 18th date (before the first head-to-head) was intentional or not. I didn't really check the schedule beforehand, so I didn't know when the first full match-up was. I'm fairly happy with my GE captions (though would admittedly like to tweak them slightly after the SA show), but just wondered if putting the deadline the day before the scores actually meant something was intentional to throw a bit of chance into the mix or not.

this is by no means a complaint, but it would be helpful if the July 18th date had been listed on the corps page under captions where it is says "...Drum & Bugle Corps has X GE caption changes and Y regular caption changes available, with the last day to make changes being 31 July." I read the handbook but I forgot all about the fact that GE caption changes ended earlier.

I have to agree that it was misleading. Though I WISH I had forgotten because I'm starting to think my original idea was better... lol. Oh well!

I asked DLwebmaestro the same question in a pm and he said the date was picked arbitrarily