[PCCL 2010] Announcements

[sohum]

August 11, 2010
I have coded a section into the PCCL website (not publicly available yet to captains) that will allow captains to set their bowling orders for a game (OD and T20). This should allow team compositions to be a bit more settled and bowlers not bowling randomly. You will lose out on the auto-tuning aspect if a bowler is getting smacked around, though. This feature will be available for the OD competition starting from round 1.

 

[sohum]

August 12, 2010
The Victoria Bitter One Day Cup fixtures are now up on the PCCL website. Captains will be able to log-in and set their line-ups. Once you have set a line-up, you will also be able to set your bowling orders for the game. Check it out!

Victoria Bitter One Day Cup | Tournaments | PCCL

 

[sohum]

August 16, 2010
The Johnnie Walker First Class Trophy matches are now up on the PCCL website. I've written a fully automated parser that can take a Cricksim FC scorecard and translate it into a PCCL scorecard. This should allow for easier statistics tracking.

I haven't yet coded the points table, but the batting and bowling leaderboards are available as of right now.

Johnnie Walker First Class Trophy | Tournaments | PCCL

EDIT: The points table has been created as well.

 

[sohum]

August 17, 2010
I scheduled a few games to mirror the tri-series going on in Sri Lanka right now. This is the start of the international fixtures, where I will try to mirror the international scene as closely as possible. Another reason for this is to test out the concurrency issues with the sim (although this won't go a long way in achieving that since there's only one game at a time).

Tri-Series | Tournaments | PCCL

 

[sohum]

August 21, 2010
Hopefully the OD games tomorrow won't crash. If they do, it will be marked as a no result game and in the next round the games will be distributed over the weekend (one on Saturday, one on Sunday and one on Monday).

 

[sohum]

August 23, 2010
As of now, OD Round 2 has been declared as no result. I'm working on code so that the matches can be resumed from their current position. If and when that is completed, the matches will be resumed sometime during this week. While this is unrealistic (FC and OD games concurrently), it's better and more future-proof than simply marking games as NR.

 

[sohum]

August 23, 2010
The code for resuming a match has been written. I'm just testing it out with the frozen matches. If all is well then the matches will be resumed in a few hours!

 

[sohum]

August 30, 2010
This round's games will be resumed in about an hour or so. There were some remaining bugs in my initial write which didn't account for the situation where the game froze in the first innings itself. I'm just testing the code out and will start the games up when everything checks out.

I didn't have time to implement the copy mechanism for this week. Hoping to be able to get that in for next week.

 

[sohum]

September 4, 2010
I still haven't had a chance to fix the database issues so today's match will probably also have to be resumed.

 

[sohum]

September 6, 2010
FC Round 5 will be delayed a day. I'm traveling so I don't have time to put the threads or resume the OD games. After OD Round 5 we will be having a mid-season break (halfway through) where I will try to put an end to the sim crashing issues.

 

[sohum]

September 6, 2010
So, I *think* I have figured out the issue with the simulator crashes. Currently I'm using mutexes to control access to the database. However, these mutexes are not cross-process mutexes, they're single-process mutexes. Meaning that each process is controlling access to the database independently.

There are two overall processes--the web server process and the simulator process. Since these two processes are not synchronizing the mutex, sometimes the web process may be reading the database when the simulator tries to write it. Both processes think they have access to the database, hence the sim crashes.

The fix for this should be relatively easy (change the mutex to be a cross-process or system mutex). I'll try making a fix later today to check it out and hopefully this Sunday's matches should go through without crashing. If they do crash, I'll begin working on a the database-copy change, wherein the web server has it's own database, and there is a Windows process that copies the simulator database over to the web database every x seconds.

 

[sohum]

September 12, 2010
Looking at the matches today, it appears that everything went well with the simulators. I woke up to find an error message and closed the simulator thinking it had crashed when in fact the error was that the Lunar Sharks had chosen someone in their bowling orders who wasn't in their lineup.

I'm not going to invest the time in making sure that doesn't happen again. Instead, if a team includes someone in their bowling orders that is not in the game (thus causing the game to be frozen), they will automatically FORFEIT the game. So please make sure you don't screw around with your bowling orders.

 

[sohum]

September 29, 2010
I went ahead and counted every time a team has missed the chance to post an FC lineup. The current count (up to FC Round 6) is:

Smashers: 1
Wanderers: 0
Sharks: 3
Bandits: 1
Wizards: 1
Llamas: 2

Sharks will get a randomized line-up every time they miss a line-up for the rest of the season.

 

[sohum]

I'm gonna put a few average upgrades for Round 9/10 and the finals. The average upgrades will carry forward to next season. Should've had this back in the midseason.

The upgrades will be done based on post activity in the team thread (total posts) and post activity in the match threads (per team). Players will get a random rating bump in the range specified.

TEAM 1 (Highest Posts)
Batting: All Players 3 to 5 (OD), All Players 3 to 5 (FC)
Bowling: Bowlers & All-Rounders 3 to 5 (OD), Bowlers & All-Rounders -1 to -3 (FC)

TEAM 2
Batting: All Players 2 to 4 (OD), All Players 2 to 4 (FC)
Bowling: Bowlers & All-Rounders 2 to 4 (OD), Bowlers & All-Rounders -1 to -2 (FC)

TEAM 3
Batting: All Players 1 to 3 (OD), All Players 1 to 3 (FC)
Bowling: Bowlers & All-Rounders 1 to 3 (OD), Bowlers & All-Rounders 0 to -2 (FC)

TEAM 4
Batting: All Players -1 to 2 (OD), All Players -1 to 2 (FC)
Bowling: Bowlers & All-Rounders 0 to 2 (OD), Bowlers & All-Rounders 0 to 2 (FC)

TEAM 5
Batting: All Players -2 to 1 (OD), All Players -2 to 1 (FC)
Bowling: Bowlers & All-Rounders -1 to 1 (OD), Bowlers & All-Rounders 1 to 2 (FC)

TEAM 6 (Lowest Posts)
Batting: All Players -3 to 0 (OD), All Players -3 to 0 (FC)
Bowling: Bowlers & All-Rounders -2 to 0 (OD), Bowlers & All-Rounders 1 to 3 (FC)

--

So teams with the lowest number of posts are going to be looking at their ratings being lower. This is a great opportunity for the weaker teams to gain some ground and possibly cause some upsets for the last couple of rounds!

 

[sohum]

October 18, 2010
Average updates for FC have been made. I made some changes on the algorithm proposed earlier on someone's suggestion that players be rewarded for posting rather than teams. So I've gone through and aggregated team+match thread postings by all players.

First, the following players will have their FC averages adversely affected by a random number between -3 and -5 because they have 0 posts in the match threads:

0 Posts in the Match Thread
Bandits: sanji 1135, chan, Kandy, MattW, Shan, vasand
Sharks: Gazza, Haris Khan, naresh091, Syed Umar
Wizards: Shreyas Amrit, World Champions, Callum Gray, Harishan, Shalin Hitter, Rahul K666, Zackie
Llamas: Nitish Bhat, Muttahhar Dar, mattfb, Mike
Wanderers: Amar, Sartaj McDaniel, shrenik
Smashers: Akash, Ayub95, Zorax Doom, Andrew Peters, King Pietersen

Next, the top 10 posters in match threads will have their averages improved by a random number between 3 and 5:

Top 10 Match Thread Posters
1. WestIndian (102 posts)
2. Abhas Gupta (82)
3. Mossy McLOVIN (72)
4. Ollie Holden (64)
5. Jonathan Choie (57)
5. Haarithan (57)
7. Iridium (56)
7. Pranav (56)
9. User2010 (54)
10. Ray (47)

Next, the bottom 10 match thread posters with > 0 posts will have their averages adversely affected by a random number between 0 and -2.

Bottom 10 Match Thread Posters
1. Aidan Callegari (1 post)
1. King_Cricket (1)
1. Sahil Khan (1)
1. Highlander999 (1)
1. Meet (1)
6. AfridiRulez (2)
6. Rick Adams (2)
8. Alpaca Mani (3)
8. Rahul (3)
10. KBC (4)
10. Cricketman (4)

All other 36 players will have their FC averages stay as it is now.

NOTE: Team Thread posts will be taken into account before OD Round 9. If you want to protect your OD ratings, I'd suggest you try to up the activity prior to that round in both the OD Round 8 threads and team threads!