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Originally Posted by 21C
On a side note, how exactly do you guys ( gmo and others ) do this? I tried looking at the files and attempted to do it myself but I thought I'd be in the dark on most of the intricacies. Is there an easy method for doing this? Is it a pencil and paper job or can it done easily via spreadsheet?
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I have thought about writing up something on schedule-making. Maybe then it would catch on with everyone, and nobody would care about patches or fixes because they would all be making schedules and not playing, and it would be raining gold coins...
It is not very easy to explain the process I use, and I think that is due to more than just my inability to explain it well. Here's a little something though. Maybe if there is interest in hearing about it I could go into more of the details and tricks. Actually that could be little writing of my own and largely just synthesizing several posts from the past here by Le Grande Orange as I learned the basics from him.
I do virtually everything in the spreadsheet, though the early layout phase is really a pencil & paper process. First all the matchups - the number of games for each team home & away against every other team - have to be determined and laid out. This is sometimes easy, sometime hard. Some matchup combinations are harder to work than others, but the bigger issue is usually team numbers as powers of 2 are fairly routine, while setups with bigger prime factors or uneven divisions are tougher.
The matchups are packaged into series which are easier to manage and work with. But then the series have to be put together into couples to fit into 7-day weeks (except maybe 3 series when 2-game series are common). Each half-week (or so) block of series involving each team is laid out in some order to try to spread out the offdays and generally involve other things like having mostly divisional games to end a season.
Once everything is laid out and ordered sensibly and seemingly prettily, then the tweaking starts because it is not really as good as it seems. Since the spreadsheet is set to find these sort of things from that layout, I'll find teams playing too many days in a row, too many (or too few) games in a row home or away. So I switch around matchups & home/away series to fix that up. When that gets cleaned up at least satisfactorily, I get it from the spreadsheet into the text/csv format and do a bit more tweaking/testing.
After writing what I did there, I'm not sure I actually said anything, especially if you are interested in the process where the little intricacies are the key to making it work out right. Without going into a seemingly really boring and long step-by-step I'm not sure I'm saying anything. Maybe it's like those ancient tribes that did brain surgery - just started doing it for some reason, got a lot of practice, honed the skills, and got fairly proficient if not really that advanced. But again if there is expressed interest in really hearing about the nitty-gritty details I'll go deeper into my techniques. I won't say they are the best thing out there, but they work for me and maybe someone else could pick them up too.