Balanced or How Unbalanced?

[kq76]

When you create fictional leagues do you prefer your schedule to be perfectly balanced, slightly unbalanced, or strongly unbalanced?

Furthermore, when you're deciding exactly how many games you want your teams to play divisional opponents vs interdivisional opponents, do you focus more on the games per individual opponent or the total games vs opponent type? That is, say you've got a 12 team league, 2 divisions, 162 games, are you focusing more on the total # of games vs divisional opponents and the total # of games vs interdivisional opponents (e.g., 90 and 72 or 120 and 42). Or are you more concerned with the # of games per opponent type (e.g., 18 per div opp and 12 per interdiv opp or 24 and 7)?

Personally, I favour unbalanced as I feel that with balanced you might as well either throw out the regular season and just play a round robin tournament or just declare a champion based on the regular season. But I'm not sure if slightly or strongly unbalanced is best. I want my teams to develop regular season rivalries by playing each other a lot and I want to see a winner out of that competition. However, I also think there is a point where you can play div opps too much and where that point is I'm not sure.

I understand, the more unbalanced you go, the less fair it is for the wild card teams, but to be honest I don't care that much about how fair it is for them. Of course, I want those 100+ game winning 2nd place teams to make the playoffs, but I don't care so much if a team missed out on the playoffs that was arguably better than the worst wild card team.

And I used to focus on the total games vs opp type more, but now I more consider the games vs indiv'l opps. I think that's because I'm more thinking about how the schedule might get constructed. By doing that, however, if you have enough divisions you can find yourself in the awkward situation where your total games vs interdiv'l opps is more than your total games vs div'l opps. But I suppose the totals don't matter too much as going back to the original decision of choosing balanced must mean that the more games vs individual div'l opps must be all that really matters.

[BBGiovanni]

In a megadivision league, like Eurosoccer leagues, round robin/balanced is the only thing that makes sense. Baseball is such a stat-driven game, and quality wins out only over long-ish seasons. And the longer season only separates the wheat from the chaff fairly if everyone plays everyone else.

Once you start adding subleagues and divisions that changes a bit, I suppose you could have a 240 game season in OOTP but of course that would seem silly. I tend to like regional subleagues with no interleague play so that there's an element of surprise in the championship. If I have divisions in a subleague then I prefer slightly unbalanced just for a little variety.

So my answer is "it depends", in this case on my concept for the game AND on the feasibility of scheduling what I want. We're really at the mercy of schedulemakers (and your recent posts have inspired me to try making one one of these days!).