[TheMick7]

Quote: Originally Posted by TheMick7

I will offer the contrarian view to this, as I am one of the editors who doesn't want to give out BossHawg's ratings system. First of all, there is already an issue with people stealing the system. Some poor sucker on this thread posted a few weeks back that he bought these rosters on eBay. Yeah, somebody monetized this to take advantage of you guys, when you can get the rosters here for free, and not only that but that person threatens the entire enterprise because this service only exists because we do it for free. That's just what happened because we have made the roster file public information. What happens if we do more? Secondly, the problem with people sourcing us is that there are too many people who won't give an honest effort. The system is set up to be fair to all 130 programs and eliminate as many of each individual editor's biases as well. If we allowed public sourcing, there would be a lot of people who would not be willing to put in the 25-35 hours per team that this takes to do right, and would be more than happy to just rate players off the cuff. There would thus be no standard. If you doubt the veracity of this statement, just look at how many times people ask us where we are in the process or if the rosters are finished, when literally that is the first thing you see when you open this thread. If they can't look at Page 1, do you think they are going to look through the handful of ratings charts that we use to create these rosters? I don't. There is a reason why all of the editors are heavily vetted and go through a process to ensure quality control. There is also a reason why a lot of the guys who become editors soon quit the project-- it's a lot of work. So once our ratings work is out there, and people who don't want to do the work required to create a quality product and claim they can crank out five teams a day begin publishing their own rosters that looks something like ours, you won't know which one to choose, and before long we all get lost in a sea of user-created crap. There is a range of consumers for this product, from the guys who just wanna play some football with guys who have the right name and more or less play the way the real player does to the guys who want perfection in every detail and are willing to wait for it. We try to serve them all. So what we really need, instead of public sourcing, is 130 guys who would be willing to take a program, put 30 +/- hours into their team at the start of the season and rate according to the agreed-upon process, then steward their program all year every year. I hope none of this sounds self-important or pretentious, but I think I can speak for all of the editors when I say that this means enough to us to give a huge chunk of our free time to build, and the integrity of the game and these rosters is important to all of us.

A point I forgot to mention is that as an editor who solicits public information and criticism of the rosters for my programs, I get a lot of bad information from the public. I get a lot of good information, too. Some of you guys on here are sharp and know what you're talking about. Some of you, not so much. There are a lot of passionate fans on here who love this game, but it creates a lot of extra work for me to have to sort through which information is correct and which is erroneous. Thus, I would expect publicly-sourced ratings to reflect a similar mix of quality.