What are some sensible-sounding alternatives to eliminating the snitch entirely?
The best I can think of is have two snitches—red snitch, blue snitch. Whenever a seeker catches their snitch, the opposing team can’t score any more; the game ends when the second snitch is caught.
Harry gets the Snitch eliminated from Quidditch. Not just in Hogwarts, but in the big leagues as well—they don’t want a Germany vs. Austria on their hands.
All of the celebrity Quidditch players of the world—Victor Krum, Ludo Bagman, Finbar Quigley—are distraught by these sudden and drastic changes to a traditional game they’ve loved for many years. At the ceremony marking the changes, some of them tear up.
The Daily Prophet headline is “BOY WHO LIVED TEARS UP THE STARS”
Eliezer gives all of us a long lecture about how the prior for somebody making celebrities cry is so much higher than the prior for someone literally ripping the Sun apart that the latter hypothesis should never even have entered our consideration, regardless of how much more natural an interpretation of the prophecy it is.
Clever, but you have to balance it against the closely related fact that making celebrities cry is surely much less likely to be the subject of a prophecy than destroying stars.
When Harry received that cryptic note, I thought “watcher of stars” meant the centaur. Now that you propose this hypothesis, I’m inclined to thinking that “tear apart the very stars in heaven” means Harry will defeat Quirrell in such a way that Quirrell will survive, but will never be able to cast that wonderful stargazing spell again. Harry likes that spell more than I think is normal, but removing it sounds like a particularly cruel punishment for an astronomy fan.
I’m not sure how serious this is, but if it were said aloud Harry would hear the difference between the two definitions of “tears,” and wouldn’t be worried about it if that were the case.
I would have thought the obvious answer is to stop adding match points onto house points and instead simply give a fixed number of house points to the winner.
For symmetry, though, that would require that academic points be fixed in some fashion. (Remember, a primary point is to get students to care about the academic half by linking it to sports.)
I’ll just note that the presence of the Snitch in Quidditch has historically survived a match that took 3 months because nobody could catch the damned thing.
With professional players, whose job it was to play Quidditch.
It won’t survive children doing the same. More to the point, the snakes and ravens are deliberately and obviously exploiting the current rules, which will trigger all sorts of fair play instincts.
Although the easier solution to this problem is to stop adding Quidditch points to House points. That’s dumb to begin with. Maybe just add some points for winning the match.
Harry’s gripe about the snitch, which is that it trivializes the rest of the game, isn’t the problem on display here.
The issue currently afflicting the user experience is that the House Cup doesn’t just rely on Quidditch Win/Loss, but also on the magnitude of the win/loss. Therefore, two teams can collaborate to play a game of such magnitude that it obliterates all other considerations.
A clock wouldn’t actually solve this, (they could just agree to exchange points for the first X minutes, then play for real for an abbreviated endgame when time pressure became acute).
A solution to the problem must prevent Quidditch collusion from making one of the last two teams to play Quidditch automatically win the House Cup, but simultaneously maintain the primacy of Quidditch in determining the House Cup (because otherwise students won’t care about the House Cup).
A simple solution seems to be that rather than adding the points of both winners and losers to their Houses respective scores the winner is awarded a static (high) number of points.
Whenever a snitch is caught, it is marked as a score and released. A team’s final score is the product of their snitch-catches with their quaffle-goals.
The game ends when a team’s score reaches or exceeds 100.
No, I was thinking that the snitches would be released early on and not be quite so evasive, so the 100 might come from 6 snitches and 17 quaffle goals, or something like that. This isn’t an unreasonable number of quaffle goals for a Quidditch match.
Maybe the target would be 50 and the snitch wouldn’t be toned down so much—then each snitch grab will be worth a large fractional increase.
Suppose there is a clock that determines the end of the game. Then Quidditch becomes similar to football (of the non-American variety) or basketball, with a slightly more hostile field. But it loses some drama from the Seeker no longer having a role.
I do think that multiple snitches is a good way to go, but video games provide the right role for them: power-ups. Then there’s lots of room to get creative. Suppose there are, say, three snitches active at any time, in order to get their effect they have to be held (but they also attract the attention of the Bludgers, which has lots of potential for manipulation), and they all have a maximum duration of, say, two minutes, at which point the Snitch is depleted and is replaced by another one from the supply (and it reenters the supply to be available when the next one is depleted). Probably the seeker gets a faint glow of whatever color Snitch they’re holding, both to make it more obvious to spectators and to make it easier for the other team to try to interrupt the Seeker’s boosting of their team.
Raw points: a golden Snitch is worth 20 points if you manage to hold onto it the whole period.
Amplifying team members: a blue snitch increases the points scored through the Quaffle by your team, and a red snitch makes everyone on your team fly a bit faster. A green snitch makes the opposing side’s goal hoops a bit larger, and an orange snitch makes your hoops smaller.
Replacing team members: a white snitch causes the Bludgers to avoid members of your team (both making Beaters unnecessary and less likely to help, since the Bludgers would avoid getting hit). A black snitch halves or eliminates points scored by the other team (giving your Keeper a break).
Meta: the team composition seems unforgiving to increasing or decreasing the number of players, but it might be reasonable to have one that lets you field an extra player or knock out one of their players (likely chosen by the opposing team captain), but here there are significant frictional costs for moving players on or off the team that might not be appropriate for something that only lasts two minutes.
I will point out that removing a player for two minutes at a time is already the standard penalization scheme for one major sport, so it’s clearly not that terrible a frictional problem.
That’s where I got the idea, but the penalty box triggers because that player did something. If I grab the snitch that expels one of the other team’s players, somebody has to make a decision which player, and then they need to leave the field, and so on—and if the benefit only lasts as long as I’m holding the thing, and I let it go and grab it again, what does that do to the time they’re out? And so on. I don’t think that’s a workable idea, but it might suggest other ones that do work.
I think just having the snitch be worth zero or a very nominal amount of points works fine. This makes the core of the game the regular point scoring and play, and makes the snitch-hunting important but more about biding your time and trying to pounce on the snitch when your team gets ahead.
Eliminating the snitch won’t even solve the problem entirely. Sure, if there’s an hour time limit, the game won’t take forever, but they could still rack up points by alternately letting each other score 30 points. Come to think of it, why didn’t they? They could have way more points by now.
No reason to trust the team that goes first to let the team that goes second score, and no rush. Just play normally without catching the Snitch until one of you can win by catching the Snitch, that team goes for it.
Make the game end when the clock runs over, or when the snitch is caught, whichever is sooner. And make the snitch worth ~half the typical point spread of a match.
Nope. Make it worth zero points. This keeps it’s importance, but changes the job of the seeker. Behind, “Run interference”, ahead, “catch snitch”. But mostly, having one is still daft.
Make it worth fewer points, make the game not end when the snitch is caught (it’s re-released and can be chased and caught again, so it’s just another way of scoring points)...
What are some sensible-sounding alternatives to eliminating the snitch entirely?
The best I can think of is have two snitches—red snitch, blue snitch. Whenever a seeker catches their snitch, the opposing team can’t score any more; the game ends when the second snitch is caught.
Prediction:
Harry gets the Snitch eliminated from Quidditch. Not just in Hogwarts, but in the big leagues as well—they don’t want a Germany vs. Austria on their hands.
All of the celebrity Quidditch players of the world—Victor Krum, Ludo Bagman, Finbar Quigley—are distraught by these sudden and drastic changes to a traditional game they’ve loved for many years. At the ceremony marking the changes, some of them tear up.
The Daily Prophet headline is “BOY WHO LIVED TEARS UP THE STARS”
Eliezer gives all of us a long lecture about how the prior for somebody making celebrities cry is so much higher than the prior for someone literally ripping the Sun apart that the latter hypothesis should never even have entered our consideration, regardless of how much more natural an interpretation of the prophecy it is.
This prediction doesn’t fit very well with the exact text of the prophecy: “apart”, “in heaven”, “end of the world”.
Clever, but you have to balance it against the closely related fact that making celebrities cry is surely much less likely to be the subject of a prophecy than destroying stars.
When Harry received that cryptic note, I thought “watcher of stars” meant the centaur. Now that you propose this hypothesis, I’m inclined to thinking that “tear apart the very stars in heaven” means Harry will defeat Quirrell in such a way that Quirrell will survive, but will never be able to cast that wonderful stargazing spell again. Harry likes that spell more than I think is normal, but removing it sounds like a particularly cruel punishment for an astronomy fan.
I’m not sure how serious this is, but if it were said aloud Harry would hear the difference between the two definitions of “tears,” and wouldn’t be worried about it if that were the case.
OMG, that’s what the centaur meant...
I would have thought the obvious answer is to stop adding match points onto house points and instead simply give a fixed number of house points to the winner.
For symmetry, though, that would require that academic points be fixed in some fashion. (Remember, a primary point is to get students to care about the academic half by linking it to sports.)
But academic points can’t be so obviously gamed.
I’ll just note that the presence of the Snitch in Quidditch has historically survived a match that took 3 months because nobody could catch the damned thing.
With professional players, whose job it was to play Quidditch.
It won’t survive children doing the same. More to the point, the snakes and ravens are deliberately and obviously exploiting the current rules, which will trigger all sorts of fair play instincts.
Although the easier solution to this problem is to stop adding Quidditch points to House points. That’s dumb to begin with. Maybe just add some points for winning the match.
I’m pro-Snitch.
Harry’s gripe about the snitch, which is that it trivializes the rest of the game, isn’t the problem on display here.
The issue currently afflicting the user experience is that the House Cup doesn’t just rely on Quidditch Win/Loss, but also on the magnitude of the win/loss. Therefore, two teams can collaborate to play a game of such magnitude that it obliterates all other considerations.
A clock wouldn’t actually solve this, (they could just agree to exchange points for the first X minutes, then play for real for an abbreviated endgame when time pressure became acute).
A solution to the problem must prevent Quidditch collusion from making one of the last two teams to play Quidditch automatically win the House Cup, but simultaneously maintain the primacy of Quidditch in determining the House Cup (because otherwise students won’t care about the House Cup).
A simple solution seems to be that rather than adding the points of both winners and losers to their Houses respective scores the winner is awarded a static (high) number of points.
Whenever a snitch is caught, it is marked as a score and released. A team’s final score is the product of their snitch-catches with their quaffle-goals.
The game ends when a team’s score reaches or exceeds 100.
I’m assuming quaffles are still worth 10?
No, I was thinking that the snitches would be released early on and not be quite so evasive, so the 100 might come from 6 snitches and 17 quaffle goals, or something like that. This isn’t an unreasonable number of quaffle goals for a Quidditch match.
Maybe the target would be 50 and the snitch wouldn’t be toned down so much—then each snitch grab will be worth a large fractional increase.
Suppose there is a clock that determines the end of the game. Then Quidditch becomes similar to football (of the non-American variety) or basketball, with a slightly more hostile field. But it loses some drama from the Seeker no longer having a role.
I do think that multiple snitches is a good way to go, but video games provide the right role for them: power-ups. Then there’s lots of room to get creative. Suppose there are, say, three snitches active at any time, in order to get their effect they have to be held (but they also attract the attention of the Bludgers, which has lots of potential for manipulation), and they all have a maximum duration of, say, two minutes, at which point the Snitch is depleted and is replaced by another one from the supply (and it reenters the supply to be available when the next one is depleted). Probably the seeker gets a faint glow of whatever color Snitch they’re holding, both to make it more obvious to spectators and to make it easier for the other team to try to interrupt the Seeker’s boosting of their team.
Raw points: a golden Snitch is worth 20 points if you manage to hold onto it the whole period.
Amplifying team members: a blue snitch increases the points scored through the Quaffle by your team, and a red snitch makes everyone on your team fly a bit faster. A green snitch makes the opposing side’s goal hoops a bit larger, and an orange snitch makes your hoops smaller.
Replacing team members: a white snitch causes the Bludgers to avoid members of your team (both making Beaters unnecessary and less likely to help, since the Bludgers would avoid getting hit). A black snitch halves or eliminates points scored by the other team (giving your Keeper a break).
Meta: the team composition seems unforgiving to increasing or decreasing the number of players, but it might be reasonable to have one that lets you field an extra player or knock out one of their players (likely chosen by the opposing team captain), but here there are significant frictional costs for moving players on or off the team that might not be appropriate for something that only lasts two minutes.
That’s a very videogamey design, but still interesting.
I will point out that removing a player for two minutes at a time is already the standard penalization scheme for one major sport, so it’s clearly not that terrible a frictional problem.
That’s where I got the idea, but the penalty box triggers because that player did something. If I grab the snitch that expels one of the other team’s players, somebody has to make a decision which player, and then they need to leave the field, and so on—and if the benefit only lasts as long as I’m holding the thing, and I let it go and grab it again, what does that do to the time they’re out? And so on. I don’t think that’s a workable idea, but it might suggest other ones that do work.
Then just make it automatically the opposing Seeker(and ensure the same Snitch doesn’t recur for at least five minutes, to prevent lock-out).
I think just having the snitch be worth zero or a very nominal amount of points works fine. This makes the core of the game the regular point scoring and play, and makes the snitch-hunting important but more about biding your time and trying to pounce on the snitch when your team gets ahead.
Make it worth 20-30 points and keep it as the game-ender. It’s only going to make a difference if the game is close, so the Quaffle remains relevant.
Eliminating the snitch won’t even solve the problem entirely. Sure, if there’s an hour time limit, the game won’t take forever, but they could still rack up points by alternately letting each other score 30 points. Come to think of it, why didn’t they? They could have way more points by now.
No reason to trust the team that goes first to let the team that goes second score, and no rush. Just play normally without catching the Snitch until one of you can win by catching the Snitch, that team goes for it.
Make the game end when the clock runs over, or when the snitch is caught, whichever is sooner. And make the snitch worth ~half the typical point spread of a match.
Nope. Make it worth zero points. This keeps it’s importance, but changes the job of the seeker. Behind, “Run interference”, ahead, “catch snitch”. But mostly, having one is still daft.
Make it worth fewer points, make the game not end when the snitch is caught (it’s re-released and can be chased and caught again, so it’s just another way of scoring points)...