Not sure that’s really comparable to the World Cup.
Heck, how many soccer World Cup games have been won by a score of 1-0? That’s a far bigger blowout than any quidditch game we know of.
Yes, and that makes for a really stupid sport.
If it’s reasonable for a team to get ahead by >150 and they have a worse seeker then you have a never ending game of a shitty seeker that can’t catch the snitch and one that can but doesn’t want to.
Or, if it’s rare to get a 150 point lead, then the rest of the game doesn’t matter, which is even more stupid.
The snitch being completely unrelated to the rest of the sport is probably the dumbest thing though. Someone up thread said it pretty well, imagine you had a basketball game without a clock and it only stopped when the game of hide and seek being played in the parking lot ended. Might be 7 minutes into the game, might be in 135 hours. Basically the same thing as quiddich and incredibly dumb.
And winning by 1 score is not a bigger blowout than quiddich games…
You don’t like sports, right Chronos?
There are any number of examples of highest level championship finals being massacres. Sports are like that. You can be good enough to make it there but just have a really bad day.
However, if the games are routinely blowouts, your game is not well suited as a spectator sport. Generally, it’s preferable to have games be close so the tension exists for spectators.
The extreme value of the snitch means that the game is usually winnable by either side, even if the quaffle action is mismatched. That retains the uncertainty needed to make a spectator sport interesting, but devalues the quaffle centered gameplay.
The snitch centered play is inherently less interesting than the quaffle because it’s a 1 on 1 match to find and catch a tiny fast moving object. If the seekers can’t see the snitch, neither can the spectators. There is little interaction with the other players, and little strategy involved.
One would almost expect, given a sport like that, that a culture of etiquette would develop around the sport that would lead to a Seeker catching the Snitch if he can, even if it loses his team the game. Which is exactly what we see.
Not particularly, no. Which lets me dispassionately see how real-world sports are just as illogical, but that people don’t care, because they’ve gotten used to the illogic of their favored sports.
There’s a major difference between saying “All sports are illogical in some way” (which I as a sports fan, absolutely agree with) and saying “This fictional sport is no more illogical than every other real sport in existence.”
What in the world? This comment makes literally no sense. It only works if you are misusing %s (and even then it doesn’t really).
Why? As you noted, baseball, tennis, cricket, golf and others don’t have clocks.
Serious basketball figures have (more or less seriously) proposed that a basketball game end at a random time (e.g. the final buzzer goes off randomly between 11 minutes and 14 minutes), to avoid late-game degeneracy. Many turn-based computer, card, and board games do implement a random game-ending mechanism to avoid strategic last-turn weirdness.
Why does Quidditch need a clock? It’s not like baseball has disappeared because nobody can predict the end of the game to within a minute or two. Heck, this year a World Series game covered two calendar days!
Not a clock, but some solid end point. Baseball has 9 innings. Golf has 18 holes. Tennis has 3 or 5 sets. They only go longer in the case of a tie, just like clocked games. I can think of no sport that has such an open ended finish line as Quidditch.
The only thing I can think of is days of yore boxing matches that required a knockout. But even that is more reasonable because the limits of the human body will ensure someone will fall down eventually. Quidditch is the opposite because the catching of the snitch gets harder as the players weary.
Maybe the Snitch gets bored or tired over time, too?
If part of the rules of Quidditch were that the snitch eventually gets bored and just sits in the middle of the field, that would indeed mitigate the ridiculousness. But that would essentially be a time limit on the game.
Is there an actual rule that only the seeker can grab it btw? If the snitch screwed up evading the seeker and accidentally rammed straight into another player’s hand, would that end the game? Can the seeker score normal goals?
Sort of like how someone that hates food can dispassionately assess that everyone should eat Soylent for all their meals.
And, as I said, a goal-oriented game. All such games have as their base objective putting some object in or through a specific area or object. The specifics can vary widely and it becomes more complicated as additional ways to tally points are introduced (soccer vs the rugby family, basketball having three different values for shot difficulty, and so on) but what they all have in common is that a clock is used to define the end of the game. At its heart, quidditch is effectively the same as soccer or hockey. Each goal is worth a set amount, no matter how the goal was scored. Now, the game could be set to a total point value instead, which would be uncommon for a goal game but not unreasonable. After all, many two-player games exist that use a score endpoint, such as foosball, air hockey, one-on-one basketball, and so on where the way to score is by a goal but the game is only played to a certain number.
The snitch as it exists simply cannot be defended as it’s terrible game design.
Yeah, much of the silliness could actually be solved immediately without nullifying the seeker’s importance by a win being defined as “first to 150”. That way the seeker still wins the game for you if he grabs it but still allows an end point if both teams have shitty seekers.
Apart from the Snitch, there is nothing inherently wrong with Quidditch. It’s another game where players use teamwork to move the scoring object (usually a ball - here the quaffle) through their set of goals, and prevent the other team from doing the same to them. Soccer, Rugby, American football, basketball - same idea, with variations. Add to that the idea of players being able to fly and it is an interesting ‘thought’ experiment.
The snitch just destroys any scoring logic behind the game.
Except when it doesn’t: 2018 World Series - Wikipedia
I still don’t understand the argument that a clock is necessary. Yes, the top three or four currently most popular goal-scoring ball/puck/etc games do have clocks (until it’s tied when the clock goes off), but so what?
Yes, not having a clock sort of theoretically leaves open the possibility that the two teams could play forever, but that’s true of baseball, overtime college tackle football, overtime playoff NFL football, and every other sport with open-ended tie-breakers. Theoretically soccer and hockey could have infinitely long shootouts, (even theoretically overtime basketball) So having the theoretical possibility of playing indefinitely long hardly seems to have eliminated any of these top sports as being a real sport. What is the real problem with a game-ending mechanism that makes the players play hard right right up to the end of the game, instead of the last few minutes being an intentional time-wasting demonstration or otherwise a travesty of the regular game?
Yes, if games are typically so low-scoring (compared to the amount of time to get the snitch) that catching the snitch nearly always gets the win, yes it’s a bad game. Nobody disagrees with that. But if in most games quaffle goals are significantly more than the snitch value, what is wrong with having the snitch end the game? (in fact, if league standings are determined by total points, rather than won-loss, it sets up a lot of interesting strategical decisions…)
It also may be playable by humans, this sport could be done in a microgravity habitat, such as a inflatable module attached to the ISS, and some devices used to propel players shaped like broomsticks. The golden snitch could be a drone like flyer.
Here is another version of that: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-magic-of-quidditch-could-be-real-if-only-we-lived-in-space
So many people seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the last two minutes of a football game. Taking a knee and running out the clock isn’t “time wasting”, it’s sportsmanship. For the team with the ball, the game is already won - moving the ball or scoring again is “running up the score”. It’s pointless, and just pisses players off. As for time wasting - it takes two minutes, exactly.
If, on the other hand, the team behind has the ball, they do everything they can to score at the end. And that involves clock management. It’s very exciting to watch a team try to drive the length of the field in under two minutes, and not run out of time.
Neither one is “time wasting”.
Baseball, yes, can theoretically go on forever, but games over 5 hours are so rare as to be noteworthy. the longest game ever was 8 hours. Not “days” like Quiddich.
Basketball has no defined end, either but OT games in excess of three OT periods are very rare. The longest ever was 6 OT periods. Again, not days.