Official Match Thread Season 38, Round 10 : West Coast Wonders v Roys FFC at The Colosseum

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One more thing, we often get told we don't have history.

This much is true, we don't have a long history but I thoroughly enjoy footy fans sharing their footy/clubs history with us.

Yesterday I recognised Up There Cazaly before a lyric was even sung. Such is the footy history and culture that has been shared with me and I'm in my second year of footy.

Much respect to all those who are happy to share their history with us newbies. I love it.
Western Sydney has local footy teams, that can be the history!
 

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Western Sydney has local footy teams, that can be the history!
Hey Mobbs, this is a real opportunity to give us/ The Giant Yo Yo a potted history as to how the Qooty was born seeing as you're the Big Daddy and so many newbies don't know it.
 
I'm on the pre-match snacks.
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Hey Mobbs, this is a real opportunity to give us/ The Giant Yo Yo a potted history as to how the Qooty was born seeing as you're the Big Daddy and so many newbies don't know it.
Feel free, always keen to learn :)
Well where do I start!

I wrote a commodore 64 game in the late 80s which does a similar thing. I just filled it with the VFL teams of the time. Was running in real time though (eg 100 minutes odd for a game)

I made a fake league that I spammed at work at around 1989/90 with 10 teams. The first season I played using a ruler I'd flip and move the ball around a 6x3 grid on paper based on ridges v flats. Workmates chose teams to support and I'd type up newsletters each round.

Then I made real simple precursor of Qooty which was the same as above but on a computer instead of using the ruler. The league continued and actually only died out after 1997 though by then I was just doing it for myself mostly. 1992 I think was the first time I'd rewritten everything as the Qooty which has since evolved a lot. Used to include results/ladders in a newsletter I'd take to footy matches at Fitzroy ( royboy2 and Eat Fresh might remember the weird Hoyton FL results I was including in the newsletters). The players were all manually invented names - spectators were only that.

After Fitzroy merged I was in the wilderness and wasn't playing these games either. But after joining Bigfooty I soon decided to suggest getting a bunch of members together to form two teams and play a match. It got heaps of traction ( Chief was all for it and before long made a forum for specifically the Sweet FA when it sprung up from the initial couple of practice matches). The first season was built with 7 teams - your Wonders being the first to join iirc. This was 2001.

The Sweet FA included the evolution of the game where a) the game was shown in a forum setting as opposed to on my computer screen or printouts of stats and b) the players were the people who were spectating. I edited the code to improve things, iron out stuff, make it more user-friendly and also to retain / store commentary.

It was still very user-hostile including the fact it was written in obsolete QBasic which every new iteration of Windows tended to break (Vista was a nightmare). I kept making improvements and around 2007 I released "Qooty Fwoar" (or version 10.0) which was all rewritten in a new QB64 code, which was QBasic ported to work on 64-bit Windows systems - a fan of QBasic rewrote it all for this purpose and has his own community of us tragics.

The league itself mutated into less of purely games and results and stats and more into this community you see now with banter-driven engagement.

I was also a massive map, and alternate universe nerd, and had as a teen created fake towns and places, and in the late 90s had merged them all into one planet (the foam inside of a disco ball ftw!) At one point I decided the Sweet FA could be so-named because it was played in a city called Sweet (retcon ftw!) and around 2016 after playing Minecraft on Bigfooty's server for 5 years, I suddenly got the thought I should repeat the city map I'd made, but expanded in larger scale in the Minecraft game. I've even considered expanding further to include the locales of the original Hoyton FL as its meant to be on another continent kind of south of where Sweet is supposed to be.

The league may have platformed a bit in recent years, but it's continually evolved a lot and become more of a faux league with the t's crossed and i's dotted than the early days when it was just the sim runner spitting out the fixture results.

Hopefully I've made it hella clear how positively overwhelmed I am by the way so many people have got invested in the Sweet FA and its underlying concept of randomly simulated seasons - the true spectator sport!

Around 2007 a bunch of spinoff comps appeared around other forums, though I don't believe any of those are continuing at this point.

I still haven't learnt any more current coding systems. I did dabble with vbasic once but that was yonks ago.

The West Coast Wonders (prev. the 7th Wonders and prior that the "Kit Kats FC") are along with Mt Buller Demons (prev. "Team Pump") are the two remaining founding clubs.

A lot of AFL-rep teams spawned from about Season 3 - Baghdad Bombers from the Bigfooty Bombers, Gumbies FFC from the Geelong Gumbies, Fighting Furies representing tiges fans, and of course the Roys. Carlton had the Blues Brothers for a season, West Coast produced the unrelated West Coast Magic, Port gave us the Alberton Swamprats (nor Sin City FFC) and Fremantle had a team for a season or two, also called the Dockers. Many clubs came and went in the early seasons, a rationalisation policy reduced clubs down to 8, and teams began to disconnect from their AFL counterparts to expand their recruiting ranges and more fully embrace the ARG principle that was strongly supported.

We've had 2 instances of 2 clubs adding in, which gave us the Royals, the Warriors, and returns of the Bears and the Swamprats. And more recently, the OOBs joined mostly driven by the portion of the community who were in favour of expansion.

The politics, the tropes, the lexiconography and the history are probably the power cells of the league today, though of course the one endemic and individualising feature is still the sim in the background.

The sim (Qooty) was originally made to be watched on screen - a grid of player pairs with the highlighted text switching around to signify ball location. It can still be watched that way today, but the only folks who get to do that with a Sweet FA match are the Simmers themselves. Now, we rely not on the game screen for our matchday entertainment, but on the commentary file spat out by the program.

Remember the commentary was literally an afterthought that I added around the start of Season 1, 9 years into Qooty's lifespan! In the praccy matches before S01, I was watching the games and alt-tabbing to say things like "a couple more goals to the Wonders, I think Player X has 3 goals now". But now it's all about these match threads and, on a Sunday, all about the contents of the afterthought, spewed out into these same threads!

And here we are, in another match thread ... 38 seasons and over 20 years down the track!

And you thought the AFL was cool????? :D
 

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Official Match Thread Season 38, Round 10 : West Coast Wonders v Roys FFC at The Colosseum

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