While the fantasy season is still young, let’s turn our attention to another interesting pastime: the video game rock band.

Rock band is an interesting video game because it essentially requires three skills with little in common: drumming, guitar “playing” and singing. Although the first two do both rely somewhat on rhythm, they are still very different and require separate practice. This means that when constructing rock band teams, it is essential to consider both the absolute skills of the players and the relative skill on the different instruments.

Let’s take eight players and look at ways they could be constructed based on different skill sets.

We’ll start with relative ability on guitar since this essentially affects two of the four instruments. Although it’s difficult to differentiate between some, let’s divide them into four tiers.

Tier 1: Andy W

Tier 2: Michael

Tier 3: Ryan, Craig, Christian

Tier 4: Chris, Bryan, Andy A

Actually, we know very little about Andy A’s guitar playing because he hasn’t done it much; it’s possible he belongs in tier 3. What this translates to is one person who is going to always play hard or expert, one who will be at hard or medium and the rest who will probably usually be at easy or medium with various degrees of skill. Since bass is generally easier, the tier 3 and 4 players will probably usually be able to play those at higher levels than they can guitar.

Ok, let’s look at drums, which for most people is more difficult to pick up than guitar.

Tier 1: Christian
Tier 3: Andy A, Michael, I’m guessing Andy W, Craig
Tier 4. Chris, Bryan, Ryan

I’m not sure if I should divide the tier 3 guys up into tiers, but I mostly wanted to show the huge gap between Christian and everyone else. He can play a lot, if not most songs on hard and do well. The group in the middle can handle some songs on medium and the bottom three have to stick to easy (and might struggle with that).

Ok, finally we look at singing. This is the hardest one to differentiate. At this point none of them are singing much on hard or expert. And there are two variables here: singing ability and song knowledge. For instance, Michael carries a tune well but doesn’t know the words to a lot of songs. Chris knows a lot of songs but has less vocal control.

I’m not sure how much these mean because it doesn’t seem like singing affects team points as much as the other instruments, but for what it’s worth:

Tier one: Christian, Craig, Ryan (good voice control, know lots of songs)
Tier Two: Michael (strong vocal control, less knowledge), Andy (maybe belongs in first tier…not sure)
Tier Three: Chris (good knowledge, less voice control), Bryan (maybe slightly behind Chris because of knowledge of lyrics and melodies)
Tier Four: Andy W: refuses to sing

So now, we ask the question, how do we put these eight players into two fair teams. We have to deal with two concepts. Absolute value and positional scarcity. For instance, Andy W probably has the most absolute value because of his far superior guitar skills. But, Christian’s skill at the most scarce position (drums) probably makes him the most valuable player overall. So, the fairest teams would probably look something like this:

Team 1:
Christian
Ryan
Craig
Chris

Team 2
Andy
Andy
Michael
Bryan

This gives team 1 two of the third tier guitar guys along with a variety of singers to choose from. Team two gets the two best guitar player to counter team one’s large advantage on drums. The only possible problem I see here is that team two one has a definite singing advantage with all three tier one singers.

A second possible grouping might be:

Team 1
Christian
Michael
Chris
Powell

Team 2
Hanley
Craig
Andy
Andy

In this grouping, team two’s singing advantage would probably help them make up for the drumming of team 1.

A final option would be to simply ban from Christian from playing drums. You could also conceivably ban Andy from guitar and bass as well, but this would pretty much force him to only drum and is a lot more restrictive.

I should also note that this is just a preliminary analysis; more data about how scores are computed is necessary for further study.