BuzzerBeater Forums

In regards to tthe first suggestion:
I think managers would be very much annoyed, but it does make the game a bit more realistic I suppose. I guess this is up to BBs, I personally would hate to see my player injured in the first place, but then to find out he also dropped skills that I have been training for weeks would really annoy me! lol

In regards to the second suggestion:
This is just ridiculous. In real life you get to see a player play and see how good he is. In BB you get to see a list of skills and that is all. Seeing as potential doesn't affect training speed until the cap is hit, there would be NO way to determine the potential of a player before buying him. You need to be able to determine a players potential for training purposes. You would hate to spend 1million buying a 21 year old player with 13k salary only to find out you can't train him effectively any more because he hit his cap.

In regards to the third suggestion:
This is more ridiculous than the last one lol. Players don't just wake up and have substantially increased skills over night. You want the game to be more realistic (as indicated by your first 2 suggestions) yet this one makes the game totally unrealistic. There should not be such large rewards based entirely on luck. How would you feel if you were about to play in the Playoffs and the team you were about to play was worse than you and then got his star player 10 extra skill points for doing absolutely nothing.

In regards to the fourth suggestion:
I wouldn't mind this I guess. It would just allow you to start training a lot earlier. Don't really have an opinion on this, but like you said, there shouldn't be many of them. And if there was a 16 or 17 year old rookie they would sell for sooooooo much money lol. I guess that is 1 way to take a lot of money out of the game if you put them on the TL as free agents.

1. probadly the best suggestion from them, sometime who could be but must not.

2. but pros usually a pretty good in guessing the potential of a kid, and i believe we are in pro max 1 level inacurarcy could be but just would make it to complicated ;) And a lot of kids also here don't catch there potential because they aren't trained which correspondent with the lazyness in rl.

3. Every training you get a skill boost, and the training here is boosting, and you could train older player so there is the boost - free boost would be silly in my eyes.

4. not a fan of it, and probadly not compatible to the draft system(unique sign in the draft)

I dont think that would not be bad to have here something in advance, but there should be always any reason why it happened. Cost a lot of time before you develop your team and get somewhere and if something good or bad happens, it should not be based just on luck, because the game could turn into frustrating roulette. Even if it would be rare thing, but more rare it would be, lesser point to implement it has. Also if it would ruin game, even unrealistic parts of it.

1. Skill drops after big injurys.

I can imagine this only if you have doctor worse than lvl3 and that thing would be temporary. Would not be fun to see your player age 28 that he will after injury sucks for the rest of his career. However if he could "recover" and get these skills back after 1 month, it could be taken as a mistake from your medical staff, but would not harm you so strongly.

2. Hidden potential

This is not acceptable. Potential works like that - lower potential player have, less wage he wants, even if have same skills like the one with better potential. You would need an ability to "read" his probably potential by his salary and that would be boring, because only nerds can do that.

3. Skill boost

I can imagine this thing only like something what could happen if you get a player which has any history, that means were in several clubs and is settlet in yours for quite longer time. Something like boost based on his previous experiences. Life is about suprises and sometimes should happen something unexpected. Maybe it would help to us, which are from lower zone, to have someone great finally :D.


And rare 16-17 draft sucks, because it would create an opportunity to have better skilled players for best teams without wage punishment. Also SF would be more easy to train.

You always have to find a balance between reality and fun. That's the mix BB is trying to achieve. The more realistic possible and most enjoyable also.

1. Skill drops after big injurys.

Like somebody else said, if it is temporal it could make it interesting. Though, having an injury is something "unexpected" and it is also modulated by your doctor level so is a good point I think. You need to make a managerial choice (doctor level adn his salary) and also consider the randomess of the injury.

I don't really see how this feature can add value to the actual system.

2. Hidden potential

Totally unpredictable potentials would be a game killling. Something you planned and invest with a lot of effort and time suddenly becomes unsefull. That's not bearing with uncertanty, it's a bullet on your chest.

An alterbative could be a know range of potential. When he is 18 he may have, say, 3 potentials. You know you he is between 2 and 4 for example. Then, every season when he get's old, the range is reduced in one level. For example, you discover he is between 3 to 4. So, every player at the age of 20 would have a "predictable" potential. This will lead you to take some risk when buying and I think will produce some interesting effects on the market.

3. Skill boost

Interesting somehow. But it is a really complicated to implement. ¿How to decide wich are triggers for the blossom? ¿How much boost? To many undecid things, I prefer to work on some other features first.

4. Ricky Rubio's styles pros

This is something easy to implement and it could be really interesting. This would be very interesting because the strong incentive to train primary skill will be reduced (you can do it later with few lost on training speed) and it will help a lot to create more balanced players. Because, for me is clear that nobody will train a C of pure IS, ID and RB of high potential who was drafted at 16-17. You will have to pay it a salary of 800k every week to keep it.

I like the skill drop idea, but only if its temporary and not permanent. Just imagine you train a player for a few seasons (=one "real" year) and some random event destroys some of your hard work - how humiliating and de-motivating would that be? If that happened to me I would instaquit this game.

Hidden potential - I dont think this would make sense, maybe if potential in the beginning would just be an estimate and then could raise or drop one or two levels, but completely hidden... I dont like this.

Skill boost - random and thus unfair

Ricky Rubio - I think rookies should become stronger in general (maybe the top-rookies salary range up to 10-15k), but 2 or 3 16 year old top-guns in the whole game? Whats the profit for everybody here?

1. This is already taken care of via game shape. You have a player injured for that long and his GS will drop dramatically meaning it will probably take him 2+ weeks to get back in shape which is essentially a "skill drop" as he is not performing at his optimum

2. It will kill off the transfer market. It doesn't make logical sense why anyone would spend money on young guys without knowing his potential. Even the likes of Darko and Kwame brown was touted by scouts to have high potential when they were drafted. Not having any idea on the actual potential of the guy brings too much luck into a game

3.As already mentioned, you can still give them training minutes. No point giving them a skill boost on top of that. Also it is random and is thus unfair for others

4. this is probably the one I like the most. Reduce the starting age of guys to 17. Though this has to be made extremely rare like 1% of all draftees so you will have some drafts where there isn't any players of this age.

Wow, what a great post. I want give my opinion in this since I am the Center of the Universe (or so I see when I get these visions...):

1.Skill Drops After Big Injuries
I would absolutely hate if this happened to one of my players, but since this would apply to all teams it wouldn't be unfair. In fact, I think it rewards teams who go for depth instead of blowing all their cash on superstars who play 42+ minutes per game, every game. I think this could perhaps be linked to Stamina (i.e. lower stamina=greater injury risk, but this is very debatable and I'm not sure I'd agree with such a notion if I really thought about it). But this would add so much more reality to the game that I fully support the notion. We'd just have to put up with several "whining about career threatening injuries" posts every time some team got hit.

2. Hidden Potential
Again, I like this idea a whole lot, though I also agree with the criticisms that point out that in real life there can be a somewhat of a good idea about which players have what sort of potential. Plenty of players have "work ethic" questions and other issues that affect scoutable potential. But scouting potential is not perfect. I think the adjustment that really should be made is to make the Potential rating fuzzier (perhaps given as a best case potential) so that we have an idea who might have what sort of potential, but we won't really know until we start training them. After all, we need to have a few Tyrus Thomases and Eddie Currys in the game, the once-very-young-players with what everyone thought had tremendous potential but have shown much less maturity and desire to grow than expected. But of course, maybe they're just late-bloomers, which leads to...

3. Skill Boost
Another suggestion that begs for more realism, which I support. I think the way to handle this isn't to give skill boosts, though. I think there can be a hidden attribute for all players regarding maturity. Some players just take a little longer to grow than others, so instead of having all players uniformly train fastest as 18/19-year-olds with skills growth tapering off after 21 years, maybe some players have their peak skills growth shifted a little (perhaps reaching more trainable age starting at 20, 21, 22, 23...). And training rates could also be a hidden attribute, similar to how training rates decline now each season depending on potential, but having training rate increases for players who reach training efficiency peaks after 18/19-years-old (increase rates should be steeper than decrease rates, which may seem like a skills boost).

But also to add reality to the notion of a Skill Boost, I think there should be (somehwat random, perhpas related to potential/trainability) skill boosts for players who did not receive "training minutes" in games to account for those players who maybe had the occasional good practice or work-out. In reality, that's a big part of how we sometimes see real life late-bloomers, players who don't get game time minutes, but who stick with the team and have good practices. There should probably also be some of these (somewhat random again) skill boosts that take place during the off-season processing to account for off-season training that may help some of the (mostly younger) players.

4. Ricky Rubio Pros
In my opinion, 16-17-year-old rookies should only be players who will reach their potential sooner than other players. How much better was Kobe Bryant at the age of 28 than he was at the age of 21? He was better, but by how much? Kevin Garnett, another prep-to-pro, again how much better did he get from right out of high-school to the age of 30? I think these sort of players just matured faster than other players (see my comments on the other issues above), which is why folks think players like Ricky Rubio could even be ready for the NBA at so young an age.

UcanUwill, thanks for getting this thread started. Gets the creative juices flowing.

I think you sort of described what I was trying to get at, but you made it more confusing...

Oh, and to extend my comment on players younger than 18-years-old, since this game sort of models itself on the NBA where it can, I think the draft should have also include some more polished older players, like players coming out college. In the two rounds of the 2009 NBA draft, I believe at least 20% of the picks were 22-years old. Only 2 players were actually 19 years old, (Rubio, and Jru Holiday from UCLA). I think there even like 8 players at least 24 years old, too. But since most players that go in the NBA draft are still actually seniors from college, that puts them usually at 22 years old, and a few younger seniors and some juniors make for a bunch of 20 and 21-year-olds, too. I guess by using 18 and 19 as the draft age, perhaps it’s a nod to the more European leagues where there are levels and developmental teams more similar to how soccer is run, but…