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I like all of the changes made this season except for being able to guess your opponents tactics. Before, just like in real basketball, teams chose tactics that suited the skills of their own players and possibly countered those of their opponents. You don't play better against a certain team by simply knwoing their tactics, but by adjusting your own tactics to counter their's.With the new change, teams will be constantly switching up their tactics, not because it will allow their team to play as well as they can, but because they are scared their opponents will guess their tactics. This new situation is not only not very realistic, but it also decreases the usefulness of tactics. While its true that most teams can play multiple offenses, as many of them are similar, the real problem is defense since they are all quite different and playing one over the other can hurt a team in important areas. For this reason, I think the BBs should do away with this change or only allow teams to guess their opponents offensive tactics.

I can up the 99% to 100%. The SB/JR change also affects potential caps, and as a direct result this could also mean previously capped players now dropped below their cap again.

Again, I don't see how you can state the GE is the root of the tactical imbalance if so many people train players to fit only one tactic.

Of course you're right as most of the top players have been trained for LI.

But maybe a different assumption can be made? Perhaps the users figured out many seasons ago that LI was the best tactic even if it was just a small advantage. Perhaps this was just a fact or prehaps it evolved because bigs trained faster on their primaries than guards and everyone trained OD to high levels on perimeter players which killed most of the outside based offenses. Because all that has happened some alteration in the game engine is clearly necessary to bring back the equilibrium that the original users had intended with the tactics and to help force the users to start training different builds.

I understand (and agree) a lot to what you wrote and yes, there are much we yet to know about this tactic prediction. I really don't know the BB's real intention behind this new feature but I interpret it as an attempt to persuade managers from doing the LI/M2M cruise control ... to persuade managers to run other tactics and in the long run create balance in the game. If this boost turns out to be so minute that it has little to no affect on our tactic decision, than IMO it's a failed attempt. So from that perspective, I have to assume that the boost is large enough to affect the the game outcome ... and to have game outcome decided by this tactic prediction game is a bad idea.

If this boost turns out to be so minute that it has little to no affect on our tactic decision, than IMO it's a failed attempt. So from that perspective, I have to assume that the boost is large enough to affect the the game outcome ... and to have game outcome decided by this tactic prediction game is a bad idea.

So, to sum it up, if it does nothing it's a failure and if it does something it's a bad idea. The glass is half pee.

So we can look and see is it good for the game as a whole to reward people for not playing cookie cutters and autotactics? Yes, it is, so while it may inconvenience me, I'm encouraged that it's still a change for the better.

Its too early to tell if these are good changes. Expect a good 4-5 seasons for teams to start making adjustments that impact the game after they are introduced. So increasing SB, decreasing the cost of JR, these things will take many seasons to bear out.

While this new guess-your-opponents-tactic feature doesn't impact LI only it is geared to address the overuse of it. For that reason this is too soon. Changes have been made that havent been fleshed out by the community yet.

In regards to fixing the GE's problem with punishing well balanced teams in certain ways (ie, backcourt outside shooters in a LI offense), fix the GE itself. We already have to swallow the bizarre effort choice that was stolen from Hattrick, now we have to bother with this crap as well?

I think this, like the GS hit, are more intended to be placebo effect changes than anything else. I think that it's pretty clear from BB-Patrick's responses on this thread and the BB communication in general that they don't necessarily feel that the LI "dominance" is specifically related to the GE itself, but the way players have been created specifically for this tactic. The idea always comes back to "Oh, but if anything can beat LI, why do all the best teams run it?" But the thing is, without the players to run a different offense or effectively defend against the LI team, of course nothing else is better. And while it's easy to find guards built to run LI, good luck finding a big man built to run an outside offense and defend against LI: there are three guys total on the TL with the following search: 9 JS / 8 JR / 10OD / 8 PA / 13 ID / 13 RB. That's a perfectly reasonable build, considering I've got two guys with that skill set myself, and yet there are three meeting that criteria available on the TL - one is an NT guy, the other two played in the B3 final game this past year.

The engine itself isn't broken necessarily - you can win with other tactics at pretty much any level until you reach the point where the players are no longer available. Now hopefully these changes might spark people to train something other than endless LI clones and then complain about how no other tactics work. ;)

To be frank, hrudey ... that is exactly how I see that feature. I can also see us spending the next 5-6 seasons adjusting the boost level to make it "balance".

Last edited by TnT at 9/23/2013 4:56:17 PM

Most changes sound ok or good, except this future one:

- To more in depth tactics and possibly alter the LI domination, you will be able to guess your opponent strategy, giving you a boost.

I think it will turn the game into rock/paper/scissors, the game already has a lot of random factors, and adding more guessing just feel wrong for me.

Moreover it duplicates the defensive tactics, if you think your opponent might use a specific attack or is stronger in a particular area, you can choose a defensive tactic that try to counter the way you think the oponent will attack.

Now you could guess twice once with your defensive tactics and once with the new "guess". This is hard to rationalize.
Certainly Z2-3 is a poor counter to LI, but just fix Z2-3 rather than mess everything.

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I would really like more options for selecting tactics. A fully fledged 'Tactics Editor' would be great. Or simpler, as the tactics are more or less weights that affect the game engine (they are propably more complex, but the idea is the same), I would like to have sliders to affects those weights and to try to customize the tactics for my players and for the opposing team.

This would give the feeling of what coach do IRL, rather than a poker guess. Moreover some tactics see little use because they are too specific, for example if I want to play a slow tempo game, Patient should be a natural choice, however Patient turns to be much more specific than just being slow.
More ways to adapt tactics will help correct the defects (or perceived ones) of the existing tactics, and reduce the LI dominance.