BuzzerBeater Forums

"X Sucks" is a valid opinion. Its not my opinion of the match viewer, but its a valid opinion for people to voice on a forum such as this. Its worthless criticism unless it then goes on to explain why in their opinion it sucks and ways of possibly fixing that.

What the textual play-by-play enables you to do is:
a) Have user generated tools that enable stats freaks to work out things like player efficiency

You're already heading the right way with the Assist program. Anyone playing online sports manager games will know the value that user generated additions to the game make.

b) Enables users to look at the game in the amount of time that they have. Only got time to skim read it? that's okay. Want to watch it in a program that gives you the information in real time over 48 minutes, you can do that too.

Box scores are great summary information, but it doesn't give you any feel for the ebb and flow of a game, how it was won and lost. That said I don't always have an hour or two to watch a match (or replay) here, even if I wanted too. If I only have 5 or 10 mins to watch my game I can't do that here.

Thanks for the feedback as far as the flash limitations, it (flash) is not my area of expertise and its hard to argue with technical limitations. It seems to me though that if you are already generating the info to display the text at all, it would be quite easy to then log that to text file (and make that user viewable/downloadable) and/or expand the existing flash app using the text to drive the app rather than a clock. eg log the time of each line of text you currently display, then display each line of text for say 2 seconds, changing the clock to show whatever time the text occurred. This would still enable you to show off the strength of your current viewer (graphical representation of where the shots occurred, and "real-time" updating of boxscores, lineups etc) whilst reducing the replay time from ~2hrs like it is currently to well under 30 mins (at a guess 10-15)

it's a valid opinion.

I, however, believe the opposite. I think the boxscore is enough for someone to know why they won or lost, and with the new ratings systems being implemented will be even better (i hope).

And my guess is that the problems with having the full text report of matches are 2, and both related to how big the file will be.

(1) server storage
(2) I will never read it. And most users also won't. Like said before, it will be really long. Really long. If you have in mind something like the match report on HT, forget it. BB has much more details, much more match events. It will be boring and useless to read the whole match report.

A user that wants a report of the match has three options: A fast one (analysing the boxscore page), a long one (watching the replay), or a middle one (which would be watching the replay fastforwarding the breaks, or maybe even fastforwarding to the last quarter, or to whenever he wants).

Once again, that's just my opinion, as a normal user.

Edited 9/19/2007 1:52:44 PM by GM-Raonne

This is a good point, the "most will never read it option" is probably enough that it'll never get done. I don't agree though, that you can tell where the game was lost by looking at the box score. Sure, my PG may have been 5-15 shooting, but maybe all 5 of those FGs came in the fourth quarter. Maybe the real problem was that my C's stamina was terrible, and he died in the 4th quarter, scoring no points and getting no rebounds. This is something you'd only be able to tell from actually watching the match.

I think the solution is to: Make it so when I type in minute into the match reviewer I go exactly to that point in the game, so you don't have to guess/try 8 times. I know this has already been brought up, but I think it would help solve this problem.

I think the solution is to: Make it so when I type in minute into the match reviewer I go exactly to that point in the game, so you don't have to guess/try 8 times. I know this has already been brought up, but I think it would help solve this problem.

I agree with this. We could have the options "Quarter: (1,2,3 or 4)" and "Minute: (1,2,..., or 12)"

to add another voice... i really don't mind if you tell us that the matchviewer bores you to tears... I think we do need to have options for people who want to see play by play faster than realtime... it is in the long list of things to fix.

as for not fixing that bug... i think we actually have been trying to fix that bug.. and have gone through 3 interations of doing so. We haven't done a great job publicizing our attempts because we try soemthing, it doesn't work, try something else, doesn't work.. etc ...etc. We have now come up with I think our 3rd solution to this problem, are pretty sure it has resolved it... but only time will tell. We can test things, but we have come to the point in the game that the bugs we are having aren't things that happen across games, and often don't happen predictably. There are really were an incredibly small fraction of games that bug affected we believe... and we appreciate all the noise you make about them because it helps us track the problem down.

We are all hoping with the recent additions in staff that we will really start being able to improve things on a faster time scale than we have the last couple months.

and for is the boxscore enough to know "why" you won or lost...as the architect of the game engine I'd say that there are different levels of understanding... on some level "why" is cause you didn't score as many points as the other team.

On a second level you can break down why you didn't score points into two elements. One, how many looks did i get? Two, how much did i score per look? Basically all the info to answer those basic questions are in the box score.

Finally, there is a question of whether the answers to both those questions were really uniform over time.. and obviously they aren't and you need to see the information broken down in time to tease that apart. Particularly if you are trying to see how large an impact individual players.. say player X's poorer defense, affected those variables you want to know how you did when he was in the game.. and particularly how well the guy did against him vs against the other people who were guarding him. Its this kind of detailed analysis that I imagine some smart user who is given access to a play by play type data structure to be able to do....but all users can sort of do it just by seeing where in the game there were big swings and what was going on there.

one more thought.. the data to make a text based form is not that bad.. but to store it all in text format would be. The matchviewer takes all the essential data and parses it and adds some contextual flavor text. You can imagine writing a decoder like the matchviewer that does the same job.

This wouldn't be a trivial project for our staffing right now.. but i think should be a long term goal.