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A question of injuries.

I recall reading in a season announcement some seasons ago that injuries will no longer carry over into new seasons. Could someone comment on the truth of this...or is it simply wishful thinking. Thanks in advance.

Music to my ears after my No2 trainee suffered a 3 week injury tonight. Thanks, Manon.

Any changes to the Game Engine will first be tested in scrimmages and PLs again before being implemented in competitive matches (probably for half a season). We're planning to announce the tweaks in more detail in this off-season’s news item so that we can start the testing after the ASW, but until then I would say don't stress too much about the possible effects of the change until we all know the planned change. Even then, of course, this may be fine-tuned (or possibly even reverted) depending on the testing results.

B.B.King is right that in the early seasons indeed people were complaining for Run n Gun being too effective, and that now it's Look Inside. Our aim is to have a balance in the possible tactics to effectively use, so if we have to make a change to the engine we should be careful to not create a new imbalance. As I’ve been convinced for a long time that SB isn’t underpowered but undertrained (just sort the TL on minimum 13 SB and compare the amount of results with minimum 13 ID), I don’t think you should be too worried about the change in SB being very drastic. Yet, testing needs to determine the magnitude of the change.

No team should expect to be able to play completely opposing tactics, as you’ll need certain skillset to play a certain tactic effectively. It’s unlikely that your team’s players have skillsets that utilize the potential of every tactic. Aside from possible game engine imbalances, it’s also likely that the dominance of Look Inside is partly clarified by either teams not being able to exploit the outside defenses in an outside tactic (kind of what Wolph is hinting at), or teams not having the correct skillset to play the defensive tactics that are able to stop Look Inside effectively. The results of a match are partly decided by individual matchups. Having a player who’s able to exploit the opponent’s skillset should eventually always reward.

The kind of tactics that are effectively played depend highly on the training meta. I believe we’ve only seen small changes in the training meta over time, even though we’ve been hinting towards some other skills that may be part the answer to the supposed imbalance. Logically, this meta is highly influenced by the directly visible effects of the individual skills compared to the salary costs of a skill (such as having a higher Free Trow rate will show an increase in the FT%)– ignoring the training methods effects now-, since it’s much harder to estimate the costs of a skill that doesn’t have the clear direct (boxscore) effects. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the skill isn’t (cost)effective, it’s just harder to scale the effectiveness.

Anyways, as often there are many views on this subject and we like to read the discussion on the subjects, but sometimes I think we are losing scope of the discussion too much drawing cause/relations that may be a little farfetched. This makes it harder to keep track of the discussion, so I’d like to ask you al (without being rude), to not be drawn away too much from the subject hehe.

Good luck next season,

you say the key is to exploit the opponents skillset. I want to give this example:

If you play LI you can have high IS on your guards (free) if your opponent want to stop you he needs good ID, (and OD, SB i guess) on his guards. ID on guards is more expesive than IS.

If you want to exploit a weakness while using a outside tactic you could try to exploit low OD on bigs by having good outside shooting on SF/PF/C. but the difference here is. OD on bigs is for free while JS isn't. and on the top lvl bigs tend to have a very high OD already.

while there may be other ways to counter LI (with the right players) it just seems too easy to stop outside shooting. well but i will trust you to make it as balanced as possible, you should have more knowledge about this all ;)

As I’ve been convinced for a long time that SB isn’t underpowered but undertrained (just sort the TL on minimum 13 SB and compare the amount of results with minimum 13 ID), I don’t think you should be too worried about the change in SB being very drastic. Yet, testing needs to determine the magnitude of the change.

Then why make a change? Isn't there a test environment out side of production scrimmages/private league that can be used to simulate changes first?

It may be that your remarks are based on questionable assumptions.

By logical reasoning - as I'm not a tech-dev and thus don't know the GE code - if your guards drive inside during a Look Inside, why do you assume only the direct guard matchup defends? And why do you assume that ID is the most important skill in defending? Maybe that would be the perfect situation for Shot Blocking to step in, right? I mean, the spare times I was able to block players in my real life amateur league is when I stepped in from 3 as a help able to block a smaller guard driving in. It's by far the easiest way to block, having a big man waiting for a small dude to drive into his crowded area.
Yet you only speak about ID and neglect the SB. I'm not saying that's how the Game Engine works, but I could imagine SB is of much higher value than ID in such a situation.

Same goes for the way you talkk about Outside Shooting. To me it seems like the most important thing to shoot from the outside would be to have range, right? I could have a perfect jumpshot but that doens't mean I can shoot from outside the bucket. Yet again, I don't see Jump Range being mentioned even once in your post ;)

brian

Then why make a change? Isn't there a test environment out side of production scrimmages/private league that can be used to simulate changes first?

The game should always support multiple roads to succes. I cannot remember exactly when Charles started his "go-train-SB" campaigns, but I guess that was over 10 seasons back. Still I doubt we saw clear change in global training regimes (yes, I know a few tried). Apparently the majority of the managers doesn't feel a skill like SB is cost effective enough to train. So where does this assumption come from? Is SB itself a problem, are there not enough altered shots? Is it the way SB effects are displayed? Is it because many consider SB a secondary skill and then they feel it has become too far behind to have value to train it? Is it because the salary effects are too high? etc etc. Many questions, few answers. But probably we can improve something in game design if many tactics are being ignored because people don't value the skillsets required for these tactics. As having just a few tactics to choose from doesn't benefit the game I think we should try to make the other tactics more attractive (or the dominant less dominant). We have some ideas how we can do this the best way, and that's what we'll be testing.

Last edited by BB-Patrick at 2/28/2013 12:34:49 PM

As I’ve been convinced for a long time that SB isn’t underpowered but undertrained (just sort the TL on minimum 13 SB and compare the amount of results with minimum 13 ID), I don’t think you should be too worried about the change in SB being very drastic. Yet, testing needs to determine the magnitude of the change.

Then why make a change? Isn't there a test environment out side of production scrimmages/private league that can be used to simulate changes first?

Let's just say that for assisted shots, they added a change that said "Defender X attempted to rotate over but was too late" or something to indicate that a shotblocking opportunity had been missed, maybe one that he would have been able to stop with a few more levels of SB skill. Imagine further that this happened, maybe, 10 times per game. Obviously, without adjusting the actual balance of the engine one iota, suddenly SB would be much more highly valued and perhaps achieve the desired effect with minimal change.

Of course, it may well be that this wouldn't be nearly enough or that this isn't what they were doing or the numbers and idea that I just pulled out of my backside were better left there. But there is change and there is CHANGE and it's just too soon to know what this is going to be.

Build bigs with good outside game and ID/RB/SB high and then buy good LI guards and you'd have a team so cheap you could get in a lot of depth in your team and even a bit more primary skills on all players and still have a lower salary then many LI teams. If you make sure to have good PA on all the players i think you could do real well.

Well, but you and I both know that it'll only be valued once someone wins with that, and who among B3 particpants is going to forego six or seven seasons of being highly competitive for world hono(u)rs to take the time to build two or three such big men? They certainly aren't heavily represented on the TL, so this is something one has to do personally and when given the alternative of just buying more of the same cookies on the TL, nobody's going to take the risk of baking a cake.

Really, though, it's our fault as a userbase. If the game world was full of people training defensive big men such as you propose and outside shooting guards, the teams that are winning the titles now would be playing those offenses instead, because that's what they could get on the TL.

In another return to the topic, I think but am not certain that the game manual used to specify that the "and one" defender on the box and one tactics was the best defender of that type, but now it simply says the fifth defender. Is there any consideration being given to revealing how the "and one" defender is being selected or allowing the user to select this individually?