BuzzerBeater Forums

Fair or not fair - cup matches are played by teams with varying enthusiasm - should we therefore set a fixed enthusiasm level for all teams to play their cup matches? if you go down this road, you'll end up convincing yourself we don't need enthusiasm in the game altogether - and this way the outcomes will be academic subject to injury.

The best team hasn't the right to win the Cup (or league for that matter). The game has different managerial options specifically to ensure teams within a certain quality of one another can compete on a given day.

If you want to take luck out of BB then do it via the draft - thats as much if not more of a lottery.

I love the fact that there are two types of competition in BuzzerBeater. One is focused more on long-term planning (league), the other has a strong factor of surprise and the unexpected and has its focus on the short term (Cup). Remove the difference and having two separate competitions doesn't make that much sense anymore in my opinion.

Here’s my opinion. Random seeding in the Cup games are just fine. Speaking as someone whose team just got knocked out of the USA Cup in the 3rd round against a D.III team while so many other D.II teams could still feast on D.IV teams due to the random draw, I don’t mind this at all. The upside is that I can spend the next few weeks planning better for league games and training. I do sort of resent that my Fan Survey will take hit for both this survey and next (remember that the fans’ opinion on “last season” includes performance in the Cup), and because of the randomness of when we get a tough scheduling matchup in the Cup I really think that this element of the Fan Survey has a muted impact on our attendance numbers since I’m sure the Fan Survey isn’t taking the quality of the opponent that knocks us out of the Cup into consideration when assigning the number of balls for Cup performance. Oh, and while I’m expressing my opinion, I’ll add that I really wish all Cup games, not just the later round games, were on neutral courts. While random assignments are fine (after all, we’d be debating a long time the right way to seed a Cup tournament), I think randomly assigning who gets home court is unnecessary. The outcome the games should be based on the lineup and tactics each team uses without a random home court advantage bonus assigned to a lucky team.

The only improvement that needs to be done in the cup draw,is a system to avoid the BOT vs BOT games,that I think would be easy to insert for the BBs

It's just ridicoulous that a BOT team could arrive till the fifth round of the cup,maybe playing only against bot teams

Look at the path of these two teams that will face in the fourth round of the italian cup this season...

http://www.buzzerbeater.com/team/153765/schedule.aspx

http://www.buzzerbeater.com/team/156028/schedule.aspx

I think cup should remain random. It gives those lower league teams a chance for the title (even if it is a small one).

I think that cup should be changed, but on a different way.

There is a lot of teams in the low leagues. In fact a majority of the teams. So there can be created cup, played just between teams from 6. league separately, 5th league separately, 4th league,.. so do a division way of the cup. Higher league can play more matches against (home and away) as they are closer to the final, so there will be same volume of matches, so you can compensate lower volume of teams in higher league... this would continue like that into secon leagu where would be probably whole season like two matches to go against next team and first leagues can play international cup against teams from the countries with similar volume of users.

That way would be possible to have a chance to win a cup to everyone, not just to 1st league teams. That seems to me pretty boring. And what is normally cup about if not about trying to win that?

hmmmmm that idea is allready implemented its called normal league games

That is not correct. You cannot play against a team from different league of the same division. To win a division you have to beat only few teams succesfully and you have whole season run to do it. Cup is about relegation battle.

At this condition is cup in fact pointless, because doesnt offer any chance to win even for a 2nd division teams (if any won the cup, Im sure that 3rd division team didnt). The problem is that you have here only frame of teams in the first two leagues. Majority is much lower and from that point of view it is not interresting, because you will always know, that you will relegate sooner or later no matter what you do.

Im not sure about basketball, but in football there are cups divided among different levels, so 1st league team will not usually go play agaisnt bunch of villagers to the arena where buy tickets mostly families of the players.

I dont know how about you, but I dont see any motivation in a long run in the cup, because you have to have extra players for it which doesnt have to cross over 50k wage, because it doesnt make big difference anyway if you are losing money because of it.

my mistake i misread your post.
still i think the cup is fine how it is.

I understand your post It's hard to play in a tournament that you just know you can't win, so you want to change the tournament where the playing field is more level. The way I see it, though, is that the Cup is that part of BB that gives your team an opportunity to play outside of the regular league competition. For the top teams, it means that unless they randomly get assigned another top team in an early round, these games are easy wins and quick paychecks for their team, and also an opportunity to get in some training for younger players while getting their team Enthusiasm up. For the lower division teams, it usually means getting thumped in the first few rounds, depending on how lucky they are in getting matchups against similarly lower division teams.

Personally, I think if the tournament only featured games against teams in the same division, it would be boring. What's the point of a tournament that's just an elimination version of what I'm already doing in my league games? I see the Cup as an opportunity to distinguish my team and try to get ahead of the teams in my league. When my team is still playing, it's a challenge balancing the need to win league games and desire to grab those Cup win payments an increasing my Fan Survey. If I get knocked out, I look to see if I can get in edge in league games by not having to save my best players for a Cup game, and I also get an extra game where I can play my players out of position for training purposes without worrying about the outcome of the game. When I was still a lower division team, playing against better teams gave me an opportunity to really see what my team could do, and very often a higher division team would expect my team to roll over and not even try, so I scored a few Cup upsets that way.

I think every manager needs to set a goal, whether it's focus on league games or Cup games. It's really hard to do both, and that's just part of the game. I always set a goal for a minimum number of Cup wins and that usually satisfies me to try to reach that so I can make sure I don't kill my Fan Survey with an early exit (I failed badly this season!), and after that I'd rather lose so that I can make sure I reach season training goals, too. But that's my strategy and accomplishes what I like. Everyone needs to make their own assessment of how to approach the Cup, whether they want to win Cup games or could care less.

What if the cup games were just between the same league, so all of div 3 in one cup etc. And the winner got something more rewarding so that it would make things more interesting. For example, the winner of the cup could receive automatic promotion to the higher division and 1 million dollar prize money. This would mean that teams could try and promote via the cup or via their league, or via both if they are good enough. Would add some more tactics to the game as well.