BuzzerBeater Forums

well... tweaked is really not the right word.... i'm glad you brought this up.. We really overhauled it... and yes its now much more strict and in a new way...

without going into too many details, I can try backing off the strictness without making players outside the depth chart get as much playing time. However as I do this, its necessarily the case that sometimes the reserve is gonna play more over the backup in some situations.

anyway... please i'd love to have more feedback from users on this issue. I'd say part of the answer is though.. that if you are gonna use strict depth chart.. and really want your starters to get most of the minutes, then you can't complain that your players are getting tired to some extent. You have to have them really have a lot of stamina to do so.

that being said, i'm definitely still open to more tweaking of this.. but i want to get more input from the community. Incidently, coach decides was also tweaked to pay more attention to the depth chart as well... I think we are still considering whether getting rid of it all together is the right thing or not.

I completely agree with Raonne on this one. Not only on the substitution problems but the game engine as a whole lately. I have been playing since pretty much the beginning of the season 1 yet I'm losing to new teams which(no offense) are not much better then bot teams. I don't really see the point of LCD. You should be at a disadvantage if you don't set orders like the rules say, not given an advantage. Tbh it's a lazy man's tool. Before the strictness was increased, I thought the SFDC was all right (granted I brought up the weird sub the coach did but it happened only a couple times). I was having no problems training everyone on my roster this way.

You also say that if you play SFDC, stamina should be good. But minutes like these:
Williams, Jefferson 35
Salazar, Kirk 41
Stclair, Chad 41
Hopper, Cornell 37

Some of players can pull this off but the majority can't. Usually I would have my starters start my 2 league games and my backups the cup/scrimmage game. With numbers like these, your starters can only really start one league game. I scored 99 points in today's game...I have never scored less then 114 points in a game since taking over 6 games into season 1. Even though I have a head start on many teams, I don't expect to be some super unbeatable team but I didn't expect the losses I have had this season.

I know you said the coaching rating are messed up but look at this.
The coaching ratings from tonight's game:
Coaching Rating: phenomenal (medium) inept (high)
Guess which one is mine? Yup the inept...number wise he had a 18, I had a 4, though I beat him in every other rating!

I could ramble on forever about stuff so I'll stop after this: My whole feeling is that I have played for a season so far and last season I dominated teams like I have played so far this season yet I'm the one being completely dominated. If I could beat these teams easily all of last season, why am I have so much trouble beating them now? I'm even scared to put some of my backups into league games that previously I would have won hands down...but now I have no idea how I compare to any team.

Out of curiosity, what is the winning percentage of teams that use LCD compared to SFDC? If it is possible to find out

Edited 7/27/2007 6:58:17 AM by Vikman

Another thing...you said playing SFDC relies on good stamina which I understand. If that is the case, why are my starters all being subbed in and out and the same time? Don't they all have different levels of stamina and how quickly they get tried?

is not just a matter of stamina but a formula calculated also based on their skills.

and besides from that, in basketball players can only be subbed in and out in certain moments of the game (like for example during free throw shots), so happens often that substitutions will happen at the same time.

that's true about their only being certain moments in time. also, there might not be a terribly large diversity of stamina right now... or the modifier for how quickly players get tired depending on their stamina might need to be turned up... but i'd have to look into that in detail.

however, because people were complaining that the coach was overriding their own decisions about who was better to be on the floor... for SFDC I took out the modifier that had to do with the players actual skill. I can't really guarantee that your backup is going to play less than your starter, or more than your reserve unless my formula for whose better exactly matches up with yours...

this however does have one bad side effect. Now when your depth chart is exhausted at one position. Say, your backup is playing a different position and your starter has fouled out and your reserve is injured or something... then who gets put in that position is basically random and has nothing to do with whether they are meant to play there.

just to give people a sense of how complicated all the factors that have to be taken into account... currently we consider.

how good each player is at each position
whether its a blowout.. we rest starters
how tired each player is
whether a player is in the game already (can't have people coming in and out at every chance)
can't sub out free throw shooters
what is the foul situation.. and this has to change as a function of the point in the game
some modifier based upon the depth chart and the substitution pattern selected


then even after you have all those factored in correctly, you aren't just dealing with one position, you are dealing with 5 and you cant' have someone play two positions at once....

so if you start thinking about it carefully, you'll realize how complicated and convoluted a purely logic based approach would be. So we've gone to try to quantify each of these factors and use them to modify some global number which stands for something like... at this moment in time, how much do i want this player in at this position.

oh one otherthing... so coaching rating is calculating something. and it is informative about what happened in the simulation... so right now coaching ratings should really be like.. how good were the shots you took.

So basically, if you got a high coaching rating but shot poorly you got unlucky, or vice versa.. if you got a low coaching rating and shot pretty well.. than you got sort of lucky.