BuzzerBeater Forums

You know what time it is! It's knecht time!

I have said this for a long time and we finally have to accept the fact that the game is too much for Marin as a lone person.

BB has HUGE deficits when it comes to marketing and PR, has absolutely no clue about necessary development (app) and fails when it comes to understanding problems and finding (easy) solutions.

I think the recent changes have been more or less clumsy attempts to fix a complex issue and from my point of view those fixes have made things even worse. There is a german word "verschlimmbessern" - it means to disimprove sthg. or to worsen a situation by a failed attempt to improve it. GDP is such a "Verschlimmbesserung" - it makes a complex game even more complicated and raises the bar for new users, who already have troubles to survive in an environment where established teams kill them game after game (this is reality for all countries - except the big ones).

Marketing is the next big problem. There are many ways to attract users, but if the realize that the product is bad - they will quit pretty soon. So here we have a vicious circle of problems - bad game design kills user retention, which is killed by no/low marketing budget.

So where should BB start?

I think we have to create a situation for new users that allows them to make (huge) mistakes and still be successful - i.e. put them in leagues they will dominate, no matter how bad they are playing. There are many options how to do this - raise the budget, give them better players, bigger stadium OR my long time favourite: put them in the lowest possible league! It will take them one or two seasons to get out there, they can learn the game under no pressure and have fun seeing their scrub players put up solid numbers game after game.

A situation where newbies have to sit around getting abused every game, for more than a year is not acceptable! I think by now this should be common sense, but apparantly its not...

The opportunity to get a second team would put many countries from zero to he..., um, well maybe "okay" - I would join a micronation if it was possible and I would be very happy if we had more teams in Austria. I love all my fellow countrymen (no homo), but a fresh breeze would be very welcome. If we could get like 10% of the current userbase join a second nation that would be uber-awesome.

There are DOZENS of other great suggestions out there, and it puzzles me why we see "random" features being introduced to the game season after season, especially considering the circumstances of a shrinking userbase.

Looking at my sons team new teams get 10 free draft points. Means his 1st draft is going to even more hit and miss.
He got his side in a Div III side and has no chance of getting a win this season. Why not put new teams in Div IV and give them some chance?

My fav idea is for teams who have played more then 3 seasons and have been more then 1 level above the bottom league in country who drop to the bottom league all go into the same league. This would mean is 5 or 6 teams tank together only 1 of them can bounce back up. And they all don't get a gun draft pick as reward.

As for giving new teams more cash then maybe some bonus payments over a period of time. So instead of giving them 300k on day one give them 50k a week for 10 weeks. So they are limited in what they can throw away in the short term.

When a team goes bot leave them with their players in place to finish the season. A coachless side with decent players will perform better then a new team with 3k salary players and no idea.

I think a lot are saying it unbalance the game, but I think it stop the tanking. It depend on how the BB guy's do this. I don't see any top league team playing a 3-5K rookie.

I single positioned trained 3 SF trainees who I would give either 48 mins in either the PG or C position, (one trainee in each of my 3 games a week) and I managed to be competitive in Div II in Australia and also the Cup, whilst doing so.

Yes Div II in Australia might be weaker than Div 2 in some of the larger Nations, and yes Im also an experienced Manager and the rest of my team was pretty good, but the fact was that I proved that it could be done.

has absolutely no clue about necessary development (app) and fails when it comes to understanding problems and finding (easy) solutions.

You think that BBs are not in place to know what the game needs? You think that they don't know that an app for Android and iOS it's something the game needs? The problem once again is the finances of the game and this is something they know better than me and you.

Blablabla finances, the same old story... Really? Are businessmen that dumb? In order to make money, you have to spend money - and even if you don't want to spend like 500-1000 bucks, you could still hire a student to code an app as a part of his bachelor/diploma thesis. I even think they could crowdfund the app (suggested years ago!), if in return they gave away something special to the people funding the app.

Problem is BB-guys are sicentists or whatever, but when it comes to business decisions, marketing and strategic planning they fail miserably.

What about site redesigning? Or at least adding some little things like logos and uniforms. Give users to pick between several basic uniform designs and choose colors. Make fancy things available to supporters.

Also, change the default skin to red. Others are just eye-hurting.

As i said before,the game has indeed problems and in many cases not small ones but they are trying to fix them even if sometimes it takes more time.

Whilst it would be nice to have quicker fixes to problems like the LI dominance, I think that fixes cant be quick knee Jerk solutions, but instead be flagged in advance and then eased in as is planned.

Imagine how much time and effort people have spent developing or buying players to suit the current game engine, to drastically change the game engine with out warning over night would be a real kick in the guts to the people who have adapted to the way the current game engine plays.

Surveying those who drop out and also random demographic sections of the Managers as I proposed a few posts back in this very thread wouldnt cost anything and could identify the real problems so that what resources could be spent, could be better prioritised.

You think that this game created and running with air?

Im very appreciative of all the great work they have done to make this game as good as it is

You think that they didn't do that already?

Who is "they"? BB-Marin is pretty active and we have to appreciate his effort, BB-Patrick shows up once every two seasons, the other BBs show up once every four years, if the did not went bot in the meanwhile.

And no, I don't think they care a lot. If they did, they'd be active to a certain degree - I once again remind you that one of the BBs went bot! That alone is a pretty strong indicator of how things are going.

We will hit less than 30k users by the end of the year, to me it appears that the roof is on fire...