BuzzerBeater Forums

BB-Edju:The idea is that teams in mostly bot leagues can't finish really high in their league and also draft really well - as in real life, you get one or the other.

SpicyMcH: But this has a high risk of seriously damaging all the national teams of all the small countries in the world, plus it really takes away a lot of the fun for everyone in leagues with even one or two bots.

That's a good point. But I suggest it's more simple than that, you've just made the wrong call here BBs. As you may be vaguely aware, I know a little about game design and am a big, big fan of the way BuzzerBeater is constructed but even the best make mistakes.

If you're stuck in a league with bots, it's not your fault. You didn't ask for that, you want to play against humans and climb the pyramid and have fun. Why then should the bots even stand a chance of taking a top draftee ahead of you? Getting a top trainee prospect is the most likely way to hook new players into the game and build the player database. New teams need a leg up to give them a chance to catch up and you should be facilitating this*, not placing artificial barriers in the way.

I think you should also remember that the whole draft system is alien to Europeans anyway - although most of us get the general principle - and that being forced to watch a computer managed team take a top prospect ahead of you is counter-intuitive to a lot of your prospective long-term franchise owners. Frankly, it sucks.

Really think you should rethink this and have human teams automatically pick ahead of bot teams in the draft.

*But not to the extent they automatically get better talent in the draft pool. If you make the bots pick last, they get an advantage from that.



Last edited by Elmacca at 7/1/2010 3:04:15 PM

Random is ok, you should give the possibilty to everyone to have a good draftee paying money. I've decided to go back in second division in order to train better my young players, sometime people is more interested to train young players instead of win championship and I can tell you that I could even spend 3m to have an average player 18 yo with good potential. A parallel championship u18 should be fantastic, more money you will put in better players you'll have in the draft. This is also a good way to leave money from the system, who doesn't have money or is not interested in young players will chose randomly (same of today), who has money and wants to have a young superstar will put his money on it

The team playing all-humans from day one (does any team ever find themselves in this situation, by the way?) has a massive advantage in tactical expertise and learning which skills suit which tactics work WWWAAAAAAYYYYY (see, I can shout, too) before teams playing mostly bots do. I can tell you from other games that getting smashed by more established teams is the quickest way to learn how to win games.

Anyway, if you think of it as the improved likelihood of getting a decent trainee (and we're talking one player here) being compensation for having much less opportunity to improve your game engine and tactical knowledge, then it might make more sense to you.

You might think you know what works best - but I can tell you you don't.
I have consistently had the 12th-14th highest salary in England while in the top league, and I'm easily top six. A lot of coaches think they know how to build a team and get the best from the ME, but they don't really, they're just above average.

Trust me, the only guy who really, really knows how the ME works is Marot. The rest of us are still playing catch up.

Don't twist, it's clear I'm answering a specific point in your post.

To be honest, I don't think I need to address your main point further - I've made my argument and I'm not interested in getting in a keyboard battle about it. But to summarise, in case there's been a misunderstanding here, I think that the actual situation would be most teams having similar amounts of bots - and thus there is little imbalance, and where there is imbalance, the advantages of more competition mitigate it.

My main point originally was that new teams at the lowest level in a country should be able to draft a good trainee as a starting strategy for playing Buzzerbeater - and that this would help the BBs build the manager database/get more players playing Buzzerbeater - and new players from outside North America should not see computer managed teams draft ahead of them (because it makes no sense to them).

At higher levels in the pyramid, bot clean up before the draft should take care of preventing imbalance creeping in. No?

I do agree, however, that a system that would some div III teams an advantage over others depending on how many teams had gone bot over the course of the season (in a pyramid that goes to V) is not a good idea.

I signed up a few days before last season and was promoted straight to Div III. Last season I decided to ensure that I was relegated back down to Div IV because I wanted to be promoted through the proper channels (get some coveted Div IV trophies) and give my team time to develop. So after being relegated back to Div IV this week I find myself in a league with all bots, which I am pretty excited about.

Because this means I am likely to go through the season undefeated, and I can completely control my GS and training minutes, and I can focus on expanding my arena and the cup (lol, which means I am likely to last one round in the cup as a Div IV team).

But to have all these advantages and then not have any competition in picking in the draft is way too much advantage as BB Charles said.

I would disagree with you here. I think that as long as anybody is in a bot-heavy league he is far far behind in comparison to the country's leaders(surely that must be the case in 99% of the cases). In this line of thinking I'd say such managers should have the possibility to close the gap a bit easier. Would they face the same conditions as everybody else? Probably not but still they are so far behind that they could easily have an advantage like this. Basically all I am saying is that this game should (to some extend) promote the idea of new managers catching up with veterans. And for teams in bot leagues draft was one of the major weapons.