BuzzerBeater Forums

You always have to find a balance between reality and fun. That's the mix BB is trying to achieve. The more realistic possible and most enjoyable also.

1. Skill drops after big injurys.

Like somebody else said, if it is temporal it could make it interesting. Though, having an injury is something "unexpected" and it is also modulated by your doctor level so is a good point I think. You need to make a managerial choice (doctor level adn his salary) and also consider the randomess of the injury.

I don't really see how this feature can add value to the actual system.

2. Hidden potential

Totally unpredictable potentials would be a game killling. Something you planned and invest with a lot of effort and time suddenly becomes unsefull. That's not bearing with uncertanty, it's a bullet on your chest.

An alterbative could be a know range of potential. When he is 18 he may have, say, 3 potentials. You know you he is between 2 and 4 for example. Then, every season when he get's old, the range is reduced in one level. For example, you discover he is between 3 to 4. So, every player at the age of 20 would have a "predictable" potential. This will lead you to take some risk when buying and I think will produce some interesting effects on the market.

3. Skill boost

Interesting somehow. But it is a really complicated to implement. ¿How to decide wich are triggers for the blossom? ¿How much boost? To many undecid things, I prefer to work on some other features first.

4. Ricky Rubio's styles pros

This is something easy to implement and it could be really interesting. This would be very interesting because the strong incentive to train primary skill will be reduced (you can do it later with few lost on training speed) and it will help a lot to create more balanced players. Because, for me is clear that nobody will train a C of pure IS, ID and RB of high potential who was drafted at 16-17. You will have to pay it a salary of 800k every week to keep it.

I like the skill drop idea, but only if its temporary and not permanent. Just imagine you train a player for a few seasons (=one "real" year) and some random event destroys some of your hard work - how humiliating and de-motivating would that be? If that happened to me I would instaquit this game.

Hidden potential - I dont think this would make sense, maybe if potential in the beginning would just be an estimate and then could raise or drop one or two levels, but completely hidden... I dont like this.

Skill boost - random and thus unfair

Ricky Rubio - I think rookies should become stronger in general (maybe the top-rookies salary range up to 10-15k), but 2 or 3 16 year old top-guns in the whole game? Whats the profit for everybody here?

1. This is already taken care of via game shape. You have a player injured for that long and his GS will drop dramatically meaning it will probably take him 2+ weeks to get back in shape which is essentially a "skill drop" as he is not performing at his optimum

2. It will kill off the transfer market. It doesn't make logical sense why anyone would spend money on young guys without knowing his potential. Even the likes of Darko and Kwame brown was touted by scouts to have high potential when they were drafted. Not having any idea on the actual potential of the guy brings too much luck into a game

3.As already mentioned, you can still give them training minutes. No point giving them a skill boost on top of that. Also it is random and is thus unfair for others

4. this is probably the one I like the most. Reduce the starting age of guys to 17. Though this has to be made extremely rare like 1% of all draftees so you will have some drafts where there isn't any players of this age.

Wow, what a great post. I want give my opinion in this since I am the Center of the Universe (or so I see when I get these visions...):

1.Skill Drops After Big Injuries
I would absolutely hate if this happened to one of my players, but since this would apply to all teams it wouldn't be unfair. In fact, I think it rewards teams who go for depth instead of blowing all their cash on superstars who play 42+ minutes per game, every game. I think this could perhaps be linked to Stamina (i.e. lower stamina=greater injury risk, but this is very debatable and I'm not sure I'd agree with such a notion if I really thought about it). But this would add so much more reality to the game that I fully support the notion. We'd just have to put up with several "whining about career threatening injuries" posts every time some team got hit.

2. Hidden Potential
Again, I like this idea a whole lot, though I also agree with the criticisms that point out that in real life there can be a somewhat of a good idea about which players have what sort of potential. Plenty of players have "work ethic" questions and other issues that affect scoutable potential. But scouting potential is not perfect. I think the adjustment that really should be made is to make the Potential rating fuzzier (perhaps given as a best case potential) so that we have an idea who might have what sort of potential, but we won't really know until we start training them. After all, we need to have a few Tyrus Thomases and Eddie Currys in the game, the once-very-young-players with what everyone thought had tremendous potential but have shown much less maturity and desire to grow than expected. But of course, maybe they're just late-bloomers, which leads to...

3. Skill Boost
Another suggestion that begs for more realism, which I support. I think the way to handle this isn't to give skill boosts, though. I think there can be a hidden attribute for all players regarding maturity. Some players just take a little longer to grow than others, so instead of having all players uniformly train fastest as 18/19-year-olds with skills growth tapering off after 21 years, maybe some players have their peak skills growth shifted a little (perhaps reaching more trainable age starting at 20, 21, 22, 23...). And training rates could also be a hidden attribute, similar to how training rates decline now each season depending on potential, but having training rate increases for players who reach training efficiency peaks after 18/19-years-old (increase rates should be steeper than decrease rates, which may seem like a skills boost).

But also to add reality to the notion of a Skill Boost, I think there should be (somehwat random, perhpas related to potential/trainability) skill boosts for players who did not receive "training minutes" in games to account for those players who maybe had the occasional good practice or work-out. In reality, that's a big part of how we sometimes see real life late-bloomers, players who don't get game time minutes, but who stick with the team and have good practices. There should probably also be some of these (somewhat random again) skill boosts that take place during the off-season processing to account for off-season training that may help some of the (mostly younger) players.

4. Ricky Rubio Pros
In my opinion, 16-17-year-old rookies should only be players who will reach their potential sooner than other players. How much better was Kobe Bryant at the age of 28 than he was at the age of 21? He was better, but by how much? Kevin Garnett, another prep-to-pro, again how much better did he get from right out of high-school to the age of 30? I think these sort of players just matured faster than other players (see my comments on the other issues above), which is why folks think players like Ricky Rubio could even be ready for the NBA at so young an age.

UcanUwill, thanks for getting this thread started. Gets the creative juices flowing.

I think you sort of described what I was trying to get at, but you made it more confusing...

Oh, and to extend my comment on players younger than 18-years-old, since this game sort of models itself on the NBA where it can, I think the draft should have also include some more polished older players, like players coming out college. In the two rounds of the 2009 NBA draft, I believe at least 20% of the picks were 22-years old. Only 2 players were actually 19 years old, (Rubio, and Jru Holiday from UCLA). I think there even like 8 players at least 24 years old, too. But since most players that go in the NBA draft are still actually seniors from college, that puts them usually at 22 years old, and a few younger seniors and some juniors make for a bunch of 20 and 21-year-olds, too. I guess by using 18 and 19 as the draft age, perhaps it’s a nod to the more European leagues where there are levels and developmental teams more similar to how soccer is run, but…

it's a nod to the training system who works very explosiv, and will even look more silly if you get complete players - but hey training is fun ;)

I get you with that. It's not that I think too many NBA rookies are at their potential, but I see your point, thanks. I just think it's a trade-off for adding some degree of realism. The system we have is like what could happen if there was no college basketball level and no developmental leagues, and all those players had to merge with the NBA. But I guess if we really wanted reality, the players would have contracts that expired and players became free agents, too... and I'm pretty sure that BB isn't heading in that direction... careful mucking with the system too much, it's not really broken.

But anyway, I hope the stuff on training ages and speeds and hidden attributes and all that get thought through and considered.

early-bloomer and late-bloomer lane would look like that
http://img684.imageshack.us/img684/4117/extraordinarycare...

You mean that speed of training would be on late-bloomers just faster? Means that you could train these players faster on late age than if they were youth? Or they would get better by themselves like your previous idea about skill boosting? I dont uderstand what do you mean.

I think what he’s getting is that the training peak for each player may vary. Currently, every player is training at his maximum (100%) rate from the time he is draft at 18/19 years old until he’s 21, when his training rate starts to decline. The rate of decline is modified by his potential, which is currently a known factor (Starter, Star, All Star, Hall of Famer, etc.), even if we don’t know exactly what the rates are.

What I think is being suggested, and forgive me if I’m putting too much of my own suggestion in this, is that there are two significant changes being suggested. First, the age when a player is training at his maximum (100%) rate should vary among different players. So, an “early bloomer” could be like the current players who start out training at 100% and then decline starting at some older age, while a “late bloomer” might not train at 100% of his best training rate right away, but he will reach this rate when he’s a little older, like maybe when he is 20 or 22, etc., and then eventually his training rate will also decline, as 21-year-olds currently do.

Second, the rate at which the training rate should vary for each player. This is actually how it works now, as each player’s Potential is essentially a label for the modifier of each player’s “training rate decay”, and players with higher Potential basically have a slower training rate decline than players with lower Potential. But if the we need to adjust for “late bloomers” and varying ages at which players are considered their most trainable, each player will also need to have a time table for when the maximum training rate is achieved and how fast the training rates increase before hitting the maximum, how long the maximum training rate is sustained, and how fast the training rates will decrease from the maximum.

If I had some graph paper and I wasn’t so lazy, I could just draw a simple diagram that would probably be clearer. But I don’t the suggestion is really all that complicated. But then again, as I stated a couple of posts ago, I am in the Center of the Universe.