I haven't been able to answer a lot of questions lately, basically because we've been focusing on a few of the larger supported questions in this topic. These include the Shot Blocking concerns and the Fan Survey logic.
As you may understand these are questions that do not have clear cut answers. We need to clear up some testing, define if there is a problem or not, then what's the exact problem and how does this influence other game aspects. Then finally we'll have to discuss possible changes before we can announce something substantial.
Regarding the Shot Blocking, as you already mentioned we do believe that shot blocking is currently well balanced in the engine, although we might agree with your observation that this effect may not always be that clear from analyzing boxscores or match events. We are currently looking at this more closely and trying to find the right direction. Hopefully we can make some decisions on possible changes soon, but more often than not the ideas won't actually lead to the desired results. Personally I hope we can be less vague about this before the end of the season, but unfortunately I cannot at this particular moment.
Regarding the Fan Surver logic, we have some plans to increase the realism of the fan results related to reflecting the relative strength differences between teams better than it does now. But again, these are still plans, nothing definite yet. We prioritize the Game Engine / Mach Viewer related issues (such as the SB one) above the Fan Survey logic change, so don't expect a change too quickly on this part.
I'll be planning to answer some more questions next week. But for some of the more recent questions, such as the ones about how the BB staff is organized I can direct you to earlier posts I made in this topic. Please filter the topic on BB-Patrick to quickly get an overview of the answered questions.
Finally I'd like to mention that we have been working hard on improving the time untill boxscores show. We believe the time to boxscores has improved due to these changes, and we expect that they will further improve after we finished the optimizing. Personally I'm no programmer, but I'll try to word the 'new upcoming changes' as well as possible.
We plan to start testing the insertion of some 'temporary' boxscores that if everything goes well of course will be the definitive boxscores. However, the setback is that since games are ran in batches if a game in the end of the batch crashes the entire batch is reran; it could be the case that some temporary boxscores in the beginning of the batch already show, and they will be overwritten again if the entire batch needs to be reran. This may result in some different numbers than before, but since game engine batches rarely crash we believe this will be ok.
So, long wall of text,
Merry Christmas to all who celebrate,
Regards,
Patrick