BuzzerBeater Forums

Dear BB developers. If you're interested in having more teams promote and relegate from each league in any given season, than the league format itself needs to be restructured to accommodate this, and not make it unreasonably hard to avoid relegation if you are making a decent effort to do so.

In short, I'm asking for an expansion of each league. Here are three possible options;

18 teams

The first set-up changes the league format to three groups of six teams. Play teams in your own group twice, and everyone else once, for a total of 22 games (same as now). At the end, teams placed 6th in each group would auto-relegate, whilst 5th placed teams and the worst 4th placed team overall would head to the relegation play-offs, for a total of five teams relegated. The championship play-offs would feature teams ranked 1st and 2nd in their group, and the best two 3rd placed teams.

This set-up allows for some non-champion promotions, whilst only making it slightly harder to avoid relegation. Three conferences may mess up the all-star game, but who cares about the all-star game anyway? Besides, you could always re-code it as a tri-series of three games between the three teams...

20 teams

This expands the set-up to four groups of five teams each. Again, you would play teams in your group twice, and everyone else once. This adds up to 23 games, which means the Tuesday cup game on all star week becomes another league game. Similar to the previous example, teams finishing 5th in their group would auto-relegate and the 4th placed teams would enter the play-off, for a total of six teams relegated. This might be a bit harsh, but it remains a better option compared to having six teams out of sixteen relegate. And this format can still be tweaked to only have five teams relegate if six proves to be unpopular.

The championship play-offs in this case would consist of teams finishing 1st or 2nd in their group. Also, for competitive and economic balance, the extra league game should be played at a neutral venue with no teams receiving money (think of it as a charity drive round).

24 teams

The final format is the most extreme set-up but also the most accommodating, in that it can lessen the lower divisional pain of a switch to a 1-3-9-27 pyramid system. This set-up does away with conferences altogether and has every team play one game against everyone else for a total of 23 games. This once again removes the extra cup game on all-star week, to be replaced with a neutral venue round as mentioned before. 21st-24th auto-relegate, 17th-20th in the play-off, six teams relegate. 1st-8th to play in the championship play-offs.

This ensures that the same ratio (25%) of teams in the league relegate, whilst still achieving the original goal of allowing for non-champion promotions. And if this format change can be coupled with the big shift to a 1-3-9-27 league pyramid that was probably preferable to begin with, then each non-top level league can offer guaranteed promotion to both league finalists each season.

It would be a significant change to the game no matter which format you go with, but it looks like the developers are in the mood for making big changes anyway so what's one more? Let me know your thoughts.

Last edited by Jay (OTT) at 12/12/2016 10:06:47 AM

I like your thinking. Option 1 seems to best from my end. Adding those extra couple or teams.

I think its a little complicated and requires too much code changes. You very rarely see the devs making such big changes in a single release - they tend to make small gradual changes and gauge the impact. The last big thing I remember them doing was Utopia.

Why not just a simple expansion in team size?

1. Leave it at 2 conferences
2. 12 teams per conference
3. 11 and 12 positions get auto-relegated (configurable)
4. 7,8,9,10 fight for relegation (configurable)
5. 1,2,3,4,5,6 go to playoffs

this would make the playoffs a little longer (great!), increase the size of the league (which should hopefully increase the socialness), and still make it a pretty easy system to follow.

Any expansion of the number of teams in a league and/or playoffs would also extend the number of weeks in a season. That would, in turn increase the number of training weeks each season meaning more opportunities for training pops.

Not much compared to increasing training speed but it would help.

Actually this does not happen in the systems I suggested. The 18 team league still only has 22 games, whilst the 20 and 24 team leagues feature 23 games with the extra game being squeezed in to replace an all-star week cup game. We can still get the season done in 14 weeks each time.

Something that can be tweaked about the 18 or 20 team system, depending on the preference of the developers and community, is how the championship play-off berths and relegation play-off teams are determined. Instead of adhering strictly to conference standings, you could instead go for more of a wildcard set-up as follows;

18 teams: 6th placed teams still auto relegate, but the next four worst teams across the whole league enter the relegation play-offs. At the top, you can either still have 1st and 2nd qualify along with the next two best teams, or just have 1st placed teams automatically qualify along with the next five best teams.

20 teams: Again, 5th placed teams would still relegate, with the next four worst teams overall in the relegation play-off. 1st placed teams still make the championship play-offs, but instead of all the 2nd place teams, make it the next four best teams overall.

Last edited by Jay (OTT) at 12/13/2016 2:12:26 AM

If it's that big of a deal for the Cup/Tournament to be wrapped up before the end of the regular season, then the only solution is to cut the size of the Cup in the bigger nations to 2048. This may shaft some low ranked teams if the user base jumps back up later, but at the moment this still ensures that every human controlled team has a place, whilst allowing the Cup to be completed just before the play-offs begin despite a 23 league game schedule.

This also has the positive of removing that 7 day period where nothing of note is happening for those who are already out of the Cup.

So I think you'd need to come up with a solution for that regarding the suggestions that tale away that game.

Play the first cup game on the Tuesday after the first weekly update or instead of the thursday scrimmage. This way you also somewhat alleviate the problem of those teams with no home game in that week (cup game instead).

this would make the playoffs a little longer (great!)

Please no. Imo the playoffs should be as short as possible.

I agree with keeping the playoffs to 8 teams, and with my proposed league expansion it would make the regular season a bit more important. Not that it's meaningless now, but I have seen teams limp in to the play-offs as a 4th seed only to become a major title threat with the pre-playoff buy-up. A smart strategy, but not necessarily rewarding of success in the season as a whole.

The 'short as possible' philosophy was one of my main reasons for previously proposing a condensed 13 week BB season in 2015 (a thread you may remember since you posted in it), with the time savings made by once again cutting the all-star break and shortening the championship finals to a 2 game aggregate score series to be played on Saturday and Sunday. However, this does require a significant restructure of several aspects of the game of Buzzerbeater.

Last edited by Jay (OTT) at 12/13/2016 11:12:50 AM

Pre-playoff buy up can be dealt with fairly easily: make homegrown players contribute more than their skills by default and recent additions contribute less for 4 weeks or so. This way you really need to get a monster player to get some meaningful impact if you buy in the last weeks before the playoffs and you incentivise people to train their own players

Last edited by Lemonshine at 12/14/2016 7:28:48 AM