Από: BB-Charles
Προς: Όλους
87048.119 σε απάντηση προς 87048.117
Ημερομηνία: 7/6/2009 6:54:33 πμ
There's obviously a lot of confusion about what exactly is going on with the new game engine. In retrospect, we should have written the news post more clearly, and as I mention below, we're going to improve the situation before the next game day.
To clarify a few things:
1) The key point here, I think, is that what you see at the moment is really half of a set of changes designed to improve the game engine. We wanted to make the changes gradual so that it would be easier to adapt, but the problem is that halfway leaves things out of balance temporarily. They were somewhat less out of balance with the scrimmages, but when the best players in the game take the court, it becomes very obvious the extent to which half of these changes (most notably pace as discussed below) are missing.
2) If your C or PF is listed as the defender against a smaller player, this is almost certainly because they are trying to block the shot as a help defender, not because they got caught up in a switch. If you are playing a zone defense, then your center will end up defending against a lot of inside shots no matter who takes them, but that's what you expected, right?
3) One of the issues that has always existed in this engine is that the pace is too high; the typical NBA game has about 95 possessions, while in BuzzerBeater that number is often closer to 120. In the past, there have been too many possessions compared to an NBA game but also too much defense. We were trying to fix these things one step at a time in order to reduce the number of changes that come in all at the same time, and it's evident that the end result is that people are looking at the scores and saying their defense doesn't work anymore. I disagree; defense that concedes 101 points in 126 possessions, as I saw in the case of somebody who was complaining about the game engine, is actually quite good defense. It's just the 126 possessions that are fooling you.
4) Home court advantage has been steadily creeping up in the top divisions in BuzzerBeater in the past few seasons while remaining constant (and near the number we were aiming for) in the lower divisions. Some of the changes in this version do help to address it, but are calibrated for the entire set of changes.
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Anyway, I think it's become clear that while trying to do this halfway represents a smaller leap, it leaves everybody confused. I suppose it's been too long since I've read von Clausewitz [surely somebody gets the reference, right?]. So, this leaves us with the choice of either doing things in very small jumps and recalibrating the whole engine every time (which, while time-consuming, might work, but which will also mess up some of the team rating to expected result calculations) or making these changes all at the same time (which will result in a more massive shift, but one in which the games on both ends will make a lot of sense).
We're discussing this shortly and we're going to do something before the next game day to make sure that the game engine is easier to understand. Just to be clear, this set of changes, as well as the ones that go along with it, are really important parts of continuing to improve the game and game engine, and in particular to continue to keep the game tactical rather than having it degenerate over time towards "guess whether my SF is a guard or a center" between similarly-composed rosters. At the same time, the BB community is not our set of test subjects - we can run all the games we want to for testing, and it's our job to make sure that the game engine you see each day is the best one we can and yields the most enjoyable experience we can provide.
So, please let us see what we can do to improve things and we'll get back to everybody