BuzzerBeater Forums

but let's also admit that it's by far the best match viewer I've ever seen in an online game. EVER.

This match viewer bores me to tears.

Both of the above are opinions that have little to do with respecting other people's work.

I'm a programmer. I can appreciate how much work has been put into the match viewer as it stands. That doesn't change my opinion that it is currently a very boring way of representing a basketball game.

The inability to navigate through a game well, or speed up the viewer, or to represent more information between shooting/foul/violation situations is, in my opinion, killing your product. Yes I could have worded my dissatisfaction better, but I had just come from trying to watch a game in the match viewer and it had negatively affected my mood (despite the large win)

Oh and while we're at it. Lesson zero in gaming public relations. Don't tell people that you will rectify a bug, then don't fix it and offer no explanation. http://www.buzzerbeater.org/common/cn.asp?action=view&...

To echo Domenico, this match viewer is pretty damn good.

If you need constant action, you can play PS3 or XBox.

We don't mind hearing constructive criticism, but the insults without any fresh ideas behind them are inappropriate.

Try again.

"X bores me to tears" - is not an insult.

Reading between the lines my suggestions were as follows:
1) Go find out what they do at SimulatedSports. (An online basketball sim with a purely text inferface that I have played for over 6 years and one of only 3 online games I've ever given money too)
2) Provide a means of speeding up the viewer, watching it an increased rate, or only viewing the highlights.
3) Provide a means of scrolling back through the text portion of the match viewer so that you can read what has happened previously if you are browsing multiple screens (coz lets face it, people do that when they are online, particularly if they have to wait for something to load, which is essentially what the match viewer feels like between things happening)

So that'd be no insult, but rather a negative opinion. With ideas that are yet to be addressed and a suggestion for a place you can go and look for more ideas that hasn't been followed up.

Not that Naphtali2 needs me to fight his battles, but:

I have to admit, I'm a little bothered by the fact that Naphtali2 received so much flak for his comments:

1) This is a Suggestions forum -- users should feel free to express their opinions AND criticisms.

2) This is a game that can only get better from user feedback, both good and bad.

3) Naphtali2 offered suggestions for improvement.

I honestly don't think he had any intention of insulting the BB's, and to say that he did is a bit of a stretch...

"X Sucks" is a valid opinion. Its not my opinion of the match viewer, but its a valid opinion for people to voice on a forum such as this. Its worthless criticism unless it then goes on to explain why in their opinion it sucks and ways of possibly fixing that.

What the textual play-by-play enables you to do is:
a) Have user generated tools that enable stats freaks to work out things like player efficiency

You're already heading the right way with the Assist program. Anyone playing online sports manager games will know the value that user generated additions to the game make.

b) Enables users to look at the game in the amount of time that they have. Only got time to skim read it? that's okay. Want to watch it in a program that gives you the information in real time over 48 minutes, you can do that too.

Box scores are great summary information, but it doesn't give you any feel for the ebb and flow of a game, how it was won and lost. That said I don't always have an hour or two to watch a match (or replay) here, even if I wanted too. If I only have 5 or 10 mins to watch my game I can't do that here.

Thanks for the feedback as far as the flash limitations, it (flash) is not my area of expertise and its hard to argue with technical limitations. It seems to me though that if you are already generating the info to display the text at all, it would be quite easy to then log that to text file (and make that user viewable/downloadable) and/or expand the existing flash app using the text to drive the app rather than a clock. eg log the time of each line of text you currently display, then display each line of text for say 2 seconds, changing the clock to show whatever time the text occurred. This would still enable you to show off the strength of your current viewer (graphical representation of where the shots occurred, and "real-time" updating of boxscores, lineups etc) whilst reducing the replay time from ~2hrs like it is currently to well under 30 mins (at a guess 10-15)

it's a valid opinion.

I, however, believe the opposite. I think the boxscore is enough for someone to know why they won or lost, and with the new ratings systems being implemented will be even better (i hope).

And my guess is that the problems with having the full text report of matches are 2, and both related to how big the file will be.

(1) server storage
(2) I will never read it. And most users also won't. Like said before, it will be really long. Really long. If you have in mind something like the match report on HT, forget it. BB has much more details, much more match events. It will be boring and useless to read the whole match report.

A user that wants a report of the match has three options: A fast one (analysing the boxscore page), a long one (watching the replay), or a middle one (which would be watching the replay fastforwarding the breaks, or maybe even fastforwarding to the last quarter, or to whenever he wants).

Once again, that's just my opinion, as a normal user.

Edited 9/19/2007 1:52:44 PM by GM-Raonne

This is a good point, the "most will never read it option" is probably enough that it'll never get done. I don't agree though, that you can tell where the game was lost by looking at the box score. Sure, my PG may have been 5-15 shooting, but maybe all 5 of those FGs came in the fourth quarter. Maybe the real problem was that my C's stamina was terrible, and he died in the 4th quarter, scoring no points and getting no rebounds. This is something you'd only be able to tell from actually watching the match.

I think the solution is to: Make it so when I type in minute into the match reviewer I go exactly to that point in the game, so you don't have to guess/try 8 times. I know this has already been brought up, but I think it would help solve this problem.