BuzzerBeater Forums

https://www.flickr.com/photos/190132839@N08/52903107193/in...

I do not know if you can see the link.

That clearly displays that the match and stats fron the draft can be a big liar.

Was my third choice.

Guys. I am outraged right now. I've based my entire teams tactics for the next ~5 seasons depending on the scouting which had shown me that I have a 5/5 balls prospect in both skills and potential. How come this player is 5 balls in skills? He is nearly untrainable. I would have never decide to take a hit and drop out of the II div if I knew it could be that bad.

(52171615)

The only way to minimise the chances of receiving a total garbage player as your 1st choice is to spend scouting, interviewing AND unveiling every skill... which means you must gather some 90-100 draft points.

but, and there's a but

you can spend 100 points unveiling every possible skill of every player in the draft, have the 1st choice in the draft and the #1 player of that class is a 18yo 6k salary with allstar potential or is a 19yo 4k HoF with severe holes in 2-3 important skills!

on the other hand, you can spend 0k during a season, collect 0 draft points, end up with the 14th choice in the draft and receive a very good completely trainable 5k MVP because no one else scouted in your league and the gods of buzzerbeater were at your side! it happened to me more than once since the pandemic, 2 of those guys even made to their U19 teams (france and venezuela) and the venezuelan is still being trained and has a chance of joining the main squad in a couple of seasons.

not to mention that some seasons ago this issue was even worse because the maximum skill a draftee could get was 7! back then the value of scouting was extremely low.

they raised this to 9 and it kinda got less worse, but still...

all that said, after a while, this season I invested and collected 60 points... got an average prospect at best and two useless boneheads... to my fault, I kinda messed up the balls thing, for some reason I assumed the balls defined the potential, not the skills, so yeah, ended up with some very skilled bench warmers

to summarise: only invest in the draft if you have lots of money left and have very low expectations, otherwise the chances you'll get frustrated are extremely high.

On the other hand, once you spend the 20-50 points to reveal the skills that matter to you, you'll be able to eliminate a large portion of the draft class. Some because their skills are too low to be trainable, and possibly some because they'll have a strong (8) or proficient (9) skill that identifies them as 19 years old if you want to focus on 18 year old players who can be truly maximized.

So you won't be doing scouting & interviews for the full draft class (especially if you've done most or all of the skill reveals), but probably more in the range of 10-20 players. And some of those you may stop after the initial scouting use of 1 point, when you see they're below your cutoff of trainable initial salary (assuming that you didn't already do a full scout reveal).

So in reality, a fully scouted season is probably going to be in the 80-100 point range, and depending on how much you want to spend per point you can get up to 84 points per season.

Here are my general rules for the draft

1) Don't tank for the number 1 choice. You'll probably be disappointed.
2) Don't approach the draft like a lottery, counting on selling your draftee for a profit. You'll probably be disappointed.
3) If you want to draft a guy to train, do the scouting combine, separate the 18 year olds by heights in the appropriate range given your training plan, and interview to find at least 3 acceptable selections. You'll usually get one of your first 3 choices.

Those are pretty solid guidelines.

That said, even following them can still lead to disappointment like my draft last season (i.e. not the one that happened yesterday) where the highest potential 18 yo's in the entire draft were PAs.

I don't think it's absolutely pointless to spend on the draft

The way the draft currently is, it's very pointless to spend on the draft.

I get the point of a few divisions featuring great prospects while most divisions only end up offering average trainees as best choices. Outstanding players must be rare to keep their value. That's ok.

The problem with this design is that you have to invest a lot and risk getting nothing most of the times, while most managers don't invest anything (because it's expensive, high risk and low reward) and some get free outstanding trainees because nobody bothered scouting them.

That said, I suggest the following:

In the mid-season, when the draftees are made available, a board of specialists should publicly evaluate every list of trainees of every division. 1 to 5 balls. 5 balls meaning something like "hey, there are at least 3 MVP+ 5k+ caliber players on this list", 1 ball meaning "be advised, the best player on this list is a 19yo superstar with 4k salary"... then the managers could make a decision about spending the points or saving for the future... this could encourage managers to always invest a bit and keep points just in case, spending them when it's expected to be worthy, (and when it happens, creating some competition within the division)... this would also assure that the great prospects end on the hands of teams which invested and not on the hands of random lucky bastards.




Last edited by Bernspin at 5/16/2023 4:25:15 PM