BuzzerBeater Forums

Seriously, nobody can see that the short rosters problem was caused by the psychologist?

It is so damned obvious...

I don't agree that game shape introduced too much luck or randomness into the game. A small degree of randomness is always part of the game.

But even if that were the case, the sensible thing to do would be to change the formula for the game shape to make it less random. Period. You don't need to screw the rosters size to do that.

Yeah, well, you also have the more stamina - more minutes relation.
So both things caused the 6-men rosters: (1) stamina-minutes and (2) psychologist.

I'll do one last effort to make people understand and then I will forget about this.
Because, well, this is so obvious to me that I tend to think that everybody would know. But obviously not. So I will make it explicit.

Let's say the week is formed by two league competitive games and one irrelevant scrimmage.
So we have 48*5*2=480 minutes to share.
When you could give only 70 minutes to each player for good game shapes, we needed 480/70=6.85, that means 7-men rotation. And in practice you needed 8 men to get perfect numbers. As originally intended.
With the psychologist, you can give up to 90 minutes a player so we have 480/90=5.33.

So the psychologist allows rotations of one and a half less players.
If the problem is short rosters, this seems key, don't you think?

My 50c:

I loved the arguments and input provided by Alonso, augus, Banan-mat and surprisingly to me - jesus. A lot of good, valid points.

The problem indeed has two main directions where it can be battled effectively without creating a lazareth - stamina and game shape.

1) Game shape:
Instead of increasing injuries (which is not the way to go imo), we could just introduce an algorithm that has a % chance to decrease GS based on minutes played in B3/BBM games in addition to the regular weekly games (after all psychologist, massage doctors & regular weekly games effects are applied). Again, exponential ofc, starting from like 0% for <40 mins to possibly close to 100% for 48+ mins. Now those occasional overtime games will hit us hard on that regard but well, they do play a part in real life too. If we don't want this to happen the 40-48min penalty range might not be hard-coded but instead be percentages of the total game time (~80-100%).

This will inevitably hurt the game shape of short rosters and respectively their performance and cost-efficiency. Due to the game engine imperfections that were mentioned however <40 mins could be hard to achieve for players with 7+ stamina even if decent substitutes are present in the roster. That leads me to the second part of my proposed solution:

2) Stamina:
augus mentioned that we need an exponential algorithm to decrease player performance late in games. I completely agree ofc but I believe that the current algorithm is already exponential to begin with. The trouble is that it doesn't work hard enough for players with high endurance and even if it did - there's still the issue of 7+ stamina players staying on the floor for the whole game duration despite the coach instructions.

One thing that comes to mind (and it seems like a very easy fix) is to make stamina work "out of 20", instead of "out of 10" but not let us be able to train it past 10 (as it is now). This way we will effectively not be able to have stamina higher than the current levels of 5. That will in turn decrease players' performance late in games further and more importantly let the subs play more minutes without the need of touching the spaghetti code of the engine itself.

It is very important imo that those two measures are taken together in order to achieve the desired effects. The GS part is easy to test offline and the stamina part can be tested in PL games and scrimmages without causing any trouble.

One last thing - I wrote all this off of one foot and haven't really thought it through, so there could be some aspects I'm missing. Please don't crucify me if so!

This is a good point.
NBA salary cap doubles from $63,065,000 in 2014-15 to $112,414,000 in 2021-22 because they signed a big TV contact with ESPN.

However, the team income keeps the same when the average salary of players increases due to GYM and youth trainer.
Maybe an increase in the TV contracts might be helpful to catch the salary inflation of average players during their prime?

Raising TV contracts in each division to combat salary inflation sounds like a feasible option.

Also, in contrast to this, regarding what Check had mentioned: lowering or capping salaries would help the transfer-list value of players that have been negatively affected by salary inflation.

I said this before, but again this is a serious issue so I'll say this once more, a 144 TSP NT player, center, age 33, should not be selling for 300k on the TL. You mean to tell me this player is on the Chinese NT, a top power in terms of national competition; however, he isn't worth more than 300k? Image Ronaldo or Messi going for such a discounted price.

As was the case for Ronaldo at Juventus, despite old age, an elite player like that should raise your merchandise enough to practically pay for his own salary.

If you are curious, just google the profit Juventus made on 'CR7' jersey sales in the first week or so; the value from merchandise sales was worth Ronaldo's ridiculous transfer fee and weekly salary.

The previous NT Buzzerbeater player I had mentioned above had a salary of 230k+, which is why he sold for so low (age obviously played a factor despite the player being in his prime). Only the upper echelon of managers could afford to pay such a monstrous salary on a weekly basis, and even so, this manager very will might be operating at a loss in weekly revenue after making a such an acquisition, which with all things considered seems objectively unfair.

Boosting merchandise bonuses for certain players could be a solution along with other viable options listed by managers mentioned in this post.

The 5-6 player rotation stradegy is primarily an economic issue. Tampering with stamina/injury is not the best solution. Fixing salary inflation, so teams can afford to pay more than 5-6 players, and implementing an 8-man lineup rule are better solutions.