BuzzerBeater Forums

Yes, I'd prefer the promotion and demotion policies stay the same in our main leagues.

Bonus prizes should be adjusted if twice as many teams promote. I think the Utopia system works just fine (and due to injuries I started the season 0-8...), but given the current (higher) cash prizes for promotion, the yo-yo strategy, as it has been labelled by some Italian managers, will become a lot more profitable: end 5th (so get decent gates all season) to 8th, relegate or lose the relegation battle on purpose, go for the top record in D2 or win the finals, promote and get both the cash prize and the promotion bonus. Rinse and repeat. Especially in smaller nations this is very easy to do.

I think we're at a point where D1 salary is decreasing on average and D2 vs D1 teams don't carry a $200k-300k difference in salary on average. So there is less and less of a case for handing a lot of free cash to promoting teams, especially if they double in number.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 10/27/2016 5:33:11 AM

Bonus prizes should be adjusted if twice as many teams promote.

I hope the people making the decisions are taking this into account. Utopia is responsible for the sick inflation, if we expand the promotion system across all countries I expect players to cost 10mil+.

Happy times for newbies.

Many teams can cruise pretty much on auto pilot even in top leagues season after season.

...and many teams tank for last place and picks, don't they? Cruising is not the issue. The main message should be that shuffling is good, both vertical and horizontal, it keeps the game fresh. However, be careful what you wish for because tanking will also become more profitable, but I'm sure you understand that.

Also the main issue with the Utopia system is that if I finish with on of the top records in my league level I will promote via bot promotion. There are 2 problems with such system in country leagues (on top of the yo-yo strategy some people loathe):
1) Leagues with more bots will have it a lot easier to bot promote. In Utopia the bot promotion tiebreakers were a) position in conference, b) record, c) point differential. This means you can have 3 teams promoting from the same league (maybe the only 3 human managers, while other leagues with 15 or 16 human managers only get 1 promotion)
2) Tanking will increase. If you fall behind in the standings, you might as well fold it as even crawling back to 7th will not give you a chance to stay up anymore. I started 0-8 and was 4 games back from 6th place in Utopia. Most people would just give up.

So perhaps you should think of making changes in the way the playoffs work as well.
1) Make a single ranking for teams 1-4 in both conferences (1 seed and 2 seed might be from the same conference). 1 plays 8, 2 plays 7 etc, you know the drill (but with removed conference playoffs). This will make it more interesting if the 2 conferences are unbalanced (and often, especially at lower levels, they are).
2) Make a single ranking for teams 5-8 in both conferences. Here you go with playouts. You win a series you stay up you lose and go down. Added benefit: tanking teams pay salary at least an extra week.

Ideally it would be better to have a qualification series for people ending 7th and bot promotion teams. Unfortunately that can't happen due to scheduling issues.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 10/27/2016 6:11:06 AM

Anyway in the midesason news post there's a big missing part:
Where are spent the donation funds right now, how much there's to spend yet right now and what are the plans to advertise the game?
Without a clear policy about that I doubt there will be any future for the collection.

I guess this is clearly related with the first part of the news.
Some campaigns have been made and you could see that the number of users has increased at a good rate, but unfortunately, they are users who are attracted by the campaign but don't continue playing.
From my point of view, it's very important to improve the first impression new users have when they come to BB. If we can keep them interested time enough, there will be more chances that they like the game and continue with their teams. So for me, it's a first step before a new big campaign is released.

Last edited by Foto at 10/27/2016 11:13:07 AM

I totally agree with you. Personally I convinced 2 friends of joining BB and their teams are already bots again. One of them even really likes manager style games and loves basketball, so the only reason he stopped logging in was clearly that it failed to get his interest.

Anyway in the midesason news post there's a big missing part:
Where are spent the donation funds right now, how much there's to spend yet right now and what are the plans to advertise the game?
Without a clear policy about that I doubt there will be any future for the collection.

I guess this is clearly related with the first part of the news.
Some campaigns have been made and you could see that the number of users has increase at a good rate, but unfortunately, they are users who are attracted by the campaign but don't continue playing.
From my point of view, it's very important to improve the first impression new users have when they come to BB. If we can keep them interested time enough, there will be more chances that they like the game and continue with their teams. So for me, it's a first step before a new big campaign is released.

The easiest way to keep new users interested is to stop placing them in leagues in which they can't compete. I just spent about eight seasons in Div.IV before promoting back to Div.III this season. Every season in IV, three or four teams would go bot and be replaced by scrub teams. Every one of those scrub teams would then get destroyed by 50, 80, 100 points nearly every game by teams whose owners have been playing BB for 10, 20 or more seasons. It's no wonder that many of those new owners didn't log in after a week or two of butt-whoopins' with no chance to compete, let alone win.

You want to keep new owners around longer? Put all the new users in each country's lowest division playing against other new users who also have scrub teams and are just learning the game.