BuzzerBeater Forums

Just found this thread.

BB

Pros

Match Viewer - There's really nothing like this in any other management game I've played. It's really quite enjoyable to find yourself yelling at the screen to tell your PG to pass the rock or your SF to drive the lane.

Training - The quick pace of training ensures you're not waiting 12 weeks or some ridiculous amount of time for a pop on your star player, and the fact that everything (save FT and Stamina) trains more than one skill is genius.

Match Frequency - 2-3 competitive games per week (4 if you include PL) is better than having 1-2.

Player Faces for Non-supporters - no alien-like shadows with eyeballs is a definite plus.


Cons

Player Potentials - Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's already something in place to limit how high a player is trained, it's called his salary. Besides, open-ended games are more fun.

Transfer Search - in HT, players have 8 skills, need 4 at most, and you can search for 4 skills. In BB, players have 12 skills, need 4 at the very least, and you can search for 4. And no search option for experience is crap.

SF Training - No single-position SF training options, and some of the Wingmen trainings are so slow that they're useless.

Hidden Traits - if a player is physical, why not tell me? Better yet, why not make it his specialty and tell me everything it does?

Quick Timeouts - I'll probably be timed out while typing this, so I'll need to copy it, hit send, log in again, open up the forum again, reply to Josef Ka again, change the reply to Everybody, paste, and hit send again. (yep, just checked in another tab, and I've been timed out)

Staff System - Steaming turd. Buy a doctor for $1000, replace him for $1000 in 20 weeks when his salary is too high. Buy a PR guy for a much larger sum, replace him in 15-20 weeks for another larger sum. Scour the staff market for a decently-priced trainer for ten weeks, give up, settle for one a level or two lower just because you can't be bothered with it anymore; repeat next season.

Draft - Random crapshoot.
SCOUT: Hey coach, I just watched this kid play, but I have no idea how tall he is or how old he is, but if I had to rate him, I'd give him 1 out of 5 stars. Here's the boxscore from the match I watched.
COACH: Don't scout that kid again, he's a pile of dung.
SCOUT: I scouted that kid you told me not to again, and I still don't know how tall he is, even though I've watched him play twice, but I now know he's 19 and I think he's got 2-star potential, and I've given him an F grade. You were right, he is a pile of dung.


HT

Pros

Large Userbase - Great community (particularly in the USA) keeps the forums interesting, over 1M matches/week means a great deal of data can be collected in a short time and changes to the match engine/training/attendance/etc can be quickly figured out with some certainty. Also, millions of players means you can usually find what you're looking for when you need it.

Mobile Friendly - nearly all features (the one exception being the new match orders interface) are easily to access via mobile devices, no links hidden in crappy drop-down menus, and matches can be watched live on phones.

Youth - YS or YA, your team gets a new player every week, rather than three pieces of crap at the end of the season.

Match Ratings - Far more meaningful than in BB, and don't require you to read all match reports to scout an opponent.

Forums - well done.


Cons

Training Speed - really slow, particularly for defenders

Boring - particularly for newer users, there's nothing to do but train and lose for the first RL year or so.

Useless Specialties - Technical defender? Quick IM? Powerful FW?

I know these are not your quotes Darykjozef...but

Cons

Player Potentials - Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's already something in place to limit how high a player is trained, it's called his salary. Besides, open-ended games are more fun.

Disagree strongly with Player Potential. A starter can be ~25k. Thats good enough to play bench minutes in NBBA. ~50% of players can be trained well enough to play top level in some capacity. This mimics real life more closely than anyone who receives correct training at 18 can be a Hall of Famer.

Also, salary DOES NOT limit how high a player is trained. It simply limits how far he is trained until he is sold. I like the fact that I can train a player I drafted/bought to simply be a starter and not have to sell him at a certain point because of opportunity cost. It also makes those rare all-time great players closely watched by the community and awesome to own.

I would consider Potential as a Pro over Hattrick, which I played for a year on two separate occasions but became bored with...on two separate occasions.

Also, you can't call the BB draft a crapshoot in comparison to the Hattrick YA.

You're free to disagree, and I appreciate you adding your opinion in contrast to mine. But I'm going to respond.

Cons

Player Potentials - Stupid, stupid, stupid. There's already something in place to limit how high a player is trained, it's called his salary. Besides, open-ended games are more fun.

Disagree strongly with Player Potential. A starter can be ~25k. Thats good enough to play bench minutes in NBBA. ~50% of players can be trained well enough to play top level in some capacity. This mimics real life more closely than anyone who receives correct training at 18 can be a Hall of Famer.

If I wanted something that mimiced real life, I'd play NBA Fantasy basketball or something. The players aren't playing this game, I am. I should be able to train a player however I like, without the game itself slowing certain players down before others due to nothing else but a fake skill that was added two or three seasons after I started playing BB.

The part I underlined rewards me, the guy playing this game, not the fake skill the kid had at the moment he was created in the draft.

The other problem I have with potential is that it creates value on players who otherwise would not have any. Would you buy a 6'7" player who was mediocre or inept in all skills? Probably not. Now, would you buy a 6'7" player who was mediocre or inept in all skills and had HOF potential? I know I'd give a second thought to the latter one.

Also, salary DOES NOT limit how high a player is trained. It simply limits how far he is trained until he is sold. I like the fact that I can train a player I drafted/bought to simply be a starter and not have to sell him at a certain point because of opportunity cost. It also makes those rare all-time great players closely watched by the community and awesome to own.

To some extent, you're right here, because most managers aren't very smart with training in relation to its effect on salary, and U21 teams make a habit of asking managers to create high-salaried young beasts to remain competitive. You can actually train a player for many, many seasons without his salary becoming a burden. But allow me to address the underlined bit:

What happens to him after he is sold? If you're right, and salary only limits the amount of training before a player is sold (to another team who continues to train him, because his salary DOES NOT limit how high he is trained), then he'll continue to be trained and sold again and again until some other reason for not training him arises (such as he becomes too old, perhaps). I disagree. I think salary definitely limits how highly a player is trained, because players do not fall off the face of the earth just because you sell them.

I would consider Potential as a Pro over Hattrick, which I played for a year on two separate occasions but became bored with...on two separate occasions.

You're free to do so, but every player in HT has the potential to be trained up to divine, yet there are fewer and fewer divine players all the time. I wonder why that is?

Also, you can't call the BB draft a crapshoot in comparison to the Hattrick YA.

I didn't; I said the YA/YS gives you a new player every week. A lot of them are crap, too, sure. But in BB, you wait all season long, focus on one or two players you might actually like in the crapshoot, and hope the other 12 or 13 teams that pick before you in the draft don't scoop those guys up. And then, when you actually see the players, you get to find out that the 5* PG is 6'11".

(It makes a big difference when you're not drafting against bots and inactive managers.)


edit: tightened up a sentence so it meant what I meant it to mean.

Last edited by darykjozef at 5/13/2010 8:43:36 PM

I like potential...it always seemed odd that any player could be made into a divine. I'd like it even better if potential was somewhat separate for each skill.

I think everybody agrees, the draft needs to change/improve etc. I think perhaps a rolling scouting sort of process, might make it a more interesting proposition.

I'm gonna break this up because you've made some interesting points I want to address one at a time. I'm not trying to take you out of context.

I like potential...it always seemed odd that any player could be made into a divine.

Just because you can train a player to a certain skill level doesn't make it a good idea. A quick search of the TL brings up a few players with legendary rebounding and nothing else worthwhile, and there's even a 21yo kid with colossal JS who only has two other skills above average.

I think I'd be okay with potential if (and this will never happen, for good reasons**) once he was capped you could "downgrade" some of his skills so he could be trained higher in other skills without taking an eternity to get there. Or if there was some sort of warning that a player was nearing his cap before you started wasting training minutes for a few weeks to find out that he was already there. Which brings me to:

I'd like it even better if potential was somewhat separate for each skill.

I'd only go for this if there was some sort of status bar on his player page that started changing colors when you were closing in on the cap. How frustrating would it be if the 5'11" PG was capped at respectable handling, yet had a massive end cap on something like inside defense?

I think everybody agrees, the draft needs to change/improve etc. I think perhaps a rolling scouting sort of process, might make it a more interesting proposition.

I wouldn't mind having some sort of interface where I could talk to my scouts every week. I'm interested in you explaining your "rolling scouting" a bit more.


**-the good reason that immediately occurs to me is that if it were possible to downgrade a player's skill, most managers would do it between their last competitive game and the salary update.

I'd only go for this if there was some sort of status bar on his player page that started changing colors when you were closing in on the cap. How frustrating would it be if the 5'11" PG was capped at respectable handling, yet had a massive end cap on something like inside defense?

What an interesting statement. I always thought of potential as related solely to salary, and that the particular mixture of skills a player had was at our (the coach's) discretion, as long as the salary cap (as vague as that might be) was not broken. You seem to suggest that a player has inherent limits that at best may slow down training or presumably at worst never be attained. Is this accurate?

I'd only go for this if there was some sort of status bar on his player page that started changing colors when you were closing in on the cap. How frustrating would it be if the 5'11" PG was capped at respectable handling, yet had a massive end cap on something like inside defense?

What an interesting statement. I always thought of potential as related solely to salary, and that the particular mixture of skills a player had was at our (the coach's) discretion, as long as the salary cap (as vague as that might be) was not broken. You seem to suggest that a player has inherent limits that at best may slow down training or presumably at worst never be attained. Is this accurate?

I my statement was in reply to Steve's idea of having caps on particular skills, as opposed to overall skill. This is not currently the case, no.

While caps are somewhat related to salary, some skills are cheaper than others, and you'll find that more well-rounded players will cap out sooner salary-wise than for example a C with only RB IS ID and SB and all other skills in the atrocious-awful range. (I hope that sentence makes sense.)

I'm not quite sure how I even found out about BuzzerBeater. I think I clicked an ad somewhere but I don't remember where. Anyway. So I've been playing Hattrick for about a month now, even though I have been aware of it for a while and I think I may have played years ago. I've been playing BuzzerBeater for a little over a week now and I have to say, ever since signing up, I've been logging into Hattrick less frequently. Perhaps BB has more appeal to me because it's a sport I have more knowledge of, having grown up watching basketball. Short of the World Cup every 4 years, the occasional EPL match, and the once-in-a-blue-moon MLS game, I really haven't been watching soccer all that much, so while I understand the game for the most part, there are intricacies that I'm sure I'm missing.

The biggest element of BB that I enjoy would have to be live games. Sure, it's text driven just like HT, but there's something about the scoreboard and the basketball court with missed/made shots, and just the general pace of the action that keeps me glued to my monitor (live chat is a big plus too). HT matches are for the most part dull. Often times you have to wait minutes for the text to even update because apparently nothing exciting happened worth mentioning.

One of the biggest drawbacks in HT, at least for me, is the skill dependency of players, or rather the lack thereof. There is generally 1 skill that is needed and secondaries that help, but that game favors more specialized training, whereas this game seems to favor more well-rounded players. A lot more skills get factored into a player's performance in this game, or at least that's the impression I get. I also like potential. Not every player was destined for greatness. Some can be really good. Some can be decent enough to contribute, and some can be stars with a hall of fame career. I simply love that how and what I train my player in will be affected by how much he can learn. It adds another layer of management to the game. And let's face it, if we're playing BB, we're all pseudo General Mangers at heart. If all we cared about was putting together the most talented, already fully trained team, we'd be playing Fantasy Basketball instead.

P.S. I read some people complain about not being able to reply to all. Not sure if you're aware, but you can select "Everybody" from the drop down list when you hit reply.

Last edited by ShootingStars at 5/21/2010 5:03:32 PM

Having to train multiple skills makes bb a lot more fun than hattrick. For hattrick you set your training and you leave it there for around 2 seasons minimum only adjusting amount of training used for stamina. Also what is winger? there isnt really a winger skill in real life. The specialties in hattrick should be things you can train that you need for all positions. For example quickness, heading, power. If those were things you could train in hattrick and you needed to train to go along with a players primary skill, then it would rival buzzerbeater. Hattrick also has a chat on the matchviewer, or maybe they used to and got rid of it but i remember you could only talk if the person you were playing was there too, there wasnt a spot to talk to players in your league or players in usa that are on.

I agree, a few upgrades to the whole draft process could really push this game into greatness. The fact that you unload cash at a scouting pool and get no feedback for months is a little disturbing. I would find it incredibly entertaining if your draft class was released to you at the beginning of the season. Of course upon release, all you can see is player 1 through 48 and that's it. As each week goes by, depending on the amount of capital invested in the scouting, more information appears on your draft list. You would then be able to direct your scouting department to revisit certain guys and never see others again. Total personalization of your draft class and target areas without compromising the integrity of the draft.

Exactly, what if you could use you scouting pts each week to actually scout players and get info/box score as you direct them.

I also think the draft pool needs to be expanded, so that people at the top of the division don't have zero chance of getting decent players.