BuzzerBeater Forums

After reading the mid-season announcement, I have some questions. (And by the way, it is strange that there is no discussion in BB Global (English) forum.)

1. Top league teams won't be affected, of course.
2. Most human teams will change their current league and move laterally to new leagues of the same division - but now they will play mostly human opponents!

"Top league teams" and "Most human teams" confuse me. Does team consolidation apply only on the last (highest number) division occupied by human teams?

3. To offset possible losses of income, we will match the promotion awards for all promoted teams - no matter whether they are playoff winners or just promoted due to available empty slots!

What if the team is not in the last (highest number) division occupied by human teams and is promoted due to available empty slots?

It will get the same promotion boost as if it won a championship.
.

Starting when will this apply? Next season?

It will apply to all low (last) divisions, including Utopia?

Last edited by deanswer at 6/8/2022 9:37:10 AM

First official NT game is several days after the draft. So a NT could save any bot draftee anyway without being affected. Again, that would be the bigger nations that would benefit from this since they would have more players to save and more players worthy to pay salary x100 for potential MVP/HOF/Legendary when micronations could maybe save potential 8/9 for the same price.

We don't even know yet if there would be that many lost players to consolidation. And that change is made to motivate users to stay in BB by playing against more humans, thus increasing the number of teams, and thus increasing the number of draftees in the end.

NT and drafting are not working that way. An NT team manager can pick players from an inactive manager who is going to be botified soon, but it cannot select a player who is in a bot team from the beginning. A rookie drafted by a bot team is lost forever.

From the BB's side, you can actually collect the data and have a very accurate estimate of how many rookies will be lost according to the consolidation. Just go through all the draft pages from all bottom leagues in a country, and see how many among the top prospects are still in a human team. I might try to see what I can do with BBAPI this weekend.

(P.S. Sorry to GM-Perpete for the misunderstanding. The discussion went on quite a bite and I did not read every post...)

Last edited by Feizai Passing by at 6/8/2022 10:54:53 AM

Thank you Marin! I never expected a BB will reply. Achievement unlocked!

When playing an opponent, a meaningful part of the attendance is affected by the fans of that opponent - so it makes sense that playing human teams brings a higher attendance (and income) than playing bot teams. This difference, over time, might even grow if we determine that there is indeed a loss of income (on average).

Yes, it makes much more sense now, if not only the league champ bonus but also the "promotion aura" on the fan base is applied to the newly promoted teams.

This is true, but the effect might be overestimated. We might think of a way to offset this, I like the idea of keeping 4-6 bot teams per league.
Currently, in most bot-filled leagues, many top talents are lost to bots anyway, so I don't think the difference will be that big. I cannot estimate precisely though, we might need to just wait and see on this one, and apply changes on the fly if the draft pool is severely guttered - something I very much doubt.

Maybe there is some data you can collect from the BB side in order to estimate the discrepancy. Collect all the draft data from the bottom league, and see how many of them are currently in a human-controlled team right now.

I might try playing with BBAPI recently and see what I can do, but for a country of 100-150 players, I am anticipating ~20% loss on the high-end rookies coming from the bottom league. As a very rough estimation, if each league gives 0.5 18y HoF and 1 18y MVP on average, that means ~2.4 18y HoF and ~4.8 18y MVP loss. This is quite consistent to @atsii's estimation in this thread (314977.24).

That being said, it is great that BBs are willing to put bot-drafted rookies on the transfer market in case things go wrong. The "deus ex machina" solution is not optimal, but it should work.

3. Important updates like this should be announced at least a season before the rollout.

I agree with this too. There were some factors that made us decide to push this though. Things that may or may not happen in the short term, so we'd rather not elaborate yet.

Thank you. I understand that BB has a timeline for releasing the APP and some change in the dynamics is necessary. Maybe the team consolidation will cause some loss on my side, and maybe not, but I can understand.

Please keep up the work and the communications!

What if the team is not in the last (highest number) division occupied by human teams and is promoted due to available empty slots?

It will get the same promotion boost as if it won a championship.

So for this case, it is not related to offsetting possible losses of income caused by consolidation. Then why BB want to change it?

I know that.

I was reacting to someone suggesting that NT coach could save anyone in bot team. A suggestion I strongly disagree with.

I was just trying to find a way to mitigate the loss of draftees that this change might cause