BuzzerBeater Forums

I have the same problem as you have. Most games I start badly and end up winning...

I think crazyeye could be right with point 2 and point 3 could be possible too...

However, (noone knows what hidden sub skills players have so this is pure speculation), I think there might be a hidden sub skill that makes a player a slow starter. When you have a few in your team, this could hurt you quite badly...

I would go with crazyeye's possibility 1.

I have the feeling that in BB first (and maybe third) quarters are particularly random, and the engine tends to compensate for this in later quarters, if this is necessary to bring the game back to the expected tendency.

A naive example is in fouls. More than once I've had my team enter the second quarter with no fouls, and then suddeny my PG (or whatever) makes 3 fouls in 30 seconds. It's as if the engine "realises" too late that you have too few fouls and tries to adjust the stats immediately.

It might be just my imagination, but I have seen too many games dominated by a team after losing the first quarter.

Thank you all for the responses.
Jon

It might be just my imagination, but I have seen too many games dominated by a team after losing the first quarter.

If you believe this is the case. Than how can you say the first quarter is random. I am not trying to be a smart ass or to start an arguement, but arent you contradicting yourself by saying 1st and perhaps 3rd quarters are random but in the same post you say you see often a team dominate the rest off the game "often" after they have lost the 1st quarter. That doesnt make it random than does it?

I have lost many games in the 1st quarter and recovered or not recovered from it. Mostly recovered. I dont think this is random. I wonder whether a low stamina is being calculated more evenly over the whole match instead more towards the end off the game? I wouldnt say a player would be quickly tired in the 1st quarter, even if they play many minutes...

I've never used the word "often".
It's not like: "oh my god no, I've won the first quarter, now I'm going to be dominated for the rest of the match!". Not at all. I'm simply saying that this happens more often than you'd expect in real world.

I'll try to be more specific. I don't think that the engine simulates any single play in the game, independently from the others. It would be too hard to generate vaguely predictable results in this way; I've seen many sports simulations on the market and I'm quite sure none of them works this way.

I think that the engine somehow decides how the game will end up right at the beginning. Can't say exactly what this means: maybe all the stats for each player are calculated, but that's unlikely, maybe some "trends" are calculated, along with an approximate final score, or whatever.
After that, the engine lets the game flow freely, and randomness plays a relatively big part. At some point, a check is made for consistency: if the game is drifting too far from the expected trend, the engine forces a correction.

That's it. I may be completely wrong of course, but I wouldn't care too much if a pattern seems to appear in a team's score, regardless of who's on the court and who they're playing against. I mean, better players will most probably have a better +/-, a higher stamina will surely let them perform better late in the game and so on, but in the end, the engine structure also plays its part.