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Very interesting post Spaz. I liked it very much. You are absolutely correct.

Let me be one more to congratulate you on an excellent post. You have really captured an esence of all the negative issues in few sentences, I really hope that someone from BB staff will read this and think for a few seconds about it. Well done

Thank you all for you support, I really did not expect it as all that filled my mind at the time I wrote that was dismay at one of my favourite sim games going down what I thought was the wrong path.

BB needs to pull itself away from HT's flawed design and come good with it's own that centers around the sport and on-court happenings instead of being more and more economic. I know the BBs want a new staff system that is exciting for us and we appreciate the effort, we really do. But try to come up with a system that doesn't impact the economy. Try to keep changes which impact the economic system to a minimum.

I seriously hope the BB will hear our voices. I am not complaining because each change hurts my team financially, I can take it. I can plan for it. I am bringing up my concern for the implemented changes which diverts the game's purpose from a sports sim into an economic sim of a basketball club. My concerns are posted in the middle of a long thread, and if a BB reads this far down I can appreciate them going the extra mile to take the fans view into account.

I'm not afraid of my club going under, I am afraid where this game is headed. And where it is headed isn't pretty.

As long as there is any sort of market in the game, it is inevitable that the success of teams will depend on how they manage their finances. This is directly proportional to the amount of teams in the game, and the 'age' of teams -- and is not necessarily conditional on game changes such as the staff.

I am yet to see how this issue can be eliminated without turning it into a clone of (http://www.mobygames.com/game/lakers-vs-celtics-and-the-n...).

I'm quite aware that this game is a manager game, and like any other game it involves financial aspect of the basketball itself, and me, also, am not afraid for my team, but as you said it, those peripheral things are moving into the first plan, and basketball tactics and simulation are losing importance. For example, I would like to see some improvements in deepness of tactics, like some player individual tasks, last quarter specialized tactics, more training options (especially for SF position) and something like that. Some times ago, in our national forum we had a discussion about loving or not loving basketball as a real game, and there was a lot of users that said that they don't even like basketball, but they said that this is really not important for playing BB, I was a little bit piss off with those statements, but now I can see that water is, more or less, flowing in their direction. From my opinion full success of a game would be to get those guys to get interest for game itself and right way for sure isn't how your team stands financially.

I'm really, really, big basketball fan, and as 34-year old basketball is still a big part of my life, too big if you ask my wife, so conclusion would be, BBs please keep the game alive in all pure basketball colors

Don't get me wrong, BB is still a great game, definitely best on the market, and I won't stop playing it, just wanted to express my current opinion.



Last edited by LA-Kasie K. at 10/13/2008 2:45:21 PM

Looks like the global economic worries have hit BB

well i agree with your vision of the game, but i see you were here in season 3. at the time DT was running wild and the economy-driven strategy was much stronger than training
i think now it's much better than then, but of course having a new team in a new game is going to provide more fun... it's inevitabile

Last edited by mark_lenders at 10/13/2008 4:44:49 PM

Add me to the list of people who like the "idea" of the new system (especially introducing staffs with various specialties), but totally dislike the implementation. Most of the criticisms of it in this thread have been spot-on, and the defenses/responses given by the GM's/BB's have been pretty hollow.

It's both unrealistic and stupid that staff salaries go up while staff performance remains the same. All that does is leave a player with two choices: continue to pay higher and higher salaries for ZERO increase in performance, or else fire your current coach and pay ridiculous auction fees for staff that gives you zero increase in performance. LOL what a choice. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I signed up in this game because I was interested in basketball. I don't have much interest in micro-managing weekly fluctuations in staff salaries. Ugh. Why would anyone think this is interesting?!? Fun? Honestly (really, I mean this), do the creators of this game expect that we are supposed to find this fun? That we're going to sign on each day going, "Wow, my doctor and my trainer are now demanding ridiculously overinflated salaries, hey you know what, I bet it would be a blast if I went to the staff auction and poured through fifteen pages of staff listings to try to find a staff member who might be able to provide me with the same level of performance, without paying an overpriced salary or a ridiculous auction fee!!!"

I also want to say that this seems like development time that was poorly invested. As others have pointed out, the actual level of *basketball* strategy in this game is pretty minimal. Pathetically minimal, actually. There are, what, about a half dozen offensive tactics options, and maybe an equal number of defensive ones. That's it. I would think the game would benefit by GREATLY expanding the BASKETBALL part of the game, rather than introducing tedium and frustration in forcing players to attempt to constantly monitor dozens of staff member listings so that they can figure out if it's worth it to auction $300k in order to grab a lvl 3 trainer asking $9k a week versus staying with their current lvl 3 trainer who's asking $11.5k a week, and breaking down the rate of salary increase for each based on their current salary and thus calculating the exact optimal time to make a staff chance based on percentage salary increases per week versus current market fluctuations in auction values for staff members of various levels.

Bleh. No thank you.

And just so the devs don't think I'm just whining without contributing anything positive, here are some of the basketball strategy things that could be added:

* a momentum system in-game (influenced, perhaps, by home court advantage)
* a "hot hand" system where players who make several good plays in a row get a temporary boost (and also, tactical settings for how much to "force" the ball to a player with a hot hand)
* special 4th quarter strategies when up/down by a little/lot
* implementation of "big plays" (alley-oop dunks, etc.), perhaps linked to the aforementioned momentum system
* implementation of actual coaches (of all staff, this would be the only one truly interesting) who have differing strengths/weaknesses (in-game strategy, recruiting, team motivation, end-of-game scenarios, etc.)
* implementation of player "special abilities" or "special traits" (similar to Hattrick's "Specialities" like Quick, Powerful, Unpredicatable, etc.)
* some meaningful implementation of team chemistry

Those are just a few things I could think of off the top of my head. Any of which, IMO, make the game a lot more interesting than paying more and more money each week just to keep the same crappy staff members I already have, all of whom obviously must be mentally retarded since they never get one bit better at the job they do, no matter how long they do it.

a "hot hand" system where players who make several good plays in a row get a temporary boost

Already implemented.

But not to the degree that when setting tactics for a game, I can't *choose* how much my other players force (or don't force) the ball into the hands of the guy with the hot hand. I can't adjust telling them to pass up an open shot (they would normally take) in order to get the ball to that other guy.

So while the basic mechanic might be in the game, it doesn't "add" anything at all to me as a player...it doesn't add any complexity or any strategy to the choices I need to make. THAT's my point. That this game as it stands now essentially forces us to spend a lot of time thinking about things *other* than basketball strategy, and almost no time thinking about actual basketball tactics.

Is your opponent's strength his inside game? Then you have one (maybe two) choices for your D. Is his strength his outside game? Then you have one (maybe two) choices for your D. Same thing is true when you have the ball. That's all there is to the "strategy" of this game, at least when it comes to basketball. The entire rest of this game is a simulation of stock-market-like economics of buying, training, & reselling players (and, now, staff--at least the buying part).

Give us more basketball. Please.

Last edited by J-Pop at 10/14/2008 1:05:20 AM