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Hi Marin

Lots of people are asking about specific issues but I'd just like to know what the top priorities are for BB in the next few seasons?

are there any thoughts about allowing us to indicate approval of a BB's post only more than once a day with those little basketball symbols?

No.

1. For a various number of reasons, not needed to be analyzed here, prices in TL have gone way up. Are there into consideration any means to relieve economy? For example, lowering the salary limits of Free Agents? Or adding more FA due to their total skill points and not salary (a lot of good players are lost because they are too cheap for their true value). I think one of the reasons new players leave is because with 300.000$ (+ 4x50.000) they cannot buy any worthwhile and cheap player.

2. Do you feel that GS training is overpowered? Do you have any plans to further tweak its power, remove it or limit its use to a fixed amount every season? Do you feel that GS training has something to do with the lack of well-trained players (and therefore with the bug prices in TL)?

3. Are there any thoughts about training whatsoever? Don't you feel that training speed is a little too low to keep most of the managers hooked?

4. Any plans to refresh site's appearance? Or ditch flash for GE to something more modern and easier to repair?

1. Lowering the salary limits has been discussed by us but we decided against it because we actually like the rise in prices. If it goes out of hand, we will intervene in the FA limits. And yes, we still believe salary to be a fitting measure of a players worth in this case. New users can buy a couple of nice trainees with that money. Problem is that everyone wants to train MVPs and up. That's just unrealistic.

2. GS training effect was reduced last season, but if needed, we will reduce it even more. How much and when is to be decided. At the moment, the situation on the transfer list is under control and the rise of player values is a good thing (they were very much undervalued so far, therefore the incentive to train was low). There is no lack of well-trained players due to GS training, since GS training was used by a small percentage of teams. Actually, I personally think there is no lack of well trained players at all, but I'll agree to disagree.

3. Training is exactly where it should be, with it's pace being just right too. Training was never meant to be easy nor quick, it is, like most of the things here, a challenge. In a strategy game like this, successful managers need to have skill, determination and patience for long term planning and performance. To some, this is exactly what keeps them hooked.

4. We had some ideas over the years but a complete visual rehaul would probably take too much of our resources. In a text based strategy game, we don't feel graphics are top priority (even though I agree they could be updated). We would ditch flash in a second if we could do it easily. Again, it is too big a project to do manually, but eventually a converter to HTML5 might do the job.

Lots of people are asking about specific issues but I'd just like to know what the top priorities are for BB in the next few seasons?

A valid and simple question with a possibly very controversial answer If I give you my TO-DO list, are you going to hold it against me if I don't do something from it on time? Or even worse; if we decide against doing something after I listed it here, are you going to get mad and say "You promised!" ? Circumstances can change and therefore, I beg you, don't take the items of this list as promises. But, since I clearly have some self destructive tendencies, I'm going to (partially) release it. It is not complete (nor as specific as I keep it) because some things I cannot/don't want to list here. The items are not sorted in any particular order.

Anyway, here they are:
- implement league level (human filled / bot filled) choice for new managers
- fan survey update
- deal with inside based strategy dominance
- BB app:
- think of/decide on a way of financing/developing it (crowd sourcing? open source?)
- prepare a special developers API for it (so we can use outside developers without giving them direct access to the db)
- boost social media presence

Now please, since it's late and I'm tired, don't make me regret this. And again, I'm aware that there are a lot more issues that need tackling but remember that this is an incomplete list of priorities.

Last edited by BB-Marin at 1/28/2015 7:04:15 PM

Great thread. Thanks so much!

I'm not the kind of guy that would do that, just good to hear the things that you are looking to change in the next few seasons, even if they don't happen they all look great..

There are others that might hold it against you but I think most rational people understand that there are massive limitations to what can be done and how long these things can take.

Cheers for the honest answer.

Well, first, I want to thank you (BB's, and all the staff) for this post and for give us a big and great game experience. Personally, I think that the World Cup is too boring for this kind of tournament. I'm thinking in k.o. rounds, but this isn't the suggestion forum. Have you think any time, change the World Cup?

Do you think that another payment way can be introduced for southamerican community?

So first of all I have to thank Marin and all of the BB's for making such a fun manager game that I've enjoyed for these past ten and a half seasons. I would however be lying if I said that this game is perfect, and whilst it does a lot of things right, I feel that the salary formula might be a bit off.

My main concerns is that Jump Shot is far too expensive in the SF salary formula, whilst Inside Shot is very cheap for PG/SG/SF's. And Outside Defence is also a relatively cheap skill compared to it's usefulness. My theory is that it's these flaws that make it easier to build a team that plays inside tactics better than outside, and in general, makes three point shooting percentages in the game very low for a game that's trying to simulate professional basketball.

BB-Marin, have you ever considered making a major change (not just tweaking one skills effect) to the salary formula to try and correct some of these imbalanced formulas and make it easier to run a predominately outside shooting team? And if so, how easy or difficult do you think it would be to make and enforce the formula changes in practice?

When I was searching a top french player, I was competing against team which had a balance of +10, +20 and +50M in their transfert list. Once they recruit a top player at a decent price, they put him in the trade market again until they find someone ready to pay +20-50% of the price they brought it.

So I'm curious to know what your think about it. Will you take care of this or you consider it's acceptable ?

What is actually wrong here? Any team has the right to buy and sell players. Is it OK if they profit? Yes, if it's not daytrading. Especially if they receive additional training. Maybe I missed your point here, please explain if I did.

Hmm I though it was a well known problem, but as it should be a very low number of players. What looks wrong is these team had daytrading in the past and accumulated money. Then they evolved to continue to do profit with top players now. Of course I didn't check every players and I don't remember their ID so I can't give you clear example.

I just remember Le Saout because he was a U21 world champion player at the potential limit. Sold around 1 M at young age. And put on sale at 2 M at 25 years old ... but he was already at his limit ! 0.o

My point is these team are killing the hope of casual players team who can't follow every bid. I don't mind losing a bid but when I see the same player on sale some minute after, and usually for weeks, it's irritating. It's not daytrading as it takes weeks to find someone willing to pay the high price, but most of time, they aren't training the player either.

I guess you can check the history of brought players put on sale just after. If you add an history like that in your database. If you get my point, I'm still curious of what you thought about this.

#1 Would it be extremely difficult to do this (programming wise)
Week 1, no league game, CUP game on Saturday
Week 2~12 (11 weeks) 2 league games a week, 1 home game a week for everyone (I can show you how to schedule it if need be), Tue and Saturday games like right now. No 2 homes and no 2 aways in the same financial week. No 1 game weeks.
Week 13 quarters and semis
Week 14 FInals
rinse and repeat.

Additionally the allstar game probably best on a Sunday, allstar weekend. I don't really care about how or where the allstar game happens as do most of the users...or even if it happens....

#2
Are you looking at changing how the attendance works. Specifically less income for tanking/walkover teams and more for high-end teams that maybe lost their last game only....and maybe less for the #1 team and more for the #4 teams.

#3
Good work on making training a little better each of the last two seasons. Less of a question ~ Please consider improving it further as time goes on. Overall reception of the babysteps has been good correct?

#4
Please don't over compensate the tactics adjustments. Have you considered interfering with the vets in the market from users who have quit/are stuck in the LI era. Without tactical changes/GE changes, changing the actual market might improve the situation. When shopping for players, I think everyone will agree, its just easier to build inside because of what people have trained. High JR is nowhere near as common as high OD. This obviously HAS to have something to do with 3 pt %. Salary concerns are an issue, but changes you made to how much JR impacts salary have not been taken advantage of by many builders. So LI remains dominate.
Simplfied quetsion- Have you considered fixing the imbalance through the market/salary formula/training in addition to/instead of further GE changes.

As you can guess issues I really am concerned with are autobid, micronations and taxing profit versus transfer amount with no limit on the frequency of transfers ( the more activity the better for you advert income wise) But I do not even want you to waste space here addressing those issues since they ahve been talked to death and there is no hope ;)

#1. No it wouldn't. To even consider it is another thing.

#2. We had a interesting proposal here, which I don't mind sharing. Having less than 50% (or another arbitrary percentage, need to research for it) of your opponents points in a match would trigger "fan riots" in matches which earn attendance money (basically home league and PO matches). These "riots" would result in some property damage which would be taken out of the attendance income (again, a fixed percentage). As you see, the problem here is away matches. Maybe we could implement a fixed fine or something instead... I'm not sure yet, it's just an idea (and would punish teams tanking because of their cup matches). Also, it doesn't look at previous results, true, but the problem lies in the definition of a tanking team and how do we detect it. This is something I'm willing to get some suggestions about.

#3. Yes.

#4. Yeah, we are aware that the state of the market might have a bigger impact on the choice of users' tactics than actual players' impact in the GE. We've made some steps to tackle that; making JR cheaper was one thing, a small improvement in the balance between training types was another. Also, we are considering doing something on the 3pt% aspect too. The market is LI dominant, I agree, but it's hard to fix that quickly and without overcompensating. One idea is to exclude old players from free agency, with inside (or just taller) players being excluded sooner.

Training inside has always been a bit easier (2 skills less to worry about), but we always thought that their salary cost and small market value would discourage users from training them. We were only partially wrong.