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I'm glad you are making headway with shotblocking. But 3-2 becoming a premier shotblocking/inside attack stopping defense is a 100% complete horrific failure to simulate the game of basketball.

It has become alien-ball and has nothing to do with the real life game anymore.

Is this the point the simulation stops being realistic?

I want to say that it's my impression (based strictly on random recollections from my time pre-GM hat, since we get no extra inside knowledge as staff) that Marin has said that actually modifying the game engine itself may be beyond what he'll be able to do. I think making certain skills more effective by counting more for how things are calculated is possible (which I think the SB changes were), but revamping the zones themselves to represent a more accurate version of the zone may be impossible. I hope I'm just misremembering though.

The only thing I can think of is that pressure has to be reworked in how it relates to passes and drives on inside shots. OD needs to be removed from the equation. Its not longer OD/ID. OD seems to mean pass defence and ID seems to mean just about nothing aside an SB helper or something like that. OD should only apply to plays outside, including passes. ID should be the primary defense stat used for passes and drives inside, never OD like it seems to be so much now.

First of all, I think also the OD is to strong atm. In Season 10 when Charles remodeled it, he overpowered OD.
The thing about driving layups is that they start as an outside play and finish as an inside play in the GE. So OD has to be used for this action.
Than OD is used for everything outside the paint. Because of the 3 sec violation your players have to be outside the paint (most of the time) to receive the ball or to play a pass. So again OD is used because we are not inside the paint. From the piont "ID inside the paint, OD outside the paint" everything works well. But again OD is so strong that it influences everything to much.

In addition they need to address open shots missing more often than guarded ones. 1 OD defended shot should always be worse than an open 3 base % wise, even if the team pressure rating is 50000. Right now this isn't happening, I believe if they look close at their code they will see that the %s for open shots can be lower than the % is guarded shots...which is just wrong.

I think most of this is the fault of us users. From my analysis there are two main errors made by us: 1) to low passing and 2) no JR.
about 1) you need passing to create open shots (with a high possible FG%). A high passing player will find a way to help his teammates and overcome the OD of his defender. Currently there are 103 players with OD 17 or higher on the TL and only 18 with passing 17 or higher. That's the same mistake we did with SB. (There is a post from Charles where he esplaines that a high passing will result in more open shots with a high FG%).
about 2) JR supports every shot outside the paint. It's the counterpart for OD. OD tries to decrease your FG% and JR works against this and tries to increase it. But there are only 4 players with JR 17 or higher on the TL.

Be honest, in BB most of the managers train OD, IS and DR. These three skills are considered almost as "God-Skills." It's unbelivable easy to buy a player with a high skill in at least one of these three.
But the other skills like PA, JR and SB are something like the ugly cousin. And no one wants to play with her. Since Season 7, Charles said that we have to train SB. It's the most important skill for defense. But everyone trained IS and complained that the defense is broken. Charles also said you need high passing to find open shots and a high FG%. But everyone trained OD to prevent this. He also said that JR is the most important skill for a SG and that JS>JR is wrong. But I again everyone complains about the Engine. You know the 80-20 rule? 80% of the problems sit 20 cm before the desktop. That's the case here.

Before you quit I tried to explain how the BBs intended the 2-3 zone to be. But this ended in an explosion from your side. ;)
When the BBs programmed the 2-3 zone their main target was to strengthen RB and close the paint. They never thought that the guards would have IS 10+. They had high passing guards in mind. These guards would try to find a open shot for their bigs. But our current guards have high JS, DR and IS. They are build completly different than they were intendend. And that's the reason the 2-3 isn't working. The BBs and we have a different "understanding" on guards for inside tactics. That's like you build a garage for a Smart and your wife comes with a Escalade and complaines that you messed it up. ;)

Surely an easy fix would be to make skills that are found in players playing in a specific slot cost more from one season to the next.

The problem is that for some skills this kind of regression cannot be done, since IS on guards doesn't really have any cost. It's also painfully clear that this kind of adjustment isn't done during the offseason even for skills that do go in the salary formula, otherwise OD by now would (in terms of salary) cost so much that very few teams would be able to afford 19+, while JR would be the by far the cheapest outside skill for guards.

If OD would cost 50% more than today and it was also slightly slower to train, while JR would cost 50% less and was slightly faster to train, people would still train so much OD over JR (or IS over SB for big men)? Perhaps not, it would be worth trying though, since this would not require a complete overhaul of the GE.

This is the kind of dynamic medium-long term balancing exercise that would ensure that the flaws in the GE are actually smoothened out automatically (i.e. OD is overpowered->everybody trains it->training speed goes down and salary contribution goes up slowly over time. At some point OD will still be overpowered as a standalone skill, but people will not find it that appealing to train it to extremely high levels, due to training speed reduction and salary cost).

Last edited by Lemonshine at 11/4/2014 7:00:52 AM

Yeah I know that, mate. I should have said 50% faster than it does today. Apologies.

I do agree with Nachtmahr, OD might be too overpowered but the main issue is on the user side.

Oh I do agree too. I'm just suggesting how you can make it beneficial and encourage different training plans.

Clearly such changes would need to be administrated in small amounts. You can't have a skill plan costing 100k today and 160K in 6 seasons (when the training of a player is mostly done). But 100k today and 160k in 18 seasons probably gives enough time to adjust tactics and plans accordingly. In fact a 1.5% max change per season would result in a 30% change in 20 seasons. Of course, that's assuming that the training of that skill would remain equally popular throughout 20 seasons of diminishing returns and increased costs.

If the change to OD was done in S10 can you imagine what would have happened in 19 seasons to S29? With 33% extra cost on OD, my PG would cost 80-85% extra salary, my SG about 75% extra. Probably I wouldn't have bought them in the first place.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 11/4/2014 7:54:02 AM