BuzzerBeater Forums

After the experience we had in Italy with the partnership with another online game, I'm still convinced that you should try to find out other good online games and exchange the banners making advertising each other. Another way to collect users is throught forums, I didn't receive the new users collected to me by Mark but in this way in a couple of days I've collected something around 130 users.

Also I suggested to create an external website writing there something about BBB, predictions and articles written by BB users. This can be good for our community but also a good solution to create "interests" in people that never saw BB.

Coming back to my first suggestion, partnership with other websites, I've seen you made advertising in sokker, in that case in order to save money you can offer partership + money, they've more users than you but if they accept this proposal, as I said above you can save money and you can have a permanent space in their game.
If you give me the green light I can ask to the owner of F1 if they would like to extend our cooperation in other countries (to do that we must have more or less the same users but I can try).

Last edited by ned at 1/7/2009 7:56:04 AM

Imo it's very important to have contact with other players to feel really involved in a multiplayer game like this.
Encourage the interaction with other users even more with some ideas:

Press blog
- nobody knows when you write a press blog unless they go to your teampage or if you tell others by yourself (rather impolite, so not always possible)
--> a link from the standings page whenever a new blog is written, would be nice.

- On the other hand, when someone has found your blog and did the effort of replying, there is no warning message. This could be sent to your inbox or on the forum page, or even with a read number next to your "overview" link on the left side of the screen.

(EDIT:) - create a page where you can search for new blogs: search by language (requires ability of users to mark their blog with a certain language) and type (league/division/national/international/general)

Forum
- ability to make polls: very usefull for predictions of a game/season/cup.
- add the "mark forum as favorite" in the newbie tutorial. This way they see the general forum page changing and know how to handle the the forum structure.

Conference Rivalry
- BB's stated they 'd like to see some more rivalry between conferences. Add stats with a link from the standings:
conference rivalry history
--> number of champions from conference A and B
--> wins/losses in the interconferential round this season
--> number of allstar-trophies conference A and B
--> number of relegations from conference A and B
This way other users will cheer more for their conference members during promotion/relegation too.

(EDIT:) Federations
- create a page where you can search through all the existing federations: right now, you need to know some fed exists before you can find it, which is a pity 'cause I'm sure there will be plenty of fun federations which I don't know.

Last edited by LA-Kantine at 1/7/2009 9:02:12 AM

About referrals:

Who's good at community sites/already active on them?
I suggest that players who know their way into those sites create a profile similar as "BuzzerBeater fan page" and tell all about the game on them.
There are plenty of those sites which are popular. Facebook, Netlog, Twitter (new), Myspace,...
You can contact a lot of people in a small period of time and it's absolutely free.

I repeatedly ask myself why BB is growing slower than I would expect it to.

For me it is definitively not a question of the game quality or maturity. Quality is excellent, maturity comes with time. A perfect game would by the way be boring and reduce community activity.

New users are new users and we should address their needs. If there is something that makes starting to play BB difficult then it makes also recommending BB difficult.

Therefore:

1.) make it easier to start playing BB. A tutorial, a manager test, more detailled rules and explanations. In my opinion that is 50% of the problem.

2.) stimulate more interaction and action for the non-natural-hardcore-spammer-type of user. For this purpose I would refer a 100% to the comments of LA Kantine in (67615.6) !

All the Best!

Pallu

i have a very strong feeling the fact that the game is so good fun to play and challenging is also the downside off it all. You can play hattrick by spending 10-15 min a week on it. I estimate that when you play buzzerbeater you need atleast 1 hour or so.

I have showed the game to some people that also play hattrick. Their response is really always the same. It looks cool, the website, game report etc and than when I tell them the training bit takes some time to sort out and that you play 3 weeks a game etc they all say "i don´t have time for that"...

I play HT too. There you play twice a week, one for your championship, the other cup or friendly. Not much different than here, considering that RS is far less critical in BB because of PO (while in HT you can win 13 and loose 1 in RS and not get promoted).

The main difference is that in HT you think you can easily set your team, just arranging 11 players based on one single core skill (and I have to say that flash interface is much friendly and richer in contents). Here you have to look at 5 on the field + 5 backups + 2 more, trying to capture which is the best P or PF (and you know the "preset" role is not necessarily the good one). That scares people, unless you love basket: football is more universally played, and the skill "attack" high easily suggest you that as an attacker. Here a G have at least 3-4 skills to look at, and even with some experience you can experience some trouble.

That is the feeling you have in HT. The reality is much far away. There are plenty of programs you can use to define team and tune it, and the results can change over 20-30% in comparison with common sense. I just read a 10-pages long guide to "your best number 10", understanding (and confirming just trying in my latest friendly match) that common sense does not fit with GE.

HT can be perceived as "easy to play", as many people plays football. BB cannot be.

At the end of the day, the time you can spend on both is comparable, although BB can require some more due to the lack of solid, easy-to-understand statistics (look at the tons of graphs you can have through utilities in HT, not basic ones that are definitely useless), ease of setting your team, basket mechanisms replicated by GE, and a general minor understanding of basketball ground rules.

Last edited by GM-BlackMouse at 1/7/2009 11:58:16 AM

really. why do people always have to take everything you say litterally and point out to you all the possible exceptions there are. i totally agree with you that if you want you can spend hundreds off hours a week on hattrick. I can guarantee you that most people spend no more than 10-15 min a week on hattrick. I am more than happy to ask my hattrick federation to make a poll for this (hundreds and hundreds off members) and ask them how much time they spend on hattrick.

It is about the point I was trying to make.

In hattrick sure you can always look at what tactics the other team has, scout your team through and through etc The bottom point is that most teams play 3-5-2 and you dont really need to do a lot to get a decent team together.

I dont know how you organise your team in buzzerbeater, but just looking at how many minutes your players played in buzzerbeater and to maximise the training minutes and to set up your team takes more than 10 minutes. I am sure you can get away with always playing the same tactics, but different from hattrick, you can win or loose a game in buzzerbeater by outsmarting the other team by using the correct or wrong tactic. If you want I can give you loads off examples...

Please anyone spare me the billion and one exceptions that are out there. It is a fact buzzerbeater is a more complex and therefore a more time consuming (how much more time is totally irrelevant) game than hattrick. It makes this game (in my opinion) a lot more fun but many people dont have the time to play this game.

You are right, it doesnt help that basketball isnt the number 1 sport in the world either. But in countries like USA, Spain, Italy, Greece this is a massive sport... Maybe BB should try and market the game in these countries. No clue how big their budget is, but I am sure there are many community websites in these countries. Also working together with other games would be a big help I reckon, although I can imagine other games might be comprehensive doing this, being afraid to loose members...

Probably my English is not as good as I think, as I am not sure I fully got your point. It looks like there are many things we agree on, but don't understand all your post.

So, let me try to summarize few points (either we agree or not)
- football is more universal than basketball, even in countries as Italy or Spain
- HT can be played with less effort in time than BB. It does not take at all 10 minutes unless you have a dominant team or you just play with no major objectives (ask my rival...)
- even when you are proceeding in the game, you can still spend less time in HT than in BB because of better support in team accomodation and statistics/evaluation (CHPP)
- in HT you can train 6 midfielders just setting up two matches in a row, with typically no surprise. In BB you cannot because of rotation and foul effects on minutes played

So, improve support to users (see also my first message), improve experience to not bother people jumping from one screenshot to another (HT flash match set up), make leverage on community.

very good summery. think you are spot on by saying that there are many help tools, websites that provide a lot off help with hattrick.

It would be good to have more available in bb.

I dont know if it is implementable in this game, or if the developers feel up to the task, but a website based or downloadable tool like hattrick organizer would really make a huge difference in my opinion...

Reading Astragoth's + BlackMouse's discussion is very interesting and it helps me to add to my earlier thoughts:

HT is difficult if you want it to be difficult. BB is difficult by default. That to me is the singular problem.