BuzzerBeater Forums

It's tanking: enough said.

I have to agree. At the heart of it is tanking... At least people have to play 3 players now. A year ago people could put 0 on the floor, waste your training minutes when you play them, and they would get the #1 pick with 20+ forfeits. I think it could all be solved by forcing teams to dress 5 players. Teams will still tank with 5 players and 5k total salaries, but at least they won't have ghost men running around the floor.

Blame the horrible training/shape system. Teams can't field an effective lineup for 3 games a week if they wanna be competitive for any longer than that specific week. That, in combination with the need to constantly play players out of position if you want to get any meaningful result out of their training is what forces players to tank games so they can effectively use them as "minute regulators" until they get knocked out of the cup.

Last edited by Xamos at 6/5/2016 12:06:25 PM

Very true Xamos. If the training system let you get the 100% training in any stat by playing the players in their natural position it would help the overall gameplay. If I could single position train my Center to get passing training at just the C position it would be amazing! And during the cup, it is horribly hard to stay competitive in league and try to survive the cup as long as you can. Game shape gets killed. These have been part of the game forever and there has to be a reason that they have not been revamped.

Yes, ideally your starters would get 2 games of 36 minutes, then the bench would get 2 games of 12 minutes and 1 game of 48, or so. You can't really be that accurate with your minutes though and most starters will probably get closer to 40 in a truly competitive game.
Even if it worked, the moment you get an opponent that doesn't suck in the cup, the plan goes out the window. Plus, this is only feasible for strong, established teams in the higher categories. How do you suppose a div.IV team could pull that off, except for hoping for constant draws against bots?

At the end of the day, the game is designed around 3 competitive games per week and the training/game shape calculations are not. Even if that wasn't a problem, the whole plan would require 10 similarly competent players to narrowly work in an ideal scenario. The way training works, it's simply impossible to produce enough players for all teams to have that kind of depth.

The entire system is not very well thought-out.

Last edited by Xamos at 6/5/2016 5:51:55 PM

I think it could all be solved by forcing teams to dress 5 players. Teams will still tank with 5 players and 5k total salaries, but at least they won't have ghost men running around the floor.

Absolutely right. It can't be beyond the capabilities for the BBs to introduce this. I can't see any reason not to.

I know this post has evolved beyond 3 players but this was a well thought out post. I'm sure the Bb's will keep tweaking the GE until some things are better and then everyone will complain about the next thing. We can make suggestions and hope, but the fact remains that this is the best Basketball Sim of its kind out there, hands down...

Obviously, the system could use some tweaks, but I don't think GS is one of the areas at all. Training and out-of-position is something else, and it would be nice to see some changes there.

As far as GS and competitive line-ups go, of course a weak team (div. IV) has no business in the cup at later staqes, but that's because it's a developing team and comparatively weak. The opposition would blow them out. And they could even do that by fielding their back-ups. Further on in the cup, as I said, it's a choice really - throw a regular home game and field your best for the cup, or not. Of course, there are those rich and established team that don't need to throw any game, but they represent fringe cases. And teams which don't suck and are on a level equal to you or me, we'll they're in the exact same boat. They also need to make choices and develop a strategy for the season. If BBs changed the way GS works, a cool part of actually coming up with a strategy for the course of the season would be lost. I wouldn't like that to happen.

Oh yeah, one other thing about minutes. I'm quite sure that with low stamina guys (3-4) it is much more likely they'll get about 36 minutes. I've rarely seen minutes closer to 40 happen on a consistent basis (since real battles to the very last second are also not that common). And 72 minutes in total isn't bad for low stamina guys, and higher stamina also enables playing more minutes with no adverse effect for GS (that was a really good tweak).

And there's another trick you could use, "sit them". If a team has a consistent fouler *and*a quite good bench player, this can be used to control minutes and game performance (of course, training becomes very problematic that way, two guy tops for one position regimes).

I realize there are elements of the game that can't be as realistic as we would like, but dressing five players is about as basic as it gets. I have a difficult time faulting the game or the training system when we can't get the easy stuff done first. I suggest that any team not dressing five players for every game also be excluded from that season's draft and should not get any weekly training benefit for any player on the team; game shape should also be reduced to the lowest level for all players on the team. You shouldn't be able to benefit by gaming the system.