BuzzerBeater Forums

Replacing owners late in the season causes a number of problems.

They may replace an owner who has got his team deep into the relegation zone with no chance of recovery. Even if he tries his best, he may not be able avoid relegation, and he is told his season ticket holders deserted him for the horrid season, and his draft is bad because he didn't invest in scouting.

Or he may replace an owner whose team was doing well, and will be placed ahead of other teams who have been playing all season.

Replacement may also cause competitive imbalance as a replaced team suddenly goes from conventional tactics, to a new owner experimenting with 5'8" players, or seeing what happens with CT every single game, or perhaps doesn't bother to set a lineup. It also can be especially unbalancing in the playoffs.

Or there may be no room for new teams if BB did not anticipate growth in a particular country.

The basic idea of a Late Season League is that it would be created entirely outside the regular league pyramid, and would provide scheduled matches, as well as scrimmage dates. The new owners would all have similar experience (none), and start from 0-0, on roughly the same day, hour, or minute.

After the end of the season, LSL teams would be moved into the regular league pyramid based on their performance in their short season.

Possible format:

LSL would start when there was 5 weeks or less remaining in the seasson (3 weeks of the regular season plus the 2 weeks of the post-season). Before then, new owners would play at least the last round of intra-conference play in an ordinary league.

LSL would have 6 teams, and would have a 10-game double round-robin schedule, plus 5 scrimmage dates. There would no post-season.

Leagues that started later could drop scrimmage dates. When scheduling 10 games, BB could simply schedule league gamees on Thursday if there are not enough Saturday and Tuesdays remaining. So a full 10-game schedule could be played in 3-1/3 weeks.

After that, the schedule would be truncated, but even someone who joined with 2 weeks left, could play 6 games, instead of being told, "you finished last, you're going to relegate, in two weeks. Play some scrimmages."

Even someone who starts in the last week, can try to finish 2-0 rather than 0-2.

Teams in the LSL could be ranked based on their number of wins, then number of losses, and not on their league place, but this would have only minor effects such as which league they were placed in, and perhaps whether they played in the cup.

Issue not addressed: The draft.

They may replace an owner who has got his team deep into the relegation zone with no chance of recovery. Even if he tries his best, he may not be able avoid relegation, and he is told his season ticket holders deserted him for the horrid season, and his draft is bad because he didn't invest in scouting.

because we place owners in the bottom division that has humans, late season replacements cannot be relegated because generally there is no division below them.

Replacement may also cause competitive imbalance as a replaced team suddenly goes from conventional tactics, to a new owner experimenting with 5'8" players, or seeing what happens with CT every single game, or perhaps doesn't bother to set a lineup. It also can be especially unbalancing in the playoffs.

the opposite case is also true... owners drop in the midst of the playoffs and suddenly their tactics go from consistently unconventional to normal. Normal players can also do this strategy.. i know i have. Being unpredictable is fun i think. Diligent scouting will reveal that your opponent has become a human and you should consider the possibilities.

In general I think that getting owners into a real league and into the Buzzerbeater culture as quickly as possible is better than having special cases, which really only make things marginally more fair.

In your proposal, you still have players who enter the league late being at a disadvantage.. and players in the LSL share the same uncertainty about their opponent being human or bot.

I don't see a freshly reset team being a serious challenge to any team that has been around for more than a month... if they are a challenge then the team hasn't been that active, because it is relatively easy to improve your team from where you start to a more competitive place. (please correct me if i'm wrong on this.. but its my impression)

In short it seems like a considerable amount of work (on the same scale as building national teams/private leagues), makes the game more confusing for new users, and has a marginal benefit to game play. If others disagree please chime in.

I hope this doesn't come off too harshly.. we really do appreciate ideas and I think we've accepted a number of them. The draft is definitely an area we have listened to users complain about and are going to be changing next season, but that is my honest assessment. There is another thread about some of the ideas including the one I personally favor... a user set weighting that produces a custom dot product on the players ratings rather than a one size fits all rating.

Man, jimrtex, do you get paid by the word?? ;)

anyway, I understand where you are coming from, but as BB-forrest points out, creating a separate league adds another layer of unnecessary learning for the new player. An active player should always do better than a reset or inactively owned team (unless they are a complete dolt or 8 years old).....The fact that all the leagues have undergone a realignment allows BB to now add new users in the lowest leagues and this makes it much more equitable......

BB's, will teams that become inactive "reset" and then "drift" down to the lower levels, or has that determination not been made yet???

As of right now, inactive teams(ones managed by users but taken over by bots), are not reset. Their current player set and skills remains.

As of right now, inactive teams(ones managed by users but taken over by bots), are not reset. Their current player set and skills remains.

Hmm. so, theoretically speaking. If the NBBA champ was suddenly told by his wife that he could no longer play BB, his team would eventually go inactive and whatever settings he had made the last time he logged in, would continue to be implemented? Thus, conceivably, he would remain in the NBBA, and stay competitive for at least some length of time?
Me thinks, perhaps, that may need to be looked at going forward......

I assume you try to set conditions somewhat similar for new teams. That is, their players are at least nominally comparable. They have the same amount of cash, arena, etc. This is simple fairness.

But they take over the record and schedule of another owner. Please understand, I'm not whining about my position, but simply using my team as an example. The original bot was 8-1. Then the first owners were assigned in mid-season. My team's first human owner was 1-9, losing by an average of 27 points per game. I won the last 3 games. Overall, at 12-10 I was tied for 5th best record in the league, but because of the point difference, I was 6th in my conference and facing relegation. If there had been one team placed in D.V, then I could have been relegated. I won 2 of 3 to take the series, with the only loss in 2 OT. 10% of my season ticket holders left the team. Had it not been for the fluke of a very good bot, my team would have been mired in 8th place.

All the teams in my league had 3 or 4 names last season, the original bots for 10 games, followed by a first owner, and then one or two new owners. I think with 3 league games, I am one of the veterans. And because of the bot cleanup, there are only 8 active teams in my league. Had there been a LSL, you could have filled as many D.IV leagues as possible from the LSL's, just as you filled all the D.III leagues from D.IV (or you might have even been placing the best teams from the LSL's into D.III).

Starting out, I would rather have been placed with other owners who were starting out, with a 0-0 record, and let us try to understand how games are played. Perhaps start looking at training or the TL. Bunches of those new owners will do zero. But in a way that is good, since the teams that do actually try the game will be relatively successful.

I don't understand why you say that owners who enter the league late will be at a disadvantage. With small leagues, you will fill each one within days if not hours. It is intended that those who enter very late, say when there are only time for 4 games to be at a relative disadvantage, to teams who played 10 games. But they won't be in the same LSL. You fill each LSL as quickly as possible, and then create another one. You don't refill.

Another way of looking at it, is as if you told people who signed up late in the season, that they were going on a waiting list, but while you're on that waiting list, you can start playing games against other teams. And we will use that performance to place your team at the start of the new season.

I agree that a freshly reset team won't be much of a challenge for established teams. But that is part of the problem. Some of the established teams will have played the previous team on autopiliot (which may be reasonably good - a bot took my league championship), and some will play the new owner.

anyway, I understand where you are coming from, but as BB-forrest points out, creating a separate league adds another layer of unnecessary learning for the new player.

When someone starts out, they are going to be doing good to set their lineups for their games. If they have a lot of time on their hands, they might try to figure out training or the TL. I am saying they should be playing against similar new teams who started at 0-0.

An active player should always do better than a reset or inactively owned team (unless they are a complete dolt or 8 years old)

But some new active owners are assigned teams that are 14-6 and others teams that are 4-16. All the owners in my league were replaced twice, with the last owners taking over late in the season.

So, instead of a guy taking over a team right away, he plays with a "temporary team" until the next season? Does he get all new players with his "permanent" team at season start? Personally, I'd rather take over a 1-16 team and know this was my team and start working on it. I think you are overstating the situation with new teams. Sure, it would be nice to get a team right at the start of a season, maybe. AGain, I would rather get my team half way through, get my players, sell the scrap, and start learning. Then when the next full season starts, I'm ready to go. I know my starters, I know who my trainees are and I start playing.
I think the half or quarter or tenth of a season you play initially is valuable in that you learn the game with your actual team....not a temporay one.

i don't think he was suggesting temporary players, just a temporary league.

No you would get your players and be placed in a mini-league with other teams that signed up about the same time. You would all be 0-0.

Instead of playing 5 league games and then spending 2 weeks playing scrimmages, you would get 10 league games. If there were 5 league games remaining, there would be 12 game dates (Tu, Th, Sa), so the mini-league might play 3 games, 3 games, 2 games, 2 games, with scrimmage dates the last two weeks. Or if it was simpler to program using the regular schedule, you would simply play the last 8 games of the schedule.

At the end of the season, everyone would be "promoted" into a regular league, with placement based on your actual performance.

What I didn't mention was that this was part of an idea for integrating bot-cleanup into the playoff system, and it would work a little better if bots weren't becoming owned teams during the playoffs, but rather simply to leave them as bots, then moving them down to the bottom division, and then letting new owners replace them after the relegation is finished.

As an alternative, is it possible to start new teams out with a 0-0 record, and only place new teams into each league once per season (assuming that you don't run out of space). These teams would simply play a fragment of the schedule and then go into the playoffs.

So in the USA, you start out refilling the low-numbered series in IV, which should happen pretty quick, and then just keep going on into the higher numbered leagues in IV, and then on to V. If you did get to V.256, then you could restart.