BuzzerBeater Forums

I also would like to add the point since we have 3 picks we could have 3 different pick preferences.

How about something entirely different, more along the lines of free agency? This should just be regarded as a general idea, with lots of possibilities for specifics.

At the end of the season, a team can sign up for a scouting combine. A scouting combine would consist of 10 teams (not necessarily from the same league) and 20 prospects (4 at each positions). The 20 prospects would be divided into 4 squads of 5 who would play a half in each of 3 games. So in Game 1: red+white v. blue+gold; Game 2: red+blue v. gold+white; Game 3: red+gold v. white+blue.

Games would be available for replay, etc.

After each game, each GM can request to have one skill revealed for each of 5 players. All GMs will be able to see this information.

After the 3rd game, GMs can rank from 0 to 5 players. Players who are ranked #1 by at least one team are selected, with ties broken either by lot or some ranking procedure. Once a team has a player their other picks are disregarded. Teams that miss out on their top ranked players skip to the 2nd pick. This process is repeated for the remaining picks.

Players that are passed over go into a 2nd chance pool. Teams can sign up for a 2nd chance scouting combine, that works just the same as the first combine, except it will be made up of players passed over in the first round combine. Players passed over this time, will go to a 3rd chance pool. If they wash out there, it is the end of their career.

The combines could happen at any time, so late comers such as myself won't be disadvantages. A team can sign up for a scouting combine when they are ready to participate, and it is a process than can be completed in a week. Teams have equal information, since they will be able to have seen all the players perform, plus have limited information about their skills. By mixing teams from different leagues, you mitigate the possible imbalance of a draft. where there might only be a few teams actively drafting in one league, and 16 teams in another.

This would take much too long. The offseason is only a week long and everything would have to be spaced out since not everyone logs in everyday. It's a good concept but I feel its too complex to implement.

Why does it have to take place in a one week off-season?

The whole idea is it is a process that takes about a week, executed when the GM is ready to go looking for a player. I just joined, and I think that most of the owners in my league are new like me. If a bunch don't bother with their draft list, then I may be able to get 3 5's. Or someone might join up a week after the draft and miss out completely.

Participation can be fairly inactive. Someone wants to go FA hunting, so they click on a button and are assigned to a scouting combine that starts on say Sunday, where they can see the players in the scouting combine, which would constitute names, height, age, and position. The first game would be played on Sunday and could be watched live or in replay. By Monday, GMs can ask for one player skill to be revealed. All GMs will be able to see this information. If a GM doesn't select a skill, it is just a little bit less information that is available.

The second game would be played on Tuesday, with another skill revealed on Wednessday. The third game would be played on Thursday with the 3rd skill revealed on Friday. GMs have until Saturday to order their top 5 picks, and they will know on Sunday who they acquired.

But let's expand this a little bit. Let's recycle all players. If a team is about to be replaced, dump all of its players in the FA pool. Any players that are fired also end up there.

The pool would have a fairly large depth (perhaps a minimum of 5 x the number of active teams), so that players who go in the FA pool don't recycle immediately. If the pool becomes too shallow, then new players will be generated.

New teams are given 12 players from the FA pool, and 6 combine credits, which will let them acquire other players of their choosing if they like. Existing teams will get 3 combine credits each season.

The combine players are selected from the FA pool, 20 players for 12 teams. The players that aren't selected from the combine are dumped back into the FA pool. A record would be kept of players rejected 3 times, who would be removed from the FA pool. Since a player has about 8/20 chances of being rejected, about 6.4% of players would be removed each season.

Perhaps a GM could participate in 2 or 3 combines at a time. If an existing team wanted to do their player acquisition at the end of the season they could do it in a week. Or they might spread it out over the season. New teams could take their time getting used to the game, and then start looking for some new players.

First time post here. I too am a former Hattrick'er, who got fed up with the lack of reality and lack of tactical choices.

I thought I would add my few cents to the debate here. There *has* to be a way to relay some of this pertinent information while still making it very difficult to cheat. A draft is only useful if you are able to go after the players you feel your team needs. It is apparent this is the way our teams will get built for the foreseeable future, and thus the draft gains even more importance (the TL is really full of scrubs at this point). With as much realism that exists in the rest of this game, it seems such a shame that at the DRAFT, we don't know age, position played in college or height these players have, all of which are public domain information in real life.

Some of my ideas:

1) Instead of isolating a specific best position as a scoutable attribute, simplify it down to either "backcourt or frontcourt".

2) Instead of giving a specific height, simplify it down to tall, average or short. Each identifier could have a wide range (behind the scenes of course), tall equals 6'8 and up, medium equals 6'0 to 6'8, short equals under 6'0.

3) Instead of age, give a generic identifier such as "underclassmen" or "senior". This will give you a clue as to the players age without actually giving it away.

4) Provide a system where you can focus on a certain type of player. It could be an easy add to what is already there. All you have to do is say I want type of player and let the system do the rest. You set the order of players to draft as it is now then when it’s your turn to draft the system picks the top rated 7-footer or PF, etc from your order.

5) Add randomness to the equation. Right now, scouts are equally talented, it's just a matter of quantity. They all tell us that player X has "respectable rebounding" for example. But if you had head scout as a hireable staff member, you will get varying levels of scouting talent between teams. Maybe a lesser talented scouting program would identify someone as having a respectable skill, when in reality they are merely adequate. This randomness will make comparisons nearly impossible.

6) To prevent easy transfer of any draft information, make the draft order list something that is impossible to cut and paste. There a plenty of ways to do this via the internet, such as converting the list to flash or making it an image, etc. I guarantee that alone would eliminate 90% of any cheating you think may be attempted. People are impatient and lazy, especially people trying to take shortcuts

Lastly, I haven't seen any debate on why its preferable to make the draft system completely impervious to cheating (at the expense of much realism and ability to tailor your team), instead of make cheating a no-win proposition. For starters, if I was in the same series as any of my friends, my competitive nature would mandate I hoard all my info to myself! lol Screw them. I want to beat them, not tell them which guy is an A+, 5 star, respectable Jump Shooter. If the concern is that multiple teams owned by the same person will combine their info, then the problem isn't that the info is combinable, it's that there are multiple teams owned by the same person.

In summary, I see this as the lone remaining obstacle between BB and greatness. Make the draft such that teams can actually target their needs instead of just taking the best player available, and BB would be perfect. It just doesn't make sense that I can tell my team to run a Princeton style offense with a 1-3-1 zone on D and tailor my substitutions exactly as I want them.......but when it comes to the draft, I have no prior information on how tall any of the prospects are.

Keep up the great work and I hope these points spark some discussion.
Scott

Remember that if you don't get the players at the position you wanted, thousands of other teams potentially may have done so.

GM-Juice:

Your reply confused me. What do you mean that thousands of other teams may have gotten the player I wished I had? Are you implying they will then turn around make them available on the transfer list? Where I can compete with thousands of other people looking for the same type of player when I could have just targeted someone like him from the get-go (the whole reason teams build through the draft instead of free agency)?

Your reply confused me. What do you mean that thousands of other teams may have gotten the player I wished I had? Are you implying they will then turn around make them available on the transfer list? Where I can compete with thousands of other people looking for the same type of player when I could have just targeted someone like him from the get-go (the whole reason teams build through the draft instead of free agency)?

What I am saying is that with thousands of owners drafting players, those players will be flooding the market in the coming weeks, and that you should be able to find the player you want on the market, while selling players you draft but can't really use yourself.

The draft is more or less fine as constructed, in my opinion, with some very minor fixes possible.

I have to agree with Darth Maul. Everything about BB is great so far except for the draft. It's like a crap shoot as is. I don't know if I'm going to get even remotely what I need or not. If the answer is to rely on some other aspect of BB, such as the transfer market, to compensate for the draft's deficiency then why even have a draft? Or why even have one as complicated as it is? Why not just assign players to teams and be done with it? It feels like we're given a little bit of control of how to shape our team's future when really we're not.

Okay , so why have a draft in the first place if the way the system is supposed to work is that nobody gets who they want and you're expected to buy who you hoped to draft through the transfer list? Why spend up to 40k a week scouting players if you can just save that $480,000 to buy unloved rejects at the beginning of the season anyways?
Why not just directly place all those draftees in the transfer market to begin with instead of going through the motions of a draft?


The whole point of a draft is to be able to select players you need / want to develop to fit your system without having to go to the transfer market / free agent pool, right?

I think the mechanics of the draft are fine: that it's not live, more $$$ on scouting has a payoff, that you pre-select your list and it happens all at once........but can you really say with a straight face that not knowing that the A+ respectable rebounding guy at the top of your list is a 5 ft, 6 inch tall guard is a shame considering the rest of the effort gone into modeling realism in this awesome game?

I have to say that I'm with DarthMaul on this one. There are lots of good ways (Darth mentions a few) to keep teams from getting together to identify players. In my opinion, this reasoning for not having better draft info. on height and age doesn't cut water.

You're right that I can get the player I want on the TL. But that's extra effort that I shouldn't need if I had drafted properly in the first place.