BuzzerBeater Forums

Welcome to Season 26:The GDP season! (part 1)



Let’s start with a review of some of the recent changes that will now take full effect. The Game-Day Preparation (“GDP”) feature, which you had the opportunity to test during the last season in your scrimmages, will be enabled for all game types right from the start of the new season. This feature can be found on the tactics page when setting your lineup for an upcoming game. With this feature, you have the opportunity to give some last-minute preparation if you can predict your opponent’s offensive focus (which can be inside, outside or balanced) and/or pace (which can be fast, slow or normal). If you’re able to predict correctly, your players will get a defensive edge over the opponents, but missing the prediction will result on a penalty. Please check out the rules page for full information about the feature.

As we mentioned previously, we’re making several economic adjustments to help discourage short-term-focused behavior. To encourage teams to spend on salaries within their financial means, the BuzzerBeater Fair-Play Commission has implemented an “Overextension Tax.” With this ruling, teams should try to keep their player salaries in line with their weekly income -- if you start overspending, you’ll be hit with a tax on the extra spend. This applies only to the salary your players have when they are acquired -- if you train your players and their salaries increase as a result, you won’t be responsible for this increase. To make the implementation more gradual, all current teams will have an extra training exemption, and most teams will not be affected at all by the overextension. Additionally, this rule will not be applied during the first 4 weeks for new teams and on the first week of each season for all teams.

While it impacts only a tiny fraction of all teams and players, the BuzzerBeater Players’ Union has negotiated the right for players to refuse to join a team that is many levels below the their caliber. Certain top-ranked players have been feeling insulted when bought by a low-ranking team, especially when they’re forced to carry the entire team on their shoulders. Let’s face it -- you wouldn’t want to go back now and play basketball against middle-schoolers, either. This is a function of a player’s salary and a team’s world ranking, and you’ll see this reflected on a player’s Overview page as well as on the Transfer List page.

Welcome to Season 26:The GDP season! (part 2)



Now, on to the cool new stuff that’s happening. First, we’ve added a new cool feature for our Supporters. You can now easily express your mood in the forums by adding emoticons and pictures to your posts. Don’t like smiley-faces? No problem! You’ll have the option to turn them off globally. (How many other forums offer *that*?) But we really believe that you’ll enjoy it

We’ve added some new information to the country Overview page, so you can now easily check the historical winners of your country’s top league and national Tournament, the ranking of the country’s entrants in the BuzzerBeater’s Best competition, and the country and world rankings of the top 10 local teams. Also, the league overview page has a couple of new boxes.

At this point, we normally announce upcoming changes, but, this season, we decided to do something a bit different. In an effort to improve communication with the BB’s, we’re going to start working more closely with the community to prioritize and design changes to the game. This will take many faces: for starters, we’ll be hosting more user polls in BB-Global, where you will have the chance to get involved in the process and to help us to decide what the upcoming changes would be.

Until this point, there has been a lot of the behind-the-scenes work in the community that generally goes unnoticed, and we wanted to start making that a bit more public. In addition to the Game Masters (who have the “GM-” prefix behind their name), we have several Executive Game Masters who help manage the GM’s and LA’s and communicate daily with the BB’s about new features, reports of cheating, and community dynamics. They’ve done a stellar job so far, and BuzzerBeater wouldn’t be the same without them. By making this more public, we also want to anoint them as official community representatives of the BB’s in the forums. So, please welcome me and the other BB’s in officially promoting EGM-Nickleon and EGM-Perpete to their new, official role on the team!

But we haven’t finished yet. We have some kudos to give.

First of all, congratulations to France U21, coached by Paul, for winning the world title in the Junior National Teams after beating Italy, coached by GM-dexter7™, in the final with a score of 83-70. The National Teams are now preparing for their upcoming trip to exotic Brazil for the next World Championship!

Of course we have to also congratulate darkonza and his team Młoty Stargard for winning the big BuzzerBeater’s Best Tournament final against NT- 牛姐 and his team 猛牛 in one of the greatest B3 finals ever. Darkonza is the first Polish manager to win the great trophy.

This year’s B3 prediction winners are Latvian manager Malij, followed by Whakur from Brazil and Serbian manager Trbazzi. Free Supporter packages have already been awarded to these lucky winners, and we hope they will enjoy it!

That’s all the news we have… for now. We wish you all happy holidays, a great new year, and, of course, a successful new BB season!

Posted by: BB-Marin 28/12/2013 00:46:46

Welcome to season 29: The training tune-up season! (Part 1)

Training has always been a fundamental part of BuzzerBeater; it is an aspect of the game which provides a lot of joy, and sometimes even some frustration. This is, of course, due to our long standing training system which limits training to a very narrow set of positions. Not anymore. Out of position training is a thing of the past. Welcome to the new training era! For example, from now on, you can train your Center in passing or outside defense while playing him in his most effective position. However, these new options come with a cost: a loss in training effectiveness of 10% is applied should you choose to use these new positions. The effectiveness is further reduced by 10% for each “step” away from the existing, old training position. Oh yeah, these “old” training types are, of course, still available and are just as effective as they were before. The combinations just expand the position range of existing training types. In case something is unclear, feel free to check out the training page and see for yourself!

Let’s not forget our loyal Supporters! This season, we have a really special treat for you guys: The Scrimmage Finder! This new feature sets you up with a scrimmage with just one click! And if there are no free teams, it will help you find a scrimmage partner quickly and easily, by sending out the maximum number of invites, again, with just one click. Of course, you can even limit the scrimmage time slot, home or away preference or team rank. To make sure our flag collection feature doesn’t become too easy or redundant, this feature will only book scrimmages with teams from countries whose flags you already collected. This will surely also raise the appeal of the Supporter package!

The Utopia experiment has indeed proved successful. Next season, we are filling the top Utopia league with human teams, and bots are becoming a thing of the past. Since this is the most competitive country in BuzzerBeater, we want to keep it that way by ensuring there’s a higher promotion/demotion rate there. We’re going to move our playout one step up in all Utopia leagues, starting this season. In practice, this means that from now on, instead of 6th and 7th teams playing for survival, 5th and 6th placed teams will battle it out! 7th place joins 8th as a certain demotee! This will surely keep things interesting since it will now be even harder to keep from relegating. On the other hand, promotion does become a little bit easier.

Welcome to season 29: The training tune-up season! (Part 2)

It has come to our attention that day trading has become rampant and a very common occurrence among top tier teams. While we don’t want to diminish transfer list activity, we cannot turn a blind eye to what’s happening, and have therefore decided to raise the player transfer taxes. These new taxes won’t affect normal teams much, but will make day trading much less profitable, if at all!

In last season’s news, we announced dealing with blank lineups with the blank lineup prevention code, which, sadly, turned out a bit too unpredictable and unreliable during testing. Hence, we have decided to give it some more time to make sure it’s really stable and ready for use in all match types. We would like to use this opportunity to thank our Supporters who sacrificed their private league games in order to help us test the new code.

Elsewhere in the BB World, the USA is enjoying success after success. Winning the world title with the U21 team last season paved the way for the United States senior team, led by magiker, which won the World Cup in a close game, 101-89 (boxscore), against China. Congratulations to the coach, the community and all the players’ managers. This season it's time for the juniors to go to New Zealand to catch that precious ring in the new U21 World Cup.

LA-matijag21 represented the BB staff and the Serbian community well by winning the BuzzerBeater's Best Tournament with his team, KK Zvezda je zivot, against a Polish team, KS Goldena managed by kozlik4. Final score was 98 to 86 (boxscore), in a finals game that was the talk of the moment afterwards. This is the first B3 win for LA-matijag21 and Serbia.

This year’s B3 prediction winners are French manager straka59, followed by Sant from Israel and, splitting third place, “The Best BB GM” from Ukraine and dejan9445 from Serbia. Free Supporter packages have already been awarded to these lucky winners, and we hope they will enjoy them!