Team Notes
Team Notes is a small new feature. You can see it on the roster page for each team:
When you click "Add team note", you get a small text box where you can enter any text you want about that team/season.
Advanced Player Search
I've been working on this new feature for the past few weeks and I'm really excited to announce it because it feels like more than just one new feature. The new "Advanced Player Search" page (available in the "Stats" menu) solves multiple feature requests that I've gotten many times over the years:
Combine columns from various stats/ratings/bio pages all in one table (like if you're looking for a particular type of player to target in a trade, you can search based on ratings, stats, and contract at the same time)
View total stats for a range of seasons (like "most points scored in the 2010s"), rather than just single season on career totals
Efficiently search for player seasons in large leagues (like if you've played 500 seasons in the same league and you want to see all the players who have scored more than 20 ppg in a season)
Cap on fickleness of superstars
This is a small change that you probably won't notice, and in a lot of seasons it won't even do anything. But in some situations, it makes the game less annoying.
This suggestion came from sebastmarsh on Reddit where (in addition to making some good feature suggestions) he has been posting about the strategy/tactics he has used to basically beat BBGM. Like he won 100 championships in a row in insane mode, that's basically beating the game.
One of the things he found annoying was related to re-signing really good players. With the player mood system in BBGM, really good players are less likely to be willing to sign with you. The thinking is that they are so good that they can afford to be picky. That makes sense and isn't changing.
The annoying part was for really really good players, like MVP caliber players and beyond. For those players, even if you do everything right, they still can have a decent chance of leaving your team. Because of this, you sometimes find yourself hoping your player doesn't get too good. Like if you already have an MVP, you might hope he doesn't have another year of good progs, because at that point he might be so good that he refuses to re-sign and you're basically forced to trade him.
Gzip compressed league files
This is a small feature, but it gets a blog post because it needs a little explanation.
The Export Leauges screen now has an option to apply gzip compression to league files, and you can now import gzip compressed league files.
This is what the option looks like (except for a few of you using old browsers that don't support it):
View signed free agents (not just available ones) on the Free Agents page
The latest update adds two new features to the Free Agents page. It now supports showing signed free agents, not just available players. And it also lets you view past seasons to see what players were signed then.
Shootouts - in all sports!
In the NHL, there are no ties. Games still tied after overtime end in a shootout, where players from each team take penalty shots to see who the winner is. So it makes sense to add that to ZenGM Hockey. And I did, in the latest update. But I did even better than that. I added shootouts to every sport!
New achievements
Recently someone posted on Reddit about how he completed all the achievements in Basketball GM. In response to that, here are some new achievements!
New "Compare Players" feature
Having some convenient way to compare players is a very common feature request. For example, here is a post on Reddit from 2013 asking for it, to which I replied "That's a good idea. I'll add it to my list. Thanks!"
Well now it's off the todo list!
2023 traffic stats
Every year I post some traffic stats here. It's a fun tradition because the numbers keep going up. I'm sure that won't last forever, but it did for 2023. For the 11th consecutive year, my games have grown in popularity!
Total play time was 453 years. That means that every day, more than a year's worth of time was spent playing my games. Or another way to look at it is that, for the entire year, every second of every day, an average of 453 people were playing a ZenGM game.
Basketball GM is still by far my most popular game and grew the largest in absolute terms (number of users or amount of time played), but the small ones ZenGM Baseball and ZenGM Hockey grew at the fastest rate. Overall, play time increased by 15% over last year.
I am very grateful for the love and support you guys constantly show me. Thank you for helping ZenGM have yet another successful year!
2023 traffic stats:
5 new international teams, 3 new American teams, and 4 rebranded teams
Merry Christmas! My present to you: 12 new logos!
5 new international teams in Athens, Delhi, Istanbul, Lisbon, and Seoul.
3 new American teams: the Colombus Cardinals and Raleigh Red Wolves, which will appear in default leagues in ZenGM Hockey (replacing Cincinnati and Charlotte), and Providence Shoggoths, which will appear in historical BBGM leagues from 1947-1949 (replacing the Providence Blue Chips).
4 of the original 30 BBGM teams got new logos: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Detroit.
As always, thanks to users on Reddit and Discord for suggesting names and voting on them, even though I decided to overrule some of the results :)