Improved UI for the four factors in box scores
The four factors are stats created by Dean Oliver to give some insight into a box score. By quickly looking at 4 numbers per team, you get an idea about the story of the game and why one team won. The four factors are:
- Effective field goal percentage (how well did you shoot)
- Turnover percentage (how well did you take care of the ball)
- Offensive rebound percentage (how well did you rebound)
- Free throws per field goal attempt (how often did you get to the line and convert your FTs)
Those have long been shown in BBGM box scores, with the better value highlighted:
Holds and blown saves in ZenGM Baseball
Until this update, ZenGM Baseball did not track blown saves (BS) or holds (HLD). Now it does.
You might be surprised to know that blown saves and holds are not "official" stats, and there are not agreed upon definitions for those stats, and different sources handle them differently. For that reason, I am writing this blog post to explain exactly how it works in ZenGM Baseball.
Neutral site for playoff/finals games
This is yet another blog post to explain a minor new feature!
In the NFL, the Super Bowl is played at a neutral site, so neither team gets a home field advantage.
A few years ago, I added a similar feature to FBGM, so that in FBGM the championship game has no home field advantage.
The problem was, this wasn't exposed in the UI anywhere, so it wasn't clear what was happening except for people who very carefully pay attention to the changelog. Some people were even manually turning off the home field advantage before playing the championship game, even though that was not necessary because it was already silently happening behind the scenes.
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!