2019 was awesome
Happy New Year!
2019 was a great year for Basketball GM. The game is better than ever. Well of course I'm a biased source, but it's not just me saying that. The stats speak for themselves.
2019 set new records in all those categories! The last column is the craziest... you guys collectively spent over 136 years playing Basketball GM in 2019. A less impressive way of saying the same thing is that, at any given time during the year, there were on average 136 people playing Basketball GM.
Team ratings and improved power rankings
In sports games like Madden and NBA 2k, teams generally have a rating on a 0-100 scale. Basketball GM never had a similar feature... until today! Now you can view team ratings on the Roster and Power Rankings pages. Eventually I hope to put them in even more places.
So, how are the team ratings generated?
Game simulation improvements and tweaks to ovr (beta)
Update 2019-11-13 - Everything in this blog post is now officially released! The original blog post follows:
I just updated the beta site yet again. Most of the game simulation and stat changes were already released there, I just hadn't written a blog post about it. But now that I'm also making some minor changes to the ovr formula, I figured I should blog too.
So here are all the changes in the beta:
Improvements to the injury system
Today I released new versions of Basketball GM and Football GM that contain some improvements to injuries.
In the past, each player (except quarterbacks in FBGM) had an equal probability of getting injured. That's now been changed to give older players an increased injury risk and younger players a decreased injury risk. This both makes sense and is supported by data showing a 3% increase in injury risk per year as a player ages.
New dashboard UI
The "dashboard" is the screen you see here listing all your leagues. I just gave it a facelift. The old one looked like this:
The new one looks like this:
I think the differences are pretty evident from just looking at the screenshots or trying out the new dashboard. But I just want to mention a few of the improvements...
Basketball GM and world domination
The Internet is a wonderful thing. Basketball nerds from all over the world can enjoy Basketball GM.
But where do these basketball nerds come from? On a whim, I wondered if it was possible that there are Basketball GM users in every country in the world. Crazy right? Turns out yeah, is not fully worldwide yet. But it's pretty close!
I fucked up, and the importance of sanity checks
Previously, some of you had noticed something strange about team construction and game simulation in Football GM. If you made a team of all one type of player, that team would actually perform pretty well, usually making the playoffs. Obviously that doesn't make any sense.
Looking at it more closely, I noticed that only passing stats were behaving strangely. A team of all kickers was horrible at running and at stopping the run. But they were incredible at passing! So I took a look at the passing code. Turns out the problem was just a small typo. The effects of pass blocking and pass rushing were reversed for calculating the completion percentage and distance of passes. My bad. Small fix.
But this is actually really important, and not just for silly things like a team of all kickers!
Basketball GM finally has an All-Star Game!
One of the most common feature requests has been to add an All-Star Game. I was always kind of reluctant to do it, both because it'd be a little messy to implement and because the All-Star Game doesn't actually matter, right? It's just a diversion. It's just, you know, fun. Like a video game is supposed to be. Yes, even a text-based simulator like Basketball GM still needs to be fun. So now there is a nice fun All-Star Game. Go play now to see it for yourself, or read on for details.
Moving from Browserify to Rollup
This post has nothing to do with basketball or sports or video games. It's just about some technical details that helped me make Basketball GM run faster. If you're interested in that, keep reading :)
Owner messages revamp
The annual message from the owner has long been a quirky feature of Basketball GM. Each season, you'd get some strange message from the owner about your progress. By reading it, you could figure out how close you were to getting fired.
There were problems though. The messages got repetitive if you played a lot. Sometimes the messages were confusing and possibly buggy, like if you win the title and the owner is still not happy with how much you're winning.
Also the messages were often racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive. In my defense, those were all paraphrases of things our wonderful real life pro sports owners have said. But I don't think everyone got the joke.
Overall, it was not a great system. Finally, I have replaced it. Instead of the long old messages, you get a short message containing your overall performance, your performance in the past year, and a quick recommendation for next year. Also, you get a chart of your past performance, which looks like this: