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:
Schedule and playoff seeding improvements
I deployed two changes today in version 2019.08.31.0916.
The regular season schedule is more balanced. All teams will play an equal number of home and away games, and all teams will have one home game and one away game with each other team in their division.
Division winners are guaranteed a top 4 seed in the playoffs, even if they have a worse record than some non division winners.
As always, let me know if you notice any problems!
A few small improvements
No huge news here, sorry, but there are a few minor improvements in version 2019.08.18.0097:
A lot more tables (such as Draft Summary) are searchable, filterable, and downloadable. There's still a few that aren't. Let me know if that's a problem. Also let me know if I messed anything up with this change, since the table component is used in many many places!
In the past, when you got fired, the AI would never actually change your finance settings back to something reasonable. So if you made them unreasonable, the results would look silly. Now the AI resets their finance settings every year.
The Hall of Fame cutoff adjusts based on the number of games in a season and the length of a quarter. Previously, short leagues would have empty HoFs and long leagues would have tons of HoFers.
Specifically, the cutoff is multiplied by
sqrt(quarterLength / 12) * numGames / 82. The square root is to account for fatigue in games - shorter games mean the starters play a higher fraction of the game (and the cutoff should be a bit higher) and longer games mean the opposite.
As always, let me know if you notice any problem with this stuff, or if you have any other feedback!