Performance improvements in large leagues
This probably won't be noticeable unless you have played hundreds, or even thousands, of seasons in the same league. I know most people don't do that, but some do. And for those who enjoy BBGM so much that they play thousands of seasons, I feel that I am obligated to make things work well for you.
Things still aren't perfect, but they're better. For example, viewing the Hall of Fame in a league with 3000 seasons played used to take about 5 minutes on my computer. Now it takes 2 minutes. The performance increase was by denormalizing part of the database, allowing an N+1 query to be removed (getting player stats for each of N players). With a relational database that could be done with a join, but BBGM is built on IndexedDB which does not support joins. Humorously, this part of the database was originally denormalized, and I had only normalized it because that improved performance. But after Project Iversion, normalization is actually worse than denormalization in this case.
Customizable stadium capacities
Minor new feature in version 2018.04.08.66: you can now set the stadium capacity for each team. To do this, enable God Mode (Tools menu) and then go to Tools > Edit Team Info.
This will probably do weird things to team finances if you change it. You probably shouldn't edit it unless you're making a custom league file.
For people making custom league files, see the teams customization documentation for more info.
Player ratings and development changes are live
A lot of things have changed! If you want all the details, read the blog post announcing the beta. But the main points are:
- Two new ratings offensive IQ (OIQ) and defensive IQ (DIQ), which replace the old BLK and STL ratings.
- Potential (POT) has been redefined so it is much more accurate and realistic.
- There are more statistical outliers, particularly as you play many seasons.
Thank you to everyone who helped beta test these changes. You helped me improve it a lot from the initial beta. However, I know it's not perfect now. Why not? Because it's hard! Even if someone correctly notices an issue, it's difficult to fix it because everything is interconnected. Fix X, break Y and Z. So it's not perfect now, but it's pretty good I think. As always, please let me know if you disagree!
Player ratings and development beta!
Today I released a new beta of Basketball GM featuring big changes to player ratings.
There were a lot of things wrong with player ratings previously. For example, the career arcs of ratings were very unrealistic. For example, it was not uncommon for a player to enter the league with no jump shot and grow to become one of the all time great shooters, or for a player to enter the league with horrible athleticism but grow to become an elite athlete. Sure improvement is possible - but not that much! I mostly implemented the changes described here to make individual rating changes more realistic.
Most Improved Player award
Basketball GM has long had awards every season - MVP, Rookie of the Year, etc. But Most Improved Player (MIP) has been missing for a while. That's because MIP is harder to compute than other awards. You don't need just this year's stats, you need prior years too. And you also need to understand context - is a player actually improving, or just recovered from an injury? Or maybe he's an established star coming off a bad season? Or maybe his numbers went up, but only because he got more playing time without really improving? It's complicated.
Even more advanced stats!
Earlier this week I added a bunch of advanced stats to Basketball GM. Well, now there's even more.
Team Advanced Stats: Go to Team Stats and switch from Team to Advanced to view stats like Pythagorean wins and losses and offensive and defensive ratings. Basketball-Reference.com has a good glossary of terms if you don't know what some of the stats are.
Player Win Shares and Ratings: Player pages and the Player Stats page now show offensive and defensive ratings along with offensive win shares, defensive win shares, win shares, and win shares per 48 minutes.
You guys like stats, right?
I rolled out a few new features over the past week, all aimed at one goal: more stats. Ideally, Basketball GM should provide you with all the advanced stats available for real basketball leagues. It's not there yet, but it's closer. Here's what's new:
More extreme heights
One of the cool things about Basketball GM is the time scale. The NBA has been around for 70 years, and in those 70 years all kinds of crazy things have happened - freakish players, lucky shots, huge upsets, tragic deaths, and more. In Basketball GM, you can easily play 700 years - you should get 10x as much craziness as the NBA! And you do get some.
But one thing that is missing is extremely freakish players. The best players alway feel kind of the same. That's because of the 0-100 rating system - once somebody is near 100 in most categories, he's the same as somebody else who is near 100 in most categories. You could imagine fixing that by abolishing the 0-100 system and letting ratings increase unbounded, but that is a bit too radical for my tastes. A more conservative solution is to decrease the range of normal. Take a 100 rating and make it a 75, then allow anything above 75 to appear only very rarely. That would allow for more unique stars that you might only see after playing thousands of seasons.
Live draft lottery
You can now view the draft lottery live, as it happens! The lottery behaves the same as it always has, just like the NBA draft lottery, so this doesn't change gameplay at all. But it can be very dramatic to watch the lottery unfold before your eyes.
Making a game 10x faster changes how people play it
Basketball GM 4.0 was released a week ago. It made game simulation about 10x faster. After releasing it, I was very curious how players would respond. If they played the same amount of time, they could simulate 10 times more seasons. Or they could play 1/10 of the time, but simulate the same amount of seasons. Or something in between. Or maybe they'd even change how they play, like focusing more or less on the details of the game.
Let's look at some numbers.