Fixes to player positions, heights, and weights
As Jalen Rose likes to say, positions were just created so a novice can follow the game. For that reason, positions don't actually mean anything in Basketball GM. They give you an idea about what a player can do (PGs can handle the ball and pass, Cs are big guys who play inside, ...). But there is no rigid position system. You don't need to start exactly one PG, SG, SF, PF, and C. You just need to start guys with all the skills needed to play winning basketball.
However, the positions setting algorithm has long been an embarrassment. That is now fixed. You should see more reasonable position labels for your players, and positions change over time as players age and their skillsets change. You can see the past positions for a player by looking in the ratings table on the overall Player Ratings page or on individual player pages.
(One exception: if you're using a custom roster you downloaded from somewhere, player positions won't change over time, because that seems to create too much confusion if the custom roster has weird player ratings in it.)
Similarly, the displayed heights and weights of players also don't really matter (the hgt rating does, though) and they were kind of weird as well. They should be a little less weird now.
All of this should have very little impact on gameplay, but should make it look slightly more realistic, which is important.
NBA Bracketology - predict the NBA playoffs and win $20! No entry fee!
We're all NBA fans here, right? You might have noticed that the playoffs are starting soon. Brackets are super fun for college basketball, so why not the NBA too?
If you want to give it a shot, join my group at NBA Bracketology. To make it interesting, I'll give $20 to the winner. No entry fee. It's free money! Come on, fill out a bracket.
Customize random player names
By default, Basketball GM uses random American names taken from the US Census. However if you’re making a custom league file designed to represent a basketball league in another country, it is annoying when the new players generated in your league all have names like "John Smith".
Now, when creating a League File, you have the ability to define the list of names used for randomly generated players. For more info, check out the documentation.
New feature: Multi Team Mode
Today I added a new feature to Basketball GM called Multi Team Mode. Multi Team Mode lets you to control multiple teams within a league in the same way that you control one team by default. This enables a few new ways of playing Basketball GM:
- Live in-person multiplayer - two people sharing one computer can play in the same league together
- Extreme control - if you want to control how other teams behave, for some reason
- Online multiplayer - if you want to run a league where you are the commissioner and other people email you roster moves to make manually, you don't want AI fucking things up
To try Multi Team Mode, create a new league or load an existing league. Enable God Mode (in the Tools menu) and then a new option called Multi Team Mode will appear in the Tools menu. Click that and it will let you select one or more teams to control.
One million seasons!
Today the one millionth season of Basketball GM was played! This is incredible! So far beyond what I ever imagined possible.
Here are some interesting statistics at this milestone:
- Total time played: 37,366,469 minutes, which equals 622,774 hours or 25,949 days or 71 years!!
- Highest season played to: 2735 - yes, that is over 700 seasons in the same league
- Average number of seasons per league: 2.72 - this number is so low because a lot of leagues are abandoned before a whole season is played
I started tracking the number of seasons played about 2 years ago. But I don't think it will take another 2 years to get another million seasons!
Screenshots!
You can now go to Tools > Screenshot and it will save a screenshot of your current page to Imgur. Then you can easily share it on Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or wherever.
Introducing Basketball GM Gold (no, it's not evil)
I've talked to a lot of people about Basketball GM. One of the most common things people tell me is that I should be making a lot more money from it, since users tend to get pretty addicted to it (the average user plays 1 hour per day). Imagine things like this:
- Player X tore his meniscus. Do you want to pay $1 to send him to Germany for a new treatment that will cut his recovery time in half?
- For $5, you can buy Special Training Points and use them to improve the ratings of your players.
- Pay $2 to hire a local shaman to perform a human sacrifice and bring your team good luck.
The problem is, that's all fucking bullshit so I'm not doing it. I don't want a financial incentive to ruin gameplay for people who don't dump endless amounts of money into the game.
Instead, I'm trying an experiment. As of right now, you can sign up for Basketball GM Gold for just $5/month. What do you get? Basically nothing, actually. No new features. No new abilities. Just one tiny thing: no ads. And the ads are already quite unobtrusive even without Basketball GM Gold!
Why would anyone sign up for Basketball GM Gold? To support my mission of making a great basketball sim that anyone can play. To support a game that says "Fuck you!" to the lucrative "freemium" and "pay-to-win" trends. And most of all, because you think I'm a nice guy.
I understand that there's a good chance nobody signs up for this and I just wasted my time by creating it. So I'm looking at this as an experiment. Can a quality game with a loyal userbase make a little money without fucking over that userbase? Let's see.
And if this does turn into a success... well, it could mean great things for Basketball GM. Currently I work on the game as a part time hobby. What if it could be more than that? I have literally hundreds of things I want to improve in the game and time is the only limiting factor now. What if I could work on it full time, and maybe even hire someone else to work on it with me? If a relatively small fraction of users signed up for Basketball GM Gold, I'd have enough money to do that.
Simulate through multiple seasons in one click
New feature! Go to Tools > Auto Play Seasons and you can tell Basketball GM to simulate through any number of seasons. The AI will take over your team for you and play through multiple seasons without any user input required.
I'm not sure how many people will actually benefit from this feature. I mainly made it for debugging. But I hope someone appreciates it!
New feature: Statistical Feats
Available now, view all the great performances in your league on one page. Just go to Stats > Statistical Feats. Triple doubles, 5x5s, 50 point games, etc. Eventually you will see this information pop up on player pages, team history pages, league history pages, and more. But for now, it's just on the Statistical Feats page, all in one place.
Note that this will only track performances from now on. It won't go back through the history of your existing leagues.
Easy stats export
As of the latest version (2015.01.31.658), you can go to Tools > Export Stats within a league and export either player average stats or individual game stats. The exported file is in CSV format, which means you can easily view it in Excel or any other spreadsheet software if you want to more deeply analyze the stats in one of your leagues.
I know it's missing a couple things now (playoff stats, team stats, shot locations, ...), but I want to make sure the core feature works well before implementing all of those.