Posts tagged "Draft Lottery"
New anti-tanking draft type: Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA)
Tanking has been a big issue in the basketball world for many years, and it's probably never been more prominent than right now. This has led to many proposals to replace the draft lottery with a better system that discourages tanking. IMHO most of those ideas have serious flaws. The best one I've seen is called the Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA), and now it's available in BBGM (and the other ZenGM games):
I want to explain more about how COLA works and how it's implemented in BBGM, but first I think I need to explain what it's trying to accomplish.
Real players leagues created during the current playoffs now include draft lottery results
In real life, the draft lottery happens in the middle of the playoffs.
In BBGM, the draft lottery happens after the playoffs.
This poses a little bit of a problem when real players leagues are started in BBGM after the draft lottery has happened, but before the playoffs have ended. Because in real life the lottery is over so a lot of people want those results in their BBGM leagues, but in BBGM the lottery hasn't happened yet.
The Universal Draft Lottery Simulator
Earlier today I released an update allowing the draft lottery to be customized, rather than only having a handful of preset options. You can set the number of picks to determine in the lottery, and set the odds for each team.
Previously, my draft lottery odds calculation code didn't support this kind of thing. Originally it was 3 hardcoded nested loops to handle the 3 picks in the NBA draft lottery. Then when the NBA added a 4th lottery pick, I added another conditional nested loop. At this point it was starting to get pretty ugly. Now the MLB has a 6 team lottery? I'm not doing 6 nested loops. I decided to rewrite it to support any number of picks. That made it easy to support the new custom lottery settings.
While doing that, I figured this might be a fun thing to play with on its own. So I took my lottery code and put it in a little self-contained website called the Universal Draft Lottery Simulator. Kind of silly, I know. But I bet someone will have some fun with it!
Also, it's open source.
Draft order now matches the NFL/NHL in Football GM and ZenGM Hockey
As the maker of basketball, football, and hockey simulation video games, sometimes I get amused by all the silly little differences between the major American pro sports leagues. Maybe they need some kind of meta-commissioner to iron out all those differences. If duty calls, I would gladly do my part to help!
I'm writing this today because I just rewrote my draft order code.
For a long time, there have been options about how to handle the draft lottery. Those still exist. But what I'm talking about here are all the other draft order rules. Previously they were all implemented like the NBA, but now Football GM behaves like the NFL and ZenGM Hockey behaves like the NHL. (Basketball GM should be unaffected, barring bugs.)
What exactly is this new behavior? Behold, my hopefully comprehensive list of silly little draft order differences across American pro sports leagues:
More draft lottery types
Part of the fun of using real rosters back to 1956 is watching league rules change over time. Historically, the draft lottery sure changed a lot. And today, Basketball GM just got much better support for historical draft lotteries.
You can switch your league to any of these new draft types in the God Mode settings, or if you're playing a historical league the draft type will automatically change over time.
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.