BuzzerBeater Forums

I appreciate that the BBs are trying to take the initiative and make some changes to the lower-level leagues. However, I found it hard to agree with the change. I will explain my concerns below.

1. It would be hard to evaluate "the loss of income", as stated in the announcement quoted below.

3. To offset possible losses of income, we will match the promotion awards for all promoted teams - no matter whether they are playoff winners or just promoted due to available empty slots!

It sounds that the BBs are only trying to compensate for the loss of the championship bonus. However, there is much more about the loss after the team consolidation. Just to list a few:
- Teams promoted without a championship will not have the extra boost on team support, which can make quite a difference in the ticket income.
- Compared to a bot league, it would be much harder to sustain a good weekly profit in a human-filled team, while still keeping at the top of the league and having the same merchandise bonus. I think this has been justified in the Utopia league.

2. The rookie pool will be shrunk, especially for smaller countries.

Take a country with about 128 human teams as an example. 80 teams will be in Div. II or above, and 48 will be in Div. III. In the current situation, a rough estimation is that the ˋ48 Div. III teams should be able to capture about half of the top talented rookies (MVP+). However, after the change, those teams will be concentrated on III.1 and III.2, which implies only about 19% of the talents will be captured.

Keeping the depth of national teams will be harder after the implementation, especially for smaller leagues.

3. Important updates like this should be announced at least a season before the rollout.

Taking myself as an example... I decided to give up the season, sold most of my main players, and got the 4 million arena upgrade. After the update, staying at the higher league might be the better idea, but now it becomes very hard to change my season plan without the cash in my pocket...


I do not want to discourage the BBs since you all are making to improve the game experience, but I hope you can re-examine all the potential changes, good and bad, on what you are proposing.

Personally, I feel that things could be much better if there is some sort of options about where we will go after a relegation (maybe with the default setting as "going to the human-occupied league").

Thank you for your consideration.


Last edited by Feizai Passing by at 06/06/2022 10:56:05

I assumed that lower leagues would be somewhat diluted by design so that people don't get "stuck" in a competitive lowest league. If you put 12 human users in one DIV does only one of them have the opportunity to move up each season?

I think overall it's probably a good change as I suspect most users would prefer to play in human leagues. It also makes a lot more sense to me now that I understand new teams will be grouped together in "newbie leagues" rather than spread out amongst bots.

That said, I do agree with you on the issues this causes. Instead of filling up a league, perhaps get to 12 human teams and leave a few bots in each league? It will still be an active league, but it will give every team the opportunity to boost their fan survey with a few wins each season and slightly reduce the number of drafts that are going to be lost.

Wouldnt they all get promoted after debotification anyway?
On the other hand a big part of those would miss out on the PO-Winner bonus

They willl get the bonus.

3. To offset possible losses of income, we will match the promotion awards for all promoted teams - no matter whether they are playoff winners or just promoted due to available empty slots!

I agree with you that the change of league formation might be a good one in the long term. However, it should be announced earlier and give the managers time to react to the change. It might be acceptable for some other changes, such as the BBM, to have a shorter notice. But for this one, the loss could go up to ~1 million for some managers, and more communications should be done beforehand.

Thank you for your input on the rookie issues. I feel that there will still be a big drop in the depth pool of rookies in that way, but I would like to hear about all possibilities.

Another question we raised in our forum was:

4. Fresh and newly signed up teams will be placed in leagues populated only by bots or other such teams - to make sure they don't get overwhelmed right off the bat. We consider all teams 1 season or younger "fresh"

Is it something like: Older users fill in human-occupied leagues (e.g. III.1-III.3), while the fresh teams go to newbie-and-bot leagues (e.g. III.4-III.16)? Where do the new teams go if they are good enough to grab their championship? If they still go to a higher league, are they going to suppress the promotion slots of the former?

Another question we raised in our forum was:

4. Fresh and newly signed up teams will be placed in leagues populated only by bots or other such teams - to make sure they don't get overwhelmed right off the bat. We consider all teams 1 season or younger "fresh"

Is it something like: Older users fill in human-occupied leagues (e.g. III.1-III.3), while the fresh teams go to newbie-and-bot leagues (e.g. III.4-III.16)? Where do the new teams go if they are good enough to grab their championship? If they still go to a higher league, are they going to suppress the promotion slots of the former?

I read a conversation on Discord which suggested it would work as you describe. Let's say you get 30 new teams in a season, then III.4 and III.5 would be mostly filled with new teams, III.6+ would be totally empty.

That's another good point about the teams in these "newbie" leagues promoting. It's probably fine for the play-off winners to go up, there will only be one in each league and they'll likely have invested a bit in their team if they managed to win the league. But the newbie play-off teams who don't auto-promote may have a better record than the human leagues (as they'll have some bots) so they could go up via bot promotion instead of long-term managers in III.1-III.3. Which could be an issue.

Last edited by testudo at 06/06/2022 10:18:40

I agree with you. If the "newbies" league is following the same rules on promotion-by-record, it might be unfair to the seasoned teams in the bottom league.

Another issue I can think of which does not happen in the current Utopia leagues is the shifting of "newbie" leagues. After one season, the new teams will graduate from being "newbies" if they are not promoted. How will they be merged into the old leagues? Will the old teams be assigned to a random league every season together with the new teams?

The rookie point is an important one.

Having 1-2 human coaches in each league (that get taught how to draft) increases the probabilities to get the good draftees in good hands.

Would anything change in the way the good draftees get distributed in the leagues or how they would get released in the market if won by bots?

Why not auto sell the drafters'bot players at 0 price?
In this mode we don't lose good players or nt prospect...