BuzzerBeater Forums

I posted this elsewhere, but here's it's own thread - hope this helps!

The fullest training you can get is under the following circumstances:

#1 Player is 18 years old

#2 Player is under the potential cap (if you have a capped 18 year old then you have one of the worst trainee candidates of all time).

#3 They play 48+ minutes at the position(s) selected for training.

#4 They receive single-position training.

#5 For certain skills, they're 5'11" (for certain guard skills) or 7'5" (for certain big man skills)

#6 You have a world-renowned trainer

#7 Your player's skills are fairly balanced for what their main skills should be.

The further you stray from any of these goals, the slower training is, but for the most part the slowness is not as much as people think.

The older a player gets, the slower their training is, but I don't think it's a huge year-to-year gap. I wouldn't anticipate a marked slowdown between an 18 year old and a 19 year old. Once you get into the mid-20s, you will probably see a noticeable decrease, but in a lot of cases not enough to warrant shutting down the player's training program.

If a player reaches their potential cap, forget about it, his training comes to almost an abrupt halt. I'd bet that training goes, at best, 1/3 of the speed of normal training for a capped player.

If you don't make 48+ minutes, you take a fairly sizeable hit, and it's not linear - I believe (and this is disputed by many others, don't take this as gospel but rather an educated opinion) that if you fail to break the 48 minute threshold training can drop as much as 25%, even for missing by a minute.

If you train 2 (or God forbid 3) positions, training takes a hit, but (and this is strictly my opinion and NOT an official position) it's not as bad as some people fear. If your situation allows for one-position training, by all means go for it. For most teams, 2-position training is probably the way to go.

Height does play a factor, but you don't really need to worry too much about going to extremes with trainee height - if you train bigs and you have, say, a 6'11" guy, you're not going to take an enormous hit over a 7'5" guy. Yes, the 7'5" guy will train faster in some skills (I'd say a safe guess is at least rebounding), but not enough of a difference to fret over. Try to train a 7'5" guy in, say, handling, and you're probably asking for a hint of trouble.

The further down the scale you go with your trainer, the more training slows down - but it's not linear. The difference between minimal and basic is much larger than the gap between exceptional and world-renowned. For virtually all teams, a world-renowned trainer is a waste of a massive signing bonus, and exceptional is probably not much better (full disclosure: I have an exceptional trainer, but I was able to get him fairly cheap and I have a good financial situation, so it's not really hurting my team.) for the typical team except maybe at the highest levels. Many people say that advanced is the best bang for your buck, but if you can comfortably afford a superior go for it.

Balanced training, in my opinion, is one of the most underrated aspects of BuzzerBeater. I firmly believe that if your main skills for a player are pretty close to each other, their training will show a marked rise in efficiency. Train one skill to legendary while everything else is at strong, and you're asking for trouble.


To say that a player will get full training at 48+ minutes is correct - but where "full" means "the highest possible training considering the factors that go into determining training speed." To simply say that full training occurs at 48+ minutes doesn't really tell the whole story even though it's technically not incorrect.

Hope this helps everyone, and feel free to ask questions or dispute what I've written.

Great post man! I had already seen most of this thing scattered around, it's nice to have them all organized in one post. Just a quick question. When a player reaches his cap his training speed decreases dramatically. Does this apply to stamina and FT as well?

I don't think stamina or FT are affected by anything at all, I think they train the same whether or not someone is capped, uncapped, 18 years old, 48 years old, dead, you name it.

Thanks. That's what I thought. I've been training stamina and FT's during offseason/all-star week and old guys seem to pop at the same rate young ones do. It means it's never too late for Shaq to learn how to shoot free throws!