Though, with the new version on the horizon, I'll throw in some suggestions that I've thought of or seen other people mention in the past. Some are small enough where maybe they can be added to this year's version, others perhaps for projects down the line!
- Almanac stuff - can we increase the size of it? 30 is cool, but 100 would be awesome, or even 50 if lag or size is an issue. It would be great if we could actually tailor this, like set it to 20 or to 40 or to whatever, but anything here helps. More importantly though, PLAYOFF STATS! Pleaseeee! Individual players info is kept as they're active, but it's not in their retired career pages nor are totals piled off for all time or individual teams.
- In team history, it'd be neat if the results were a little more fleshed out. So if the Clippers lost in the 1st round of the playoffs to the Lakers in 5 after finishing the season 42-40, it'd say 42-40, First Round (1-4, Lakers). If the Bucks won the finals against the Jazz in 6 after going 60-22, it'd say 60-22, Champions (4-2, Jazz).
- Summer League stats. Can this be saved anywhere? I save a file around the finals just so I can look back on it - it's useful for scouting fringe players, especially when you've got Euroleague active and there's a lot of generated players you can't always rely on their season stats for. Would be cool for Summer League MVP to be an award too.
- On the note of awards - finals MVP would be epic! And most improved player. I've asked a few times about this next one, as have a few other people - can we also have it set like Pro Football where you can override all star and award selections? Or bring back the ability to edit in injuries (or perhaps an "injure player" next to heal player :P) just so All Star can be tailored at least.
- Mid-season coaching changes. With strategy a bigger factor than ever, there's often clear cases where certain coaches simply don't fit the style of team they end up on, or are just not talented enough to handle their rosters. AIs should be firing head coaches for bad season starts, bad relationships with players (which seems a bit rarer this year), and other reasons - and it'd be cool if that showed on their career page. As of now, if I fire a coach, it won't show that he was the coach at all for that season on his career page.
- Euroleague has a few hiccups. You can't view awards properly, as in it only shows for one of the leagues, and for some teams the awards don't coincide properly (like Tel Aviv in Mediterranean showing awards as Italian League MVP etc). Also, players sign with teams based on nationality which makes sense, but complicates NBA players jumping overseas. I'm not sure how you could address that, but as of now for say Allen Iverson to sign with Roma, his country has to be set to Italy. It would also be cool if in the team info section, league championship versus eurocup or championship cup or what have you were differentiated.
- In team expansions from 1976, New Orleans is brought in instead of Charlotte in 1988, assumingly because of their franchise swaps and what not. You can easily just switch up the logos and names during expansion, but that results in Charlotte being in the West, the East for a bit with the arrival of Toronto, then back to the West in the early 2000s when New Orleans comes back in. If you push things up to 32 teams, Charlotte ends back up in the East, but now Milwaukee is in the West and Memphis is in the East. These aren't huge issues in the long run, but if we could have a way to manually configure conferences and divisions either during expansion or just in pre-season, that would be awesome! Apologies if this is a feature that already exists, but I've never managed to figure it out.
- There's a small bug that seems to happen with players towards the end of their careers sometimes. The split on pass/drive-pass/drive-shoot/post-up/etc hiccups, pushing them over 100, which there in messes up their entire play. It's not common, I've only noticed it when historically solid guys have dropped off with production, and it seems to happen later on in careers, haven't seen it on a young or in-their-prime guy, though this also isn't something I necessarily actively look for. On the same topic of bugs, sometimes players show up in multiple team pools - they don't play for them both, but for example Jimmer Fredette is on the Jazz but shows up on the Celtics page. This seems to go hand in hand with a bug where said players are automatically set to D-League, and have to be released or traded to a team and back to be non D-League. They still play for both teams at this point, Leandro Barbosa has 608 D-League games and 874 NBA under his belt at 33 right now.
And now some bigger ideas, just kind of throwing these out here.
- The strategy overhaul this year was huge and by far my favorite feature. I'd love to see this continue to grow, nothing too specific to add here other then just more styles, especially defense. I know I'm just a Boeheim fan here but ZONEEEEE! Box and One would be neat too. Triangle offense, things like "Jordan rules". Would also be cool if certain styles could only be used/used efficiently with certain thresholds; triangle offense requiring strat 75> and analyze defense >75 or things like that.
- FIBA or Olympics ;D? Euroleague is cool, and the game already has the generation and nationalities built in. Would also be cool if Euroleague teams could be edited in terms of location - ie, turning the Aegan league into a Chinese league, or a team like Holon to somewhere like Egypt. The nationalities are built in already, though not too sure on how complicated altering the generation formula is, assuming it would be a kind of large scale project.
- AI planning consistency. AI teams often trade away young potentially franchise changing players for draft picks when they hit rebuild mode around February, despite the players being young and often taken higher than the pick they're probably getting. The AI seems to focus mainly on current rating versus potential, so this is commonly a problem with really young guys like the out-of-highschool lot. I think the AI should set up untouchable players on a several year kind of track, prone to changing based on fluctuating staff or other things. Also, it'd be cool if they actually traded players around during free agency/leading-up-to-it to try and push up cap space to get big name free agents. This is an obvious advantage as a human player, especially when a lot of teams are at the cap in a good free agent year making it so big name guys are going for way under value.
- For free agency, would there be a way to gauge how players are feeling about your contract offers? I know this isn't 100% accurate to real life, but it'd be cool to know if someone wasn't as interested in your offer just for the purposes of simplicity. This I wouldn't say is as much of a priority, just a random thought I had.
I know that's a lot, but anyone else, feel free to throw in ideas! Looking forward to this year's edition
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