DDS PB 2020 First look comments and suggestions

[JohnnySlick]

Comments / Pros
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Really, really like the flat, modern look. I've got to be honest, I play the crap out of OOTP and I think that the UI of DDS: PB is straight up better right now.

It's a lot of fun to read the preseason preview magazines to see who the game thinks the top players are.

I've always enjoyed the way the game itself plays, with the game shown on court. I also like that you can see who is closer to the basket and get an idea of who will be up for rebounds, etc.

i'm loving the pages and pages of stats. Pro basketball itself has gotten *way* analytical over the years and it's good to see that the game reflects that now, too. Of particular interest right now are the lineup efficiency ratings - I could easily go George Karl and say "damn the classic stats, I'm going to go with the lineup that performs the best" - and the shot rates by spot on the floor, which give you a good sense of where a player should receive instruction, what teams they might have issues against, and so on.

Suggestions
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Offensive rebound rates are crazy low right now when you play out games. I put this in a separate thread as a bug because, well, it seems like an obvious bug that I'm sure you all will see as soon as you play out a game in real time (it's that obvious).

I miss having the little jersey boxes in the game screen be sized differently according to the size of the player. It made it easier to suss out who the bigs and littles are.

There really ought to be a way to click into a box score during games. Yes, you can get all that info, more or less ,from the sub screen, but I'd kind of rather see just the stats displayed.

The AI likes to turn off double teams that you set and (I believe) move matchups around on its own at the moment. I assume this will get fixed in an upcoming patch.

I'd love to be able to build playbooks for teams. I remember once upon a time this was a feature but it never really worked right.

I really enjoy having matchup info on the main gameplay screen but I'd love there to be more options...
- More detailed man-to-man intensity. Like, nothing major, maybe just "soft/normal/hard" for each person. If you have a guy in foul trouble right now the only way to protect him is to move him to a player who doesn't shoot as much and, failing that, to ratchet the defensive intensity down for the whole team and set them to play passive M2M. I don't necessarily want to do either of these things when it's early in the 4th and my star is on 5 fouls!
- As annoying as it is, the "hack a Shaq" gameplan was a thing when Shaq was in the league and could become a thing if we ever had someone who combined great post play with horrific free throw shooting again. Right now you can only intentionally foul as a team.
- Some kind of in-game feedback as to how a particular matchup is working would be nice. I mean, we can all see when someone is shooting 1-10 or whatever but I'd love to see something like "Robinson has been covering Sikma like a glove today".

I would need to run simulations to confirm this but it *seems* in the early going that although overall fouls are about where they're supposed to be for fictional leagues, bigs draw fewer of them relative to guards when the opposite should generally be the case. Not sure if that's a game engine issue (a lot of those extra fouls occur because a guy penetrated into the post and a big switched over and committed a foul to prevent/alter a shot attempt by the smaller, faster player) or a ratings allocation issue.

It might be time to do an overhaul to the HTML. I feel like at this point you could incorporate newer tech than statically generating separate pages for every player/boxscore/etc. Angular, for instance, would seem to work great with that (and for those of us who like to have the HTML open during games to track the things you can't get to in-game, it's pretty easy to set up node.js and run an Angular development "server" locally - I'm not sure how much people would be into this but you could probably have DDS: PB kick off a script that downloads the necessary components and then launches it for you).

Also, is there an index page for the HTML? I feel like there's not...

[Double Dribble]

Agree with everything you said! I especially like the idea of a soft/normal/hard man to man intensity. That and having the option to set up double teams before the matchups would be fantastic for those of us who don't coach out the games.