2023 Feedback

[MainOffender]

So, a little about where I’m coming from before diving into a very long and critical post: I’m a big fan of Basketball GM, but while that’s great for expansive overviews of basketball history and fast, simple simulations, I’ve been desperate for a basketball simulator with more day-to-day depth, one that gets into the chemistry of running an NBA team. I’ve dabbled with previous iterations of DDS:PB but something in the demos always put me off. Finally took the plunge on ‘23 during the sale and have mostly been enjoying myself, albeit with no small amount of disappointment and frustration, and feeling like the game is sometimes more work than it is play. As I’ve been messing around, I started keeping a list of feedback and questions that I have. I’m going to barf all that out here.

Overall, I’m a little baffled at the yearly release schedule (saw there were already previews of ‘24 on Discord) when every version I’ve played, including this one, has felt unfinished. It’s a bit of a bummer to feel like I’ve purchased a game that has a ton of problems… and rather than seeing those problems addressed, in a few months I’ll be asked to support a new full price iteration.

All of these issues were observed during Universe Mode, playing the 1976 season, controlling the GM of every team. I’m a psycho about micromanaging trades and seeing an 8 win AI team trade their upcoming first round pick at the deadline for a three star veteran was enough to make me turn off trades. I understand how difficult programming good trade AI can be, so I don’t want to harp on that too much. A little chaos can even be welcome! But I’d love an option to have user approval over any AI trades.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of feedback, loosely organized:

USER INTERFACE
• Names in emails should be clickable. If two players get in a fight, I have to navigate to my roster, pass a loading screen (why so many loading screens?), then open their profiles individually.
• The “Meetings” screen is a lot of wasted space.
• Clicking a team’s name in the playoff bracket should open up their dashboard.
• Series standing should be more visible during the playoffs. It doesn’t appear on the results screen at all. I want to know who is leading a series without going to the next day.
• The back button in the top left corner doesn’t appear to do anything. Well, it lights up when I mouse over it, but it never actually takes me back to the previous screen.

INFORMATION
• The playoff bracket disappears after the Finals, once Play/Sim is no longer accessible. This should be visible forever and incorporated into the Almanac and Team History.
• Taking a page from Basketball GM, the sim engine should note/record when someone hits a game winner.
• On the Team Info screen, the numbers of Championships doesn’t match the Championship Years. So, Boston has 13 Championship Seasons listed, but 0 Championships. Seems like the kind of cosmetic error that should be easy to fix.

2D GAME ENGINE
• I appreciate that this is very much a work in progress. That said, I wish I could turn it off and just watch text. The visuals seem janky and it’s often hard to track the ball. I end up looking at the text to see what happened anyway.
• While watching a game between two AI controlled teams, I pressed the fast forward button and the game wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I hit pause. Just had to ride that one out until the end.
• Court sound FX continue to play outside games and during timeouts. I see this has been reported on the forums. It’s not fixed.
• Desperately need some kind of sim-to-end option.

STAFF
• The staff budget scales with a change to the salary cap, but the staff contracts do not. Thus, trying to play with a historically accurate salary cap put every team’s staff budget in the negative and made them unable to hire/fire. Basically renders the Staff section of the game unplayable unless you have a certain salary threshold.
• The ratings described in the in-game “Coach Ratings Help” don’t match the names of the ratings of coaches. The manual is similarly outdated. I’m left unsure of what effect any of these ratings have.

TRADING
• The “Shop Player” button is very clunky. I often have to select a player, hover over Shop Player, see “no player selected”, click “Shop Player”, select the player again, etc etc. No reason this should work so poorly.
• Once learning that a team is interested via the Shop Player button, we then get to the “Get Offer” button. Hitting this will sometimes generate a “we have no offer at this time” message. Spamming the button will eventually produce an offer. Either just give me the offer immediately or have the AI stick to its guns.

OFF SEASON
• Retirements aren’t prominent/highlighted enough. They happen on June 18th and then disappear from the league news two days later when the season turns over. Teams should receive emails when a player retires. There should also be some option to talk them out of retiring.
• If you pause the draft and go to the War Room, the draft then unpauses upon returning from the War Room, forcing the user to pause again. Why does this countdown even exist? I’d like an option to turn it off entirely.
• In the War Room, the View Roster button doesn’t pull up anything. The only way to view your current roster is via the trade screen, which doesn’t let you see expiring contracts.
• Player relationships for free agents disappear during free agency, so it’s difficult to see who was getting along the previous season.
• We should be able to renounce rights in bulk.
• The gray on gray color scheme makes it difficult to see who is selected in free agency.
• Filtering for position in free agency requires four clicks (need to deselect the four other positions to view just PGs, for instance). The filters should start in the off position.
• There’s no overview of free agency from the commissioner screen. I’d like to be able to see every offer that’s been made from one screen, especially when I’m playing sandbox.
• Teams should receive an email notification when someone they made an offer for signs with someone else.

REQUESTS/MISCELLANEOUS
• Cities, as far as I can tell, are completely cosmetic. Markets have a huge impact on the movement of players in the real world (and team budgets). At the very least, there should be some kind of metric for how attractive a city is to players.
• The help file is a mess. It’s 134 pages which is an absolutely insane length. It’s from 2020. A lot of the information is outdated. A lot of the information that is provided isn’t even helpful. For instance: what does “Scoring” mean? The help file tells me that “Scoring” is a player’s “Scoring Ability.” How does that differ from and relate to the other six scoring related ratings? 134 pages and this isn’t explained?
• I’d like to see more personality-related incidents besides arguments and fights. Some positive incidents would be nice, even if just to add color.

QUESTIONS
• I’ve been exploring editing and have familiarized myself with working on SQLite. What I can’t figure out is how to get to the historic draft classes and historic seasons from the default database. I would like to export these into a file to edit them on my own. How can I do that?
• I’ve exported my 1976 game and edited in historically accurate coaches. Now, I can import that back into my save without a problem. But what if I want to start a new game? What is the process for turning an edited database into a custom database that I can load during league creation?
• What does each personality mean? Where is this information documented?

[Gary Gorski]

There are some valid items here that I either have addressed already for the 2024 version or will do so. Some things I have talked about many times already (the back button works for some people, not for others - no idea why and will probably just remove it in 24, the personalities I have also discussed many times that I wanted people to explore and learn which ones went well as opposed to a direct statement of it even though the game does tell you on the player card who a player tends to get along with and not get along with and tells you when signing a free agent in season that players might not want that guy in the locker room). Scoring is another one I have talked about over and over again here - its the ability to score points. That entails being able to create shots for himself, being able to get free throws, wanting to take shots...the other scoring ratings are how efficiently he does something. Two totally different things which allows you to have players who are just volume chuckers who score points because they just have so many opportunities to do so as well as players who are uber efficient but basically need to be left all alone in order to get off a rare shot and everything in between.

Cities are cosmetic and there is no reason for them to be otherwise. No NBA team is poor - with the revenue sharing and restrictions from the tax aprons its simply a matter of ownership wanting to spend money or not. Markets matter to a handful of players who want their personal brand to be in NY or LA or for players who love paying no state income taxes as opposed to paying outrageous taxes. Plus if you make cities something other than cosmetic you are then creating much more work for anyone who wants to play in a fictional world and wants to name their cities whatever they want or give teams worldwide cities (and then if you are being realistic you would have to build in how long does it take to travel to London or Tokyo and how does that impact players health etc.... it's just not worth doing it especially when the city really doesn't matter to teams and what they can spend.

If you want to create a custom database to start new leagues with I have provided template files to do that at viewtopic.php?f=357&t=35526

There is no way to simply export all that data from the game any other way than you are doing it now because it does not exist anywhere. When a historical league is setup or a historical draft class is required the game creates the ratings at that point in time and also will randomize the future potential of a player to a degree so that the experience is not always the same so if you want things a certain way the best thing to do is exactly what you did, create a league, edit what you want things to be and then use that data to build a template for a specific starting point. That link also contains a draft class template with instructions on how to use that

[drummerJ99]

Cities are cosmetic and there is no reason for them to be otherwise. No NBA team is poor - with the revenue sharing and restrictions from the tax aprons its simply a matter of ownership wanting to spend money or not. Markets matter to a handful of players who want their personal brand to be in NY or LA or for players who love paying no state income taxes as opposed to paying outrageous taxes. Plus if you make cities something other than cosmetic you are then creating much more work for anyone who wants to play in a fictional world and wants to name their cities whatever they want or give teams worldwide cities (and then if you are being realistic you would have to build in how long does it take to travel to London or Tokyo and how does that impact players health etc.... it's just not worth doing it especially when the city really doesn't matter to teams and what they can spend.

While I agree to a extinct, there's still a vast difference between LA and Indianapolis. If both teams offered the same player the same money and both teams are identical talent wise, 9 times out of 10 they are choosing LA. A easy fix if you wanted to go that way is just "small market', "medium market", "big market" options. But I really don't have any issues with how it is currently. I kinda like them being cosmetic only.

One of my suggestions, and sorry if I've missed if this is available, would be view by quarter in the box score. For example the ability to see team stats and the box score for first quarter by it's self or the first half. It helps explain how the game unfolded instead of just seeing the final result.

And yes I know PB2024 is coming soon. Just adding a suggestion.