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As announced at the start of this season, today we released an updated version of the game engine for scrimmages only. These changes will become permanent for competitive games at the start of Season 9. Over the rest of this season we will be fine tuning this version of the game engine, and some of the weights might be slightly modified. These upgrades include the following:
1. Shot blockers are now capable of help defense, blocking or altering shots taken by somebody they are not directly guarding.
2. We have changed our underlying rebounding model to better reflect the individual battle between rebounders. Our hope is that this rebounding will be more realistic, easier to understand and will scale better across different levels of talent.
3. We have changed the way in which the home court advantage and enthusiasm effects scale across talent levels. For highly skilled teams these effects will be reduced, for middle of the road teams this effect will be relatively unchanged, and there will be a small bump in home court advantage for weaker teams. In effect, we hope to return home court advantage to a state in which each division will have approximately the same home team winning percentage.
4. We have upgraded our model of zone defense to make a more intelligent choice of individual on-the-ball defenders. The defender selected will now depend much more strongly upon the type of shot selected than upon the shooter.
5. The overall assist rate in BuzzerBeater will increase in an attempt to make our simulation more realistic.
6. The overall turnover rate in BuzzerBeater will increase in an attempt to make our simulation more realistic.
We expect that we will continue to tune some of the parameters involved in these changes as we get feedback from the community, so please take a look at your scrimmages each week and tell us what you think.
Note: The game engine was released as of 3:30am Boston time, so only scrimmages starting after that time were simulated with the new game engine. |
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