Posted by dahsdebater on 10/3/2018 12:26:00 PM (view original):
That's a completely ridiculous analogy. Massaging the odds for a single decision is easy. Massaging the outcomes of a sequence of events is NOT easy. Your best solution is to make all the shooters less close to .500 shooters so that probability will favor the better ones? That's dumb as hell. Almost nobody has complained in over a decade about the bulk shooting percentages in the game. Why break something that works to fix a different problem?

And by the way, moving a 53% shooter to a 55% shooter reduces variance by less than a tenth of a shot per game. So that really doesn't address the problem in a meaningful way. You have to make him like an 80% shooter to really make a difference. Again - dumb as hell. Your solutions all basically involve making it less of a basketball sim. The implemented solution keeps all the basketball sim that it ever had but narrows the distribution of outcomes. Which is exactly what the player base was asking for.

Speaking of dumb as hell, let’s talk about how you think it would take making a player “like an 80% shooter to really make a difference.” You come off as a bit smarter than this, so I’m sincerely perplexed.

I think the problem is, as I said in my post to you, that you are misunderstanding the reference. You are stuck on “standard deviation”, when that probably wasn’t even really the term mully meant. The discussion is on a deviation from expected outcome, ie how much a user thinks it blows when the simulation produces an upset. If there are too many upsets - and this is a developer question, not a user question, except as far as a developer feels like listening to any given group of users - you can either address the deviation (from “expected” results) by adjusting the parameters that define the probability determining the outcomes *of possessions* (better), or you can lazily engineer the game to adjust parameters on the fly, so to skew towards “expected” final scores (what we have).

In other words, if you’re consistently seeing too many “random” upsets, then it’s a problem with the design of the parameters that determine the results of the possessions. You fix that design (adjust the parameters as needed, weight the applicable attribute discrepancies more, etc), you don’t just engineer the game to skew probability as it goes along toward the favorite. Because if you do the latter, you are no longer running a simulation, you’re engineering a god mode. Maybe lots of people want to play poker in a casino that deals you loaded hands based on how your night has gone so far. Lots of people want to play FarmVille too. I’m not obligated to join them.

Posted by mullycj on 10/3/2018 12:35:00 PM (view original):

Posted by shoe3 on 10/2/2018 6:12:00 PM (view original):
Also, I guarantee it was not a “consensus”, unless you’re talking about a group of 4 or 5 specific coaches. Look at the responses on this, or the thread I linked to. Re-stacking the deck mid-game to even more heavily favor favorites, and engineer “expected” results is not a good or popular plan, except among a very select group of users.

Um yeah...

How do you know YOU'RE not among the select group of players who likes it your way. Enjoy your insights but you always present things like you are the majority and most users must agree with you, when that isn't always the case.

As the previous poster said, it was common for people to post box scores with "WTF" titles every day. Now it is rare when people get royally screwed by the SIM.

You've probably benefited by this more than not so not sure why its a big issue. In fact, with so many SIM teams, ALL the humans probably benefit from it.

I wasn’t the one who brought up “consensus”, I’m just responding to it. don’t care about majorities (which is a silly conversation anyway, as most users never even touch the forums). I care about the type of game I want to play. I know plenty of people disagree. I also know plenty of people agree. This isn’t high school, and I’m not running for student council.

Also - people get “royally screwed” by the simulation every single time god mode is triggered, because it is a fundamentally unfair way to design a game. The deal is that most people simply don’t know it exists (see tecwrg’s post on page 1).

If you disagree that it’s fundamentally unfair, I’d like you to answer the question - would you play poker or blackjack at a casino that engineered “expected” results like this?

Shoe, I respectfully suggest you reconsider the casino analogy. 50 hands of casino blackjack - a long sequence of mostly independent events (affected by shoe size) - is fundamentally different from 1 game of HD where individual plays are supposed to be affected by what happened before.

It's not a good comparison, and nobody else seems to be buying it.

Posted by kcsundevil on 10/3/2018 1:13:00 PM (view original):
Shoe, I respectfully suggest you reconsider the casino analogy. 50 hands of casino blackjack - a long sequence of mostly independent events (affected by shoe size) - is fundamentally different from 1 game of HD where individual plays are supposed to be affected by what happened before.

It's not a good comparison, and nobody else seems to be buying it.

Nah, I’ll respectfully decline.

How about 50 hands of poker? Any competitive game that relies on some amount of chance (probability) along with skill (strategy) is going to be an applicable analogy.

Hell, use a simple free throw shooting contest. Would you enter such a thing if the rim got smaller when you started hitting more shots than expected?

Seems as though we have a distinct difference in thought and expectations here. Some folks want to play competitive multiplayer games. Some folks want the system to just tell us who has the better team. I suspect Mr. Debater came closest so far to naming it out loud, lots of folks just don’t want to deal with probability “when reward dollars are on the line”.

Posted by shoe3 on 10/3/2018 1:28:00 PM (view original):
Seems as though we have a distinct difference in thought and expectations here. Some folks want to play competitive multiplayer games. Some folks want the system to just tell us who has the better team. I suspect Mr. Debater came closest so far to naming it out loud, lots of folks just don’t want to deal with probability “when reward dollars are on the line”.

Now you're just making things up. This is amusing.

Can we get pkoopman to weigh in here?

Posted by shoe3 on 10/3/2018 1:26:00 PM (view original):

Posted by kcsundevil on 10/3/2018 1:13:00 PM (view original):
Shoe, I respectfully suggest you reconsider the casino analogy. 50 hands of casino blackjack - a long sequence of mostly independent events (affected by shoe size) - is fundamentally different from 1 game of HD where individual plays are supposed to be affected by what happened before.

It's not a good comparison, and nobody else seems to be buying it.

Nah, I’ll respectfully decline.

How about 50 hands of poker? Any competitive game that relies on some amount of chance (probability) along with skill (strategy) is going to be an applicable analogy.

Hell, use a simple free throw shooting contest. Would you enter such a thing if the rim got smaller when you started hitting more shots than expected?

I mean, honestly, that rim sounds kind of cool. Weird Science type stuff. Count me in.

Posted by kcsundevil on 10/3/2018 1:40:00 PM (view original):

Posted by shoe3 on 10/3/2018 1:28:00 PM (view original):
Seems as though we have a distinct difference in thought and expectations here. Some folks want to play competitive multiplayer games. Some folks want the system to just tell us who has the better team. I suspect Mr. Debater came closest so far to naming it out loud, lots of folks just don’t want to deal with probability “when reward dollars are on the line”.

Now you're just making things up. This is amusing.

Can we get pkoopman to weigh in here?

Tell us more. Is there an unfair characterization here? Lots of people don’t like games with ambiguity or chance. It’s ok, nothing to be ashamed of.

If one is fundamentally ok with a game that engineers toward expected results after its already been designed to account for discrepancies, isn’t that exactly what we’re talking about? Just tell us who is better.

Posted by kcsundevil on 10/3/2018 1:44:00 PM (view original):

Posted by shoe3 on 10/3/2018 1:26:00 PM (view original):

Posted by kcsundevil on 10/3/2018 1:13:00 PM (view original):
Shoe, I respectfully suggest you reconsider the casino analogy. 50 hands of casino blackjack - a long sequence of mostly independent events (affected by shoe size) - is fundamentally different from 1 game of HD where individual plays are supposed to be affected by what happened before.

It's not a good comparison, and nobody else seems to be buying it.

Nah, I’ll respectfully decline.

How about 50 hands of poker? Any competitive game that relies on some amount of chance (probability) along with skill (strategy) is going to be an applicable analogy.

Hell, use a simple free throw shooting contest. Would you enter such a thing if the rim got smaller when you started hitting more shots than expected?

I mean, honestly, that rim sounds kind of cool. Weird Science type stuff. Count me in.

What if “reward dollars are on the line”?

Probability, for the lack of a better word, is good. Probability is right, probability works. Probability cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Probability, in all its forms. Probability for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

And probability, mark my words, will not only save Hoops Dynasty, but that other malfunctioning corporation called WhatifSports.

Knew you couldn’t pretend you didn’t read my posts forever, Beanie. Much love.

Posted by shoe3 on 10/3/2018 1:28:00 PM (view original):
Seems as though we have a distinct difference in thought and expectations here. Some folks want to play competitive multiplayer games. Some folks want the system to just tell us who has the better team. I suspect Mr. Debater came closest so far to naming it out loud, lots of folks just don’t want to deal with probability “when reward dollars are on the line”.

I'm confused.

How is it less "competitive" if the better teams win more often? Take it to the extremes - best team always wins, that's a competition. Completely random, that's not really a competition at all. There's no point in trying. So which one is more competitive? Which one is a better game?

Posted by kcsundevil on 10/3/2018 1:13:00 PM (view original):
Shoe, I respectfully suggest you reconsider the casino analogy. 50 hands of casino blackjack - a long sequence of mostly independent events (affected by shoe size) - is fundamentally different from 1 game of HD where individual plays are supposed to be affected by what happened before.

It's not a good comparison, and nobody else seems to be buying it.

I actually think blackjack is a very good analogy for what we're talking about. And the fact is that your variance in expectations in 50 hands of blackjack - or even a few hundred - is quite high. This is the allure of gambling. It's why people who don't count cards bother playing blackjack in the first place. Because there is a real chance for them to win. Not even a poor chance. They are at a fundamental, mathematical disadvantage to the house, but they can win on a regular basis because of the fact that there is no control for the variance associated with near 50/50 events except to ramp up the volume.

The argument is that many, many HD players think this same phenomenon is a negative when it comes to HD. The fact that the statistical loser can win a significant proportion of the time isn't particularly appealing. If I'm playing Blackjack I expect to lose, and if I win it's a bonus. If I'm playing poker and I'm losing I can just stay longer and in most cases eventually I'll come out ahead (or I'm at a very good table, but in that case I probably won't stay). The game length in HD is fixed and, in terms of number of possessions on a statistical scale, it's very short. This is why outcomes have such high variance.

The same problem exists in RL college basketball. I remember a study (probably 10 years ago, so maybe the numbers would be a little different now) that found that 5-15 point underdogs win almost 30% of the time IRL. So it's not like WIS wasn't reproducing reality. The question is whether it's better to reproduce reality or to make a better game. At the time of the update most users on the forums seemed to agree that it was more important to make a better game, and that a "better game" was a game in which you were rewarded more often for putting together a superior team and game plan. Nobody wants to play a game where you aren't rewarded for your input.