Don’t know what proportion of users look at play-by-play or even monitor results game-by-game. I have always enjoyed following the details. I’ve seen wacky outcomes before but just survived a cake-taker.

Enjoying a great season in Phelan (12-0, top 10). 33-point favorite on the road; jump out 20-5 in first 6 minutes; nice start, yes? Too nice. Have seen enough to know a curb kicks in if the sim inadvertently produces a stilted early result. Trouble is, there seems to be no curb on the backlash! After the hot start, scored 9 points in the last 14 minutes and only led 29-25 at half.

After neutral opening (up 33-28), i go 10 full minutes without a SINGLE POINT, suffering through a 16-0 run. Shot 0-for-10, zero FT attempts, with 8 turnovers.

Then i won the last 9 minutes of the game 30-15 to eke out a 63-59 win. So, 50 points in the first and last 15 minutes of the game, and 13 points in the middle 25 minutes. That’s just STOOPID, with a capital OO!

Went 0-for-12 during a stretch a couple of games ago. Feels like i’m getting squeezed for possibly out-performing expectations or something. Which makes me afraid this is going to keep happening until i lose.

Any and all feedback welcomed. Similar experiences? Knowledge of how the sim manages runs?

the expectations you'd be outperforming would in theory be what the sim engine expects at the time the dice get rolled. its not going to look at your ratings and setup or coaching history and make guesses based on that stuff. its more like, your 50% 2pt shooter (against the defensive quality he is up against) misses his first 5, then he might be 60% on his 6th.

feedback is kinda goofy but in aggregate i think of it like how in real life, a team who comes out hot often cools off, or a team who is pummeling another will let their foot off the gas a bit.

overall when feedback came out, i was pretty skeptical it would work as intended, but it seems to work roughly as intended. i don't think going ahead early (compared to expectations) is an overall negative, its just not as much of a positive as it used to be.

Posted by gillispie on 7/3/2023 9:30:00 AM (view original):
the expectations you'd be outperforming would in theory be what the sim engine expects at the time the dice get rolled. its not going to look at your ratings and setup or coaching history and make guesses based on that stuff. its more like, your 50% 2pt shooter (against the defensive quality he is up against) misses his first 5, then he might be 60% on his 6th.

feedback is kinda goofy but in aggregate i think of it like how in real life, a team who comes out hot often cools off, or a team who is pummeling another will let their foot off the gas a bit.

overall when feedback came out, i was pretty skeptical it would work as intended, but it seems to work roughly as intended. i don't think going ahead early (compared to expectations) is an overall negative, its just not as much of a positive as it used to be.

The problem folks see, which is noticed in OP, is that it isn't just the 6th shot that gets boosted. It's the 6th shot on. Once feedback is triggered, it's off to the races. There may be some cases where there are in-game swings, and I think those are kind of separate things, built-in momentum shifts. I've often said the folks who built the pbp and engine really believe in momentum, in the course of a game, and over a season too. You can tell.

I've never liked feedback, and I've been pretty vocal about it. It is a move toward manufactured, expected outcomes, and the game shouldn't be doing that. Weirdly enough, the game still produces terrible sims, feedback doesn't really stop that, it just mitigates it in some isolated cases when it is caused by certain types of player performances.

I do not think there is any season momentum. And I agree with Shoe the game shouldn't be doing that in games either. But it's fine. The product is still good. Individual players are just unlikely to go 2-12.

Posted by cubcub113 on 7/4/2023 12:32:00 PM (view original):
I do not think there is any season momentum. And I agree with Shoe the game shouldn't be doing that in games either. But it's fine. The product is still good. Individual players are just unlikely to go 2-12.

That's one thing that irks me. I'd be okay with seeing my non-athletic, slow, non-scoring big go 0-7... If it meant I'd also get to see my star SG just have a nuts 8/8 from 3 performance.. but the feedback kinda makes that seemingly impossible. I think new players wouldn't mind seeing a crappy player go scoreless if it meant their star got to be a star.

In-game and within-season momentum has been something I've been trying to wrap my head around this season. Cubcub, Shoe, Gillispie, and others: Could you say more about why you believe (or don't believe) within-season momentum exists? It's messing with my head re: lineup changes, particularly as I play m2m. And if it is a thing, do you think maintaining a consistent lineup game-to-game outweighs the benefit of lineup changes in service of optimizing matchups or making your lineup difficult to gameplan against? Similarly, I'm wondering if in-game momentum is influenced by lineup continuity. For example, would more frequent substitutions disrupt in-game momentum?

Posted by jmacd7 on 7/6/2023 5:37:00 PM (view original):
In-game and within-season momentum has been something I've been trying to wrap my head around this season. Cubcub, Shoe, Gillispie, and others: Could you say more about why you believe (or don't believe) within-season momentum exists? It's messing with my head re: lineup changes, particularly as I play m2m. And if it is a thing, do you think maintaining a consistent lineup game-to-game outweighs the benefit of lineup changes in service of optimizing matchups or making your lineup difficult to gameplan against? Similarly, I'm wondering if in-game momentum is influenced by lineup continuity. For example, would more frequent substitutions disrupt in-game momentum?

My opinion is pretty controversial, as you have and will probably see, but it is what it is. I highly doubt the developers will ever confirm one way or another, and it would be kind of dumb for them to anyway. You can play it as though it exists, and you can ignore it.

I see momentum as a part of the luck modifying system the game employs. Luck modifiers play a role in a lot of games; some of them are very explicit about it. This one keeps most of it very hidden, to the point where we have to wonder about whether it exists at all. I started playing a couple very different types of games - Stardew Valley and Crusader Kings 3 - that have explicit and visible luck modifying components to them, and seeing how they work started to change the way I thought about this game. Suddenly long losing streaks in recruiting looked a little different. That weird thing where it seems like it always takes the team a few games to start firing again after you make big lineup changes, like replacing a couple freshmen in the starting lineup at the end of the season, it started making more sense. And teams getting inexplicably hot and pulling off a number of huge upsets in the tournament, with everyone, including their coach, wondering how it happened, well that made more sense too.

I have two controversial thoughts about things I think probably exist in the game. The first is a kind of "lucky day" modifier that sort of sets the trajectory of the day, and can affect both game sims and recruiting. I would suspect the default is normally neutral, but can drift - per momentum - during a season. And of course the other thing is momentum - both in game and in season.

Lots of things might affect luck, like how "optimized" the system thinks your lineup and distribution are, but generally the gist is that when things are going well, ride them out; when things aren't going well for reasons that you can't explain by looking at the team and seeing where the problem is, look for a way to "shake things up," because the system probably wants you to do that. Again the key here is that the system doesn't *think* you're optimized. You may know you have the best team on the court according to the way you want to play, but in these cases you have to think like the system. Where I run up against this, it's usually because it doesn't like how I've used the SF position, and when I put a more "traditional" SF in that spot, voila, better results. Alternately, it might also be sacrificing defense for better passing at PG, or better rebounding at PF/C.

Now obviously, when you have lots of promises out to freshmen, you can't necessarily just drop them all and optimize with no consequences. Everyone knows around game 20 or so, teams start looking a bit different. I've started to try to give my big late season games a little lead time though, when feasible, or just hold on and make the change around game 23 or so to make game 4 with the big lineup the start of the conference tournament. That's when I expect that lineup to be firing. I wish I could tell you that was optimal for ensuring best chance for big momentum heading into the NT, but it's definitely not. As far as I can tell, the NT is kind of a giant reset button for momentum. Who gets boosted with the NT juice is an entirely different game, and I don't really see any rhyme or reason behind it - but I certainly see momentum working in the postseason, with teams firing hot (and often the system will clear the table for these teams, with a round filled with upsets up and down the brackets - I've benefitted from this a few times with deep cinderella runs).

Personally, with my man team (Lincoln), I don't like moving guys around as much as I do with my zone/press and press teams. I will a bit, but I am pretty thoughtful about it, and do it mostly to exploit a bad defender, not to get a lockdown guard situation. I much prefer using double teams when necessary.

I do think in general consistency is better than trying to be unpredictable for its own sake. There is something to be said for being disruptive, sure. But even if momentum is all in my head, and it's only here because I think it is, making slow, deliberate changes is probably better for your season. Consistency gives you better data, covers over small sample sizes, good and bad luck days, disparate quality of opponents, etc, and you'll appreciate that come tournament time.