u/Significant-Care-135

After playing more with the new balance, I still think the car needs to have a bigger influence.

In my current save, Prost has a 100% podium rate and is already pulling away in the championship despite Brabham having the fastest car (95 vs McLaren's 92). Brabham's drivers are only 88 and 84, but a 3-point car advantage should matter more than a 7-point driver advantage.

These are all Formula 1 drivers. An 84-rated driver in the fastest car should still be a regular race winner and championship contender. Driver rating should separate teammates and decide close fights, not consistently overcome a clear car deficit.

I already suggested an 80/20 split before, but after seeing a full save play out, I think the simulation still leans too much toward driver ratings. The fastest car should be the biggest predictor of success over a season.

It feels like the player can consistently extract more pace than the car's rating through setup and tyre strategy, while the other teams always perform close to their car rating.

For example, if I have the 4th fastest car, I can often fight like I have the 2nd fastest car. The other teams rarely seem to do the same.

If setup and strategy can improve performance, every team should have that opportunity—not just the player.

That would make the grid more competitive and stop the player from having an inherent advantage over a full season.

Instead of a car performing at its exact rating every race, each car should have a small performance range

For example, a 95-rated car could perform between 92–98, with 95 being the most common result. The further from the baseline, the less likely it should be.

This would stop cars from performing identically every weekend and make seasons less predictable.

For example, if Team A has a 95-rated car and Team B has a 93-rated car, Team A should still be the fastest on average. However, there should be weekends where Team B is quicker due to setup, circuit characteristics, or conditions.

This would also prevent a driver from finishing on the podium nearly every race simply because their car is only 2–3 points faster than the next-best team.

The baseline rating would still determine the strongest car over a season, but individual race weekends would feel much more realistic.

I think driver ratings currently have too much influence compared to car performance.

Example from one of my saves:

- 83-rated car + 88-rated driver = fighting for the championship.

- 88-rated car + 83-rated driver = barely in championship contention.

I think the game should weight performance closer to:

80% Car

20% Driver

Using the same examples:

83-rated car + 88-rated driver

- Car: 83 × 0.80 = 66.4

- Driver: 88 × 0.20 = 17.6

- Overall: 84.0

88-rated car + 83-rated driver

- Car: 88 × 0.80 = 70.4

- Driver: 83 × 0.20 = 16.6

- Overall: 87.0

This makes the faster car the stronger package, while still giving elite drivers an advantage.

In Formula 1, drivers can make the difference between teammates, occasionally steal wins, and outperform expectations, but they rarely overcome a significant car disadvantage over an entire season. I think the game should reflect that more closely.

Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I've always felt that one of the biggest things holding the PBA back is that the teams don't really represent anything beyond the companies that own them.

When people support a sports team, they're usually supporting a city, province, or community. That's what creates rivalries and emotional attachment. A lot of fans around the world grow up supporting the team that represents where they're from.

In the PBA, we're basically cheering for products and corporations.

Nothing against the companies themselves. They're the reason the league exists. But it's hard to build a strong identity around a brand name. If you're from Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, Cagayan de Oro, Bacolod, or anywhere outside Metro Manila, what team actually represents you?

The weird thing is that the Philippines is probably one of the most basketball-crazy countries in the world. We have huge regional pride. People already passionately support their provinces and cities in other competitions. Yet our top professional league doesn't really tap into that.

Imagine if there were actual city or province-based teams.

A Cebu team playing a Davao team would immediately feel bigger than two corporate brands playing each other. Fans would have a reason to care beyond who has the better roster. Local pride would naturally create rivalries.

I know the obvious argument is that sponsors pay the bills, and that's fair. But I'm not saying sponsors should disappear. Plenty of sports teams around the world are owned by corporations or wealthy owners without naming the team after the company itself.

You could still have sponsorships everywhere while keeping a permanent city identity.

The biggest problem for me is that PBA teams often feel interchangeable. Names change. Branding changes. Marketing campaigns change. It's hard to build a long-term connection when the team's identity is basically tied to whatever the company's current branding strategy is.

Sometimes I watch games and it feels less like a league of basketball clubs and more like a tournament between different business divisions.

Maybe I'm completely off here, but I've always thought the PBA would be much more interesting if teams represented places instead of products. The basketball is there. The talent is there. The fan passion is definitely there but the identify isn't

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I know that we are now In times of extreme political polarization driven by Trump's rhetoric. Most young adults now hadn't known a time where trump is not in the national headlines. They grow up watching him through all their teenage years, which can develop hatred or love for him. They hadn't known a time where politicians actually respect each other. Would they continue hating the other party, or will they moderate given they basically only hate Trump and not the republicas, although the republican party is implicated given he's the face.

How would the Republican party evolve after Trump's presidency, would trump still control the party, or would they ditch him and purge trump's loyalists, much like what Kruschev did after Stalin.

How would the democrats respond, given their only running platform is hating Trump, would they develop actual and concrete policies.

Let me know you thoughts guys

I was scrolling through Webnovel earlier and it just hit me how much everything looks the same now. After a bit I wasn't even registering individual books anymore. It all blurred into this one visual mush, same dramatic lighting, same chunky fonts, same glowing edges, same anime dude posed in the center with floating sparkles, same blue system windows, same purple energy aura. Titles all built around "villain," "regression," "academy," or "infinite leveling" too.

Some of those stories are probably solid, but once your brain tags the cover as "standard webnovel slop," you just keep going without opening the synopsis. Covers aren't decoration on these apps. They're basically the whole shop window. Most people find stuff by swiping fast on their phone, not digging through forums or searches.

The issue is trends get copied to death. That glowing system look probably stood out at first. Then it worked, so everyone copied it. Algorithms pushed the ones that performed, new writers saw what got clicks and followed suit because why risk it. Now it's this loop where nothing stands out.

I don't blame the authors. If your reads or income depend on those first few seconds, of course you copy what sells. But damn, it makes browsing feel like work. You open the app and it's just endless versions of the same thing in slightly different outfits. Kingdom builder, apocalypse, cultivation, villain redemption, academy, they all end up with the exact same vibe on the thumbnail. The cover doesn't tell you anything real about the tone anymore.

I've done it myself a bunch of times, scrolled past something for months because it looked like generic power fantasy, then finally tried it when I was bored and realized the writing was actually decent. Bet that happens to a ton of people. Good stuff gets buried before anyone gives it a shot.

It kills the fun part, that random discovery while you're killing time. Now it just feels tiring. You get through fewer pages before tapping out, so you stick to rankings or stuff you already know instead of exploring. And the covers keep getting louder to cut through the noise, more lightning, more particles, more layered effects, huge gold text. On a small phone screen it just turns into visual static.

Weirdly, the simpler ones catch my eye more these days. Clean silhouette, actual breathing room, colors that don't fight each other. They feel like something I might remember.

Platforms should probably pay attention. If people stop browsing, the smaller writers get hit first, then everyone else, and the whole app loses that sense of actual variety. Right now it feels like opening the app and seeing fifty slightly different versions of the same protagonist staring back at you. Trends are fine, but when literally everything markets itself the exact same way, the place stops feeling like it has any personality.

I know randomness is part of the appeal of Basketball GM, and I’m not asking for every lottery pick to become a superstar or for development to become completely predictable. The uncertainty is part of what makes long saves fun. But after playing a lot of rebuilds, I genuinely think the progression system is one of the most frustrating parts of an otherwise incredible game because it often feels disconnected from what actually happens in the simulation.

From what I understand, progression is mostly determined by age, ratings, and coaching rank, while things like minutes, production, efficiency trends, role stability, or overall trajectory don’t really matter much. That creates situations where you can draft a 19-year-old with elite athleticism, give him starter minutes immediately, watch him improve statistically every season, make the playoffs with him as a major contributor, invest heavily into coaching, and then the offseason hits and he randomly drops from a future star into a mediocre role player at age 22 for seemingly no reason.

Meanwhile some 24-year-old bench player averaging six points suddenly gains ten overall and becomes an MVP candidate overnight. I understand outliers happen in real basketball too, but in real life development usually still has some visible logic behind it. Players who improve consistently, stay healthy, adapt to larger roles, and produce efficiently tend to keep progressing more often than players doing nothing on the bench.

Basketball GM sometimes skips that feeling entirely and makes progression feel like a disconnected dice roll rather than the continuation of the career you actually watched unfold. And what makes this even more frustrating is that the rest of the game is so smart. Team-building logic is excellent, asset management matters, contracts matter, roster construction matters, and the league simulation itself is honestly incredible for a browser game.

That’s why progression stands out so much when it feels detached from context. A rebuild can completely collapse even if you made almost every correct decision possible, and after enough saves it starts feeling less like “did I build this team correctly?” and more like “did the offseason generator decide my core survives?”

I don’t think the game needs to remove randomness at all. In fact, completely predictable progression would probably make saves boring pretty quickly. But I do think development should care more about factors like production trends, role consistency, playoff experience, injuries, archetypes, and overall player environment so that progression still feels uncertain without feeling completely disconnected from the basketball being played.

I genuinely think r/YAPms is becoming more and more of a left-wing echo chamber compared to what it used to be a few years ago, and before people immediately jump to “lol conservative victim complex,” actually read what I’m saying first.

I’m not saying the subreddit has “become communist” or that every liberal opinion should be banned or anything dramatic like that. The sub always leaned somewhat left. Even older threads acknowledged that. But there’s a difference between “leans left” and “slowly becoming a place where one side increasingly gets socially filtered out of discussion.”

Older YAPms felt politically mixed in a way that made discussions more interesting. You had conservatives, liberals, moderates, leftists, weird populists, election nerds, data people, cynical doomers, people arguing over county shifts at 2 AM, all in the same threads. Someone could post a Republican prediction map without immediately getting treated like they were morally defective for existing. People argued constantly, sure, but there was still a sense that disagreement itself was normal.

Now it feels like the atmosphere has shifted into something more performative and less open.

You can see it in the voting patterns first. A conservative or even mildly right-leaning take increasingly gets mass downvoted almost automatically regardless of how reasonable or detailed it is. Meanwhile left-leaning comments often get treated more generously even when they’re low-effort or openly partisan. The actual quality of the argument matters less than whether people already agree with the conclusion.

And before someone says “downvotes just mean the opinion is bad,” no, not really. Reddit has always had a herd mentality problem. Once a comment starts getting buried, people read it in a more hostile tone automatically. That’s just how this site works. The voting system rewards conformity over discussion.

What made YAPms stand out before was that it wasn’t supposed to feel like r/politics-lite. It was one of the few political subs where people from different viewpoints could obsess over elections without every thread collapsing into the same predictable moral shouting match. That balance is getting weaker over time.

I also think a lot of people confuse “allowing disagreement” with “supporting the disagreement.” You can disagree with conservatives without trying to socially pressure them out of the community entirely. If every right-leaning user gets instantly dogpiled, mocked, mass downvoted, or assumed to be acting in bad faith, eventually those people just leave. Then the sub becomes even more ideologically one-sided. Then people point at the imbalance and say “see, everyone agrees.” It becomes self-reinforcing.

And honestly, I already know this post is probably going to get downvoted heavily, which kind of proves the point I’m making.

Not because disagreement itself proves me right. Obviously people can disagree. But because on Reddit, especially increasingly on YAPms, criticism of the sub’s ideological culture gets treated almost like hostility toward the community itself. People don’t really engage with the argument; they react to the fact you even brought it up.

For context, even older YAPms discussions talked about trying to avoid turning the sub into another generic partisan echo chamber, and there were threads specifically warning against mass downvoting people just for conservative opinions. The fact those conversations existed at all says something about how the sub used to view itself.

I’m also not pretending this only happens on the left. Right-wing echo chambers obviously exist too. Some conservative spaces ban disagreement instantly and become unusable. But pointing that out doesn’t magically mean the same dynamic can’t happen in a left-leaning direction elsewhere.

The problem with echo chambers isn’t even just bias. Every community has bias. The problem is when people start rewarding ideological comfort over interesting discussion.

And YAPms used to be interesting precisely because it didn’t fully feel like that.

look im so fucking tired of the same recycled bullshit from these people. every single time someone talks about ai progress or when someone says they use ai, here come the doomers screaming "bUt tHe EnViRoNmEnT aNd WaTeR!!!!" like its the gotcha of the century.

bro we get it, training models uses power and water for cooling. no ones denying that. but acting like this is some unique ai apocalypse while ignoring how much fucking water and energy the entire internet, crypto mining, data centers for netflix and tiktok, and every other tech we use already burns through is peak hypocrisy. your iphone and spotify playlists aint running on fairy dust either.

they dont actually care about solutions or tradeoffs. they just want to shit on progress because "muh environment" is their new favorite panic button. Meanwhile actual problems like coal plants in asia or outdated grid infrastructure get a pass cuz it doesnt let them own the tech bros online.

ai is already helping with climate modeling, optimizing energy use, discovering better materials for batteries and carbon capture. but nah, these fucks would rather post their smug little threads about a data center using water equivalent to a golf course while they type it on devices made with rare earth mining that destroys habitats.

im done pretending this is good faith. its just anti-progress larping dressed up as environmentalism. if youre so worried about water go yell at almond farmers or meat industry instead of shitting on the thing that might actually help us solve this shit faster.

fuck these doomers man.

I first want to say that I really enjoy this game. I've been playing this game for a few days now but 1 issue is that no matter what I do, my team always not make it to the playoffs. I tried shifting my roster and nothing. Can someone help me, what stats should I prioritize, what kind of players in my starting 5. If I get the hang of this game, I can imagine myself playing this for weeks. Thanks