BuzzerBeater

BuzzerBeater is an online, browser-based, basketball management game (MMOG) developed in Boston, USA. Currently the game contains 84 different countries, each with its own league pyramid, and is available in 34 languages. As of May 2008, the game had over 27,000 users, each with his or her own team. BuzzerBeater is running its 5th season since it´s creation on April 15, 2007. In March 2008, BuzzerBeater announced a partnership with baseball-sim site CSFBL and since then, both sites have experienced a large increase in membership from the other site.

The game is completely free to play, though there is an optional Supporter Service available by in-game purchase. The manager is supposed to build a franchise from scratch, buying and selling players, training them, select in-game tactics or build a better stadium.

Registration

Any person can register on BuzzerBeater. The unique limitation is not to sign-up two teams and to register on a league of the country you´re living-in. If your country is not on the 84 countries list, you may register on the closest country to yours. After the registration is sent, the GMs (Game Masters) take no-more than 24 hours to accept the new registration. Usually it takes only a few hours to receive the team.

Game Structure

League Pyramid

Each country has it´s own league pyramid. New users receive a team that starts at the bottom of the pyramid. The number of divisions may vary in every country depending of quantity of users of that country. The top division consist on a 16 teams league. The second division is composed of 64 teams, the third division 256 teams, and so on.Every league has 16 teams divided into two conferences of 8 teams each. After the regular season ends, the top four teams of every zone goes to playoff, where the best team will be granted promotion to a higher division. The worst team of each conference is automatically demoted to a lower division. Teams that come 7th and 6th play demotion games between themselves. The loser gets demoted and the winners stays on division.

Cup Games and Scrimmages

Every country has it´s own Cup Tournament. At the beginning of the season, many teams will be automatically entered on this cup tournament (as many teams as will fit into a perfect direct elimination tree, that is, the highest power of two that is less than the number of teams in your league). Preference is given to those teams in higher divisions. If a level of divisions is split so that only some of the teams can be entered, teams will be ordered according to the previous seasons results. Teams that have been recently demoted to the bottom level are given the lowest preference. The cup matches are treated like scrimmages, so, while a team is still in contention for the league cup, that team won´t be able to play scrimmages with other teams. On the other hand, teams that did not enter the cup or that were eliminated, can play scrimmages between themselves.

B3: BuzzerBeater´s Best

BuzzerBeater´s Best is an international cup played by the winners of the national cup and top-division champions of each country on BuzzerBeater´s last season. This international club competition started on Season 5. During this first competition, the organizers also invited past winners of local cups and top-division champions. From season 6 and onwards, it will only include cup winners and top-division champions.

Season Structure

Each season consists on 14 weeks (real-time) of play. Every team has 3 games per week. On Saturdays and Tuesdays, League games are played. On Thursdays, Cup and Scrimmage games are played. All the team plays 22 regular season games, 14 of them are played against same conference teams, and the other 8 are played against the other conference teams. After the regular season is over, the four best teams in each conference qualify to the playoffs. On the 12nd week of the season, playoffs start facing the team that ended 1st on regular season against the team that ended 4th on the same conference. The semi-finals and finals of each conference are played using a one-game elimination system. The winner goes to the next round and the loser goes home. After every conference crowns it´s own champion, the finals of the division are held, this time using a best-of-three system to determine who´ll win the division championship. The 14th week of the season is used the off-season break.

All-Star Game

During 7th week of the regular season, the top players in each league will compete in a series of All-Star competitions. The top shooters will have a three-point competition; there will be a dunk competition implemented in the future; and these festivities will conclude with a full All-Star game between the two conferences.

The top players are chosen by the fans based on in-game performance during the season. On the Saturday leading up to the All-Star week, the votes are revealed to the managers, as well as the roster for the All-Star game. The Three-point contest starts an hour before the game, and the game takes place at the usual time of day for games.

Community

Size and Distribution

The BuzzerBeater userbase includes 26.000 users from 84 countries around the world. Spain is the country with most users at this time with 4755. Each country has it´s own forum for discussion.

The Forums

The are several types of forums for discussion. The BB forums are the ones were you discuss in-game situations. Each country has it´s own BB-Forum. There´s also a some Global BB-Forums(English-Spanish-German). Aside from the BB-forums, the game includes Non-BB Forums, which are used to talk about real life topics. Again, each country has it´s own Non-BB forum.

Finally, there are some special forums, like the "Help Forum", when users get cleared their doubts about the game, the "Bugs" forum where users report bugs about the game and the suggestions forum.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu