2024 | Offseason Update

[TuscanSota]

Hey everyone,

We're about halfway through the transfer portal process and have ~4 weeks remaining of SimNBA activity. I wanted to update everyone on a couple of things that were announced last season that will be applicable this season:

 

Bonus Points

If your team found a level of succession at some point last season, bonus points will be rewarded for you for the upcoming recruiting season. Bonus points are stackable and are applied after region/state bonus is applied during recruiting. These points are designed to give your team an edge in recruiting based on your previous season performance. For more info on bonus points, please read here.

 

Scheduling & Realignment

Conference scheduling is currently in development. @Wahoo has put in a lot of great work towards automating the scheduling process for conferences. This will allow us to generate schedules more efficiently and will allow us to start scheduling out of conference games even sooner.

With that said, we are also keeping a close eye on realignment to ensure that next year's conferences reflect the IRL counterparts with some exceptions (Guam, Chaminade, and American Samoa). Here are the major realignments to be aware of:

• Texas & OU to the SEC
• USC, UCLA, Oregon & Washington to the B1G
• California, Stanford, and SMU to the ACC
• Colorado, Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah to the Big 12
• Wazzu & Oregon State to the WCC
• West Georgia is joining the ASUN
• Mercyhurst is joining the NEC
• Hartford is being temporarily added to the NEC until the conference announces their 10th new member.
• UT Rio Grande Valley is joining the Southland from the WAC
• Western Illinois is leaving the Summit League for the OVC
• Merrimack and Sacred Heart are leaving the NEC for the MAAC

 

Custom Invitationals

When Out of Conference Scheduling begins, teams will be able to opt into invitationals once again. We're keeping the five invitationals we had from last season and will be including the opportunity to host a custom invitational. Users that have put out at least 8 articles or media content at some point during the 2023 season will be able to host and create their own invitational. A thread will be created soon to collect and allow users to create their own invitational.

 

Classics Update

Because of the large scale of realignment done this current season, some of the Classics are now hosting teams that are in their own conference. To avoid scheduling conference opponents, we're going to allow a nomination and vote on which teams should be included in a classics event, and why.

Classics are a format where teams enter a long-term rotation of games that exist from season to season at a neutral site location. Historically, these often hosted blue blood teams to face off against one another; for SimFBA, we're going to be a bit flexible and allow certain teams to enter in due to their own success.

Here are the classics in question:

CBS Sports Classic: UKEN, UNC, UCLA, Ohio State (One Spot is open). Week 2B

SimFBA Classic Series: (Four Spots Open). Week 2B

A thread will be created soon for nomination of teams to a specific series, with a vote being held later this offseason.

Outside of the above classics, there are still other classic games that are absolutely opt-in, that do not have the long-term traditional format of the above classics. Anyone is welcome to join in these exciting neutral site matchups.

 

Challenges

Because of realignment, we are leaving the idea of a conference challenge up to the user base participating. If you want your conference to face off against another conference for bragging rights, please reach out to your conference commissioner on scheduling a conference challenge with another conference.

Here were the previous conference challenges from last season:

• Gavitt Tipoff Games (Big East vs Big Ten)
• ACC-B1G Challenge
• A10-Funbelt Challenge
• Big East-Big 12 Battle

 

Gameplay Updates

A dev diary will be provided later highlighting some changes occurring engine-side for next season. There will be more info after the SimNBA season ends.

 

~Tuscan