Come Play For My Stupid Make-Believe Basketball Team

[Whipstitch]

What is the SBA?
The Simulation Basketball Association is a 5 year old forum based simulation basketball league. How it works is that people create a player according to various guidelines, get hooked up with a team and then the resulting rosters are plugged into Fast Break Pro Basketball 3. Then the results of games are processed and posted several times a week, with each in-universe season taking place over 8 weeks of real time followed by a 2 week off-season in which roster changes get handled. A full playing career from college to the pros can end up taking 14 in-universe seasons or more depending on how badly you want to fight the aging process in your character's later years.

What's the appeal to a Denner?
These leagues incorporate aspects of roleplaying, creative writing and char op nerdery. Your character has an array of attributes and each week you have the opportunity to make improvements upon your character build by completing point tasks and spending the resulting points on build upgrades in your update thread.

Just how onerous are these point tasks?
Every week you have the chance to earn up to 9 capped points by bumping the sim threads in a timely manner and creating small media pieces which consist of silly fake sports articles or bits of visual art like forum signatures. There's also league jobs which give 3 points on top of that in exchange for handling some of the league's maintenance such as running one of the teams, grading media or double checking the update threads for errors. There's also a steady stream of what's called uncapped points such as character training camps and season predictions. All told it's pretty trivial to get at least 5 points a week without any creative work but to really kick ass it helps to enjoy writing or doing some photoshop work. Fair warning: visual art is inexplicably held to a higher standard than the written word.

Should I get started now?
Shameful confession: I don't just have a player, I'm the new Athletic Director of the Louisville Cardinals. So while the NCAA is currently in mid-season right now, I'm about to cut some inactive guy's ass and that'll open up a slot on my roster. I could really use another Power Forward to play as a backup big man and possibly even push our current starter for minutes if he doesn't keep earning. I can easily find 20 minutes a game for you at a minimum and could scare up more than that if you prove yourself a good earner and we gin up a reasonably versatile build for you. My team record isn't so good right now because we won the NCAA tournament last season and had like 4 blue chippers graduate, but for various eligibility reasons that I can explain to you later I can virtually guarantee we'll be better next year. If you're not interested in joining up with me as a Power Forward (although you totally should; newbies aren't banned from being Athletic Directors and I own and understand the simulator better than some of my competition) then honestly you might want to hang tight for a few weeks and create during the off-season so you can have your pick of suitors instead of trying to shoehorn yourself into a full roster. With that said, with the way we handle the draft and college eligibility there isn't really any big long-term penalty for having a partial season. I can explain this in more detail if people show interest. If you want to join up with me at Louisville I'd rather we do some char op before you actually create a player.


FAQ

How's the community?
It's pretty decent. The atmosphere is casual, there's a bit of friendly banter/shit talking and overall if your skin is thick enough to handle the Den then there should be no problem. There's obviously some overlap with larger sports culture but it's nothing too annoying. Plus, the one time I saw glaringly homophobic harassment on the SBA discord the guy got banned immediately; I'd characterize things as being friendly without being a hugbox.

How's Competitive Balance?
This is an area where I haven't really been with this crew long enough to really pass too much judgment. Few of the rules particularly bother me and with few exceptions I don't have an obvious solution even to the stuff I do kinda dislike. With that said, here's some quick issues I'm aware of:

1. A tendency for the most active people to cluster together a bit. There's anti-tampering rules in place and a sort of ersatz salary cap that prevents teams from having just all the best players, but there's definitely an issue at play where good players have obvious incentive to try and sign up with other good players. Because competitive basketball.

2. Retirement carry over and training points for donations. When your character retires you can apply 5% of your career earnings to your next college player during the year you declare for the draft (prior to the year they declare for the draft NCAA guys are capped to 199 points). On top of that you can donate to the site once a season for small amount of training points. Playerbase attrition, salary caps, upgrade cost scaling and archetype caps that keep ubermensch from completely ruling the earth, but it must be admitted that veteran "high earner" players do have a leg up on us "first-genners" who haven't been around for 2+ years. There's still fun to be had, but I get why some people object to that shit on principle.

3. The Evil Empire. The site has one dominant Athletic Director and predictably enough he runs Duke. He's a great recruiter which has created the self-fulling prophecy where blue chip members default to Duke when all else is equal since they correctly assume that he'll find someone to team up with them sooner rather than later. On the bright side, the NCAA is essentially a feeder league to our pro level so such things only need be a concern for a season or two of your career if you're truly active.