Understanding VBA Play Styles and Team Composition

This is a follow up to our earlier post on Play Styles and understanding player performance. See our first post outlining the Play Styles here.

In last week’s blog post, we shared our approach to game balancing as we build the Virtual Basketball Association (VBA), the basketball league of the Metaverse. As season0 continues to unfold, we wanted to provide some insight into how we are making sure the game makes basketball sense through the lens of Play Styles. To be successful in the VBA, GMs will have to construct teams of Play Styles that go well together.

The Three Categories of Play Styles

As a simplification, each Play Style favors one of three categories: offensive, defensive, or support.

• Offensive players are stronger in areas like inside or outside scoring.
• Defensive players are stronger in areas likes interior or perimeter defense.
• Support players are stronger in areas like passing or dribbling.

Pitfalls of Favoring One Style

Loading up your team with all offensive players means you’ll have too many players who want to shoot, but no one to create better shots for them and leave you vulnerable on defense. A team that’s stacked with support players may not be able to capitalize on scoring opportunities. And an all-defensive team might be able to protect the rim, but stumble at bringing the ball up the court and putting points on the board.

Therefore, playing only your assumed “best” players may not always yield the best results. Instead, the key to building the strongest team is surrounding your star players with the right supporting cast and finding the right team composition.

The Slasher Example

In the first few weeks of game launch, “Slashers” became one of the most sought after play styles. Many of the best teams featured Slashers, and a deeper look into their performance showed that they can score a lot of points with high efficiency. The advice going around was to load up on Slashers, but this may not have been the optimal line-up.

Slashers are primarily strong in offense, and would probably perform even better with players who can compliment them on defense (or support) by locking up the perimeter, passing them the ball, or grabbing a lot of rebounds.

Compositions vs. Single Best Team

So, the next time you set your line-up, consider your team as a whole unit, instead of independent agents. And we hope you’ll keep in mind the words of Michael Jordan, who knew a thing or two about basketball: “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”