BuzzerBeater Forums

I haven't used the TL all that much recently, but I noticed that free agents no longer start at $1, they start at 10 times their salary, with the maximum of 1 million. It's not a big issue, but I actually think it would be better if they went back to starting at $1. I don't think that, with so many users now, there's a risk of players ending up selling below their transfer value. The advantage, in my view, is that it allowed me to search for a given type of player, then place ~1k bids on the 5 or 6 players that could fit the bill and track how the price was evolving as we got closer to the deadline in the "bids" page. Not that easy to be done if the starting price is 600k! I know supporters can save transfer searches, and bookmark players, but for non-supporters it's a little non-practical to bookmark several pages on the internet browser and check them one by one. What do you think?

I like the new Free Agent concept because of economical reasons. It was a change for the better to balance the transfer market and stop people from doing too stupid things concerning high salary players. By purchasing supportership, you can add those players to your favourites and bookmark them this way.

Yeah, we agree that supporter would bring these advantages. But I didn't really understand why you like the new free agent concept, or what you mean by balancing the market. Can you elaborate a little bit? Cheers

Well, the reason for all of that was that the flood of FAs ruined the transfer market because many of them sold "below" market value (read: the market value of similar skilled players went down because so many players of that skillset were on the market basically for free). Even with a bidding war, the pure number of players of those skills lead to low prizes.

Now that ever player of that skillset has a "price tag" of some sort - sometimes well above their true value (just take a look at those big guy players), the teams selling players don´t have to face such a huge and unrealistic figure of similar skilled players and have some kind of a shot of netting a "real value" for their players.

In addition, small and rookie teams gambling on FAs in the past often ended up with salary monsters for a non-investment.They tried to sell those players (which they rated a "bargain" impressed by their skills and their rating) for what they thought would be his real value, couldnt find a buyer and ended up in bankruptcy, while that monster became FA again. So the same players ended on the FA list over and over again, some of them ruining several newbie teams along the way.

I understand your point about monsters and small teams. Sometimes I have fun and look one of those portuguese "monsters" to see on how many teams he has bounced around recently. But let's agree that those huge-salary monsters are a deeper and different issue, because basically nobody can afford them.

As to the market value part, I'm not sure I totally agree. The market is still flooded with the same number of FAs, the only difference is that they don't go in at $1, they go in at (10 x salary). Maybe you have more experience in the market than I do, but I don't recall all that many players going below their "real" value. If I remember correctly, this FA business was introduced precisely to increase the supply of players and decrease prices. You can make the point that teams who listed their players directly at the "real" value faced an uphill battle, but I always had success when listing players at $1 to atract as many bidders as possible.

I understand that you like this change, but I really didn't get why you do. Are you saying that players starting at $1 are much more likely to be sold under market value than players starting at 10xsalary? Like I said, I don't spend much time on the market, so it could be the case. But on the other hand, it means that some players, like this guy (12477387), are driven out of the game because the starting price is not appealing.

If your main concern is tracking free agents to see how much they sell for, I think it may be easier to just have another filter for free agents. I've seen a couple other threads suggesting more filters, and like that idea. Gameshape, experience would be other useful filters.

Adding more filters is a good idea, but it's not exactly what I meant. I don't want to buy players just because they are free agents. All I was saying is that, when free agents went at $1, I could initially table a bunch of 1k bids for a few players that fit what I was looking for, and then in the bids page monitor their price until the deadlines. Right now I can still monitor without the initial bid, but it involves searching for the players 1 by 1 several times. It's not, by any means, the end of the world

I do know how to make links, I was just making it harder for you by making you search for the player ;). The portuguese "beast" I was talking about is this guy (4726855). Before they had the 4-day rule he was transferred twice a week! The player I was showing, if I remember correctly, had 14, 14, 13 at ID, RB and IS. Don't remember the secondaries, but he had atrocious PA and/or HA. And for some reason he was incredibly foul-prone.

So if I understand correctly, the free agents were introduced because prices in the market were skyrocketing. You're saying that them being introduced at $1 made for a huge army of underpriced veterans, and this 10 times salary sort of balances it out. Is that right?