BuzzerBeater Forums

What's the difference?
I know you claim to be the one who knows the essence of the problem, to me the main issue is to get new teams competetive as soon as possible to make the managers stay! Changes in training still means they need to train first to get better players, which will still take a while. My suggestions have instant effect.

Well, I explained why I think that's worse than increasing training.

Let's say you create a 120 TSP 50k player (you easily can, all 3 my utopia trainees were about 50k when they passed 120) out of the blue and put it on the market, who will be able to afford it? Whoever has more money. Who has more money? Teams with larger bank account or, more likely, more valuable players, that they can sell in order to buy our newly created player. If you increase training instead, you put the ball in each user's court, those who train will benefit, those who don't won't.

And yes the essence of the problem is that even if you wanted, you cannot create 8-10 players on your own to compete for a D2 title. We may ask someone with a homegrown team what's the best that it's reasonable to expect. Now, since you cannot create 8-10 fully trained players players and nobody can, then as a whole the whole game is unsustainable unless there is someone who trains for others.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/4/2017 3:13:13 PM

Sorry, I wasn't clear in what I wrote. All my arguments were assuming that 2-position training was more effective. 2-position training is rather useless at the moment, that's why I think the speed of it needs to be increased.

We were talking about new teams all the time, so I obviously meant the kind of players new teams would buy. Div3 starter level at best.

D3 have 50k starters, in Utopia they do and all of my trainees were around 120 or better when I relegated to D3. So yeah 50k salary can mean a lot of things, the problem is someone will have to decide where to draw the line. Do you want to trust the guy who first shut down free agency and retired U21 players (of the largest BB nation) and then made 60 TSP 40yo free agents? Let's be reasonable here.

No, that's not the essence of the problem. This game was never about training your whole team. It was always training and buying. Buying is the part that has gotten harder in the last seasons.

You're wrong. Let's say you start anew and everyone competes. Let's also assume that everyone trains and you can swap one trainee for another all the time. What kind of teams would you have? My answer is 6 trained players and 6 scrubs.

Remove FA for a second. There is only a certain number of players that can be created by teams training. Of course the actual number is lower because not everyone trains and that makes things worse. Now the question is: is that potential number enough to maintain the average skill level across leagues or not. My opinion is that it is not and therefore you have seen 2 things: skill level dropping and prices increasing. There is an equilibrium at the end of the tunnel. At some point teams will be so bad on average that you require very minimal training to reach the average skill level, but who likes a game where teams get progressively worse?

However it is important to understand that this situation is created because of the default limitations in the training system and because some people are not training (understandably in most cases). Most people are not training because of said limitations, so here lies the key problem.

Homegrown teams are a compass for the game. They are not able to compete not because they have 3 players that are similar, they are not able to compete because they can't train enough players. If you were able to create 3 guards, 3 big men and 3 SFs before they start declining you would be able to compete. At the end of the day, the userbase is the sum of 17k homegrown teams, we get the players that collectively we are able to create, no more and no less (except for Free Agency).

Does a D4 team really need "fully trained" players.
If an average Div2 team can be fully self-trained, that sounds like a good average. Some teams need better players than that, some can do with worse.

You're right and that's another problem that I pointed out some 10 seasons ago to Marin. Having 17k userbase is not the same as having 50k, because the league structure is dramatically different. DIV teams are a lot less relevant today. The number of teams in D4 or D5 is actually lower than those in D3 or higher. 85 nations out of 98 (pre Africa merge) don't have more than 336 members (16+64+256).

It is very hard to train an average D2 team be fully self trained. The salary average in my D2 is 340k. That means 3x3 players of ca. 38k salary. So you need to reach 38k by the 4th or 5th season of training (21yo-22yo) before someone starts declining. Most teams have 12 players, then the average would be 29k. So you'd need to create 29k players every 3-4 seasons (20yo or 21yo) before someone starts declining, which is harder.

Anyway, the proof that we users are not creating enough players collectively -either because of a default problem in the training system or because not enough people train- is in the state of transfer market. And keep in mind that there are MANY free agents nowadays, without them, prices would be higher and players available fewer. Whether you believe the cause is the former or the latter is irrelevant, because the solutions are the same. The only alternative is to let the average player skill level fall until it is bad enough.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/4/2017 7:50:07 PM

Sorry, I wasn't clear in what I wrote. All my arguments were assuming that 2-position training was more effective. 2-position training is rather useless at the moment, that's why I think the speed of it needs to be increased.

Makes sense. Maybe if it was 10% slower, instead of 25% slower, more people would train 2 positions throughout.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/4/2017 7:52:24 PM

The point is not that you can go into a top league or not, the point is whether we can train enough players. The team you refer to is this (122945).

What we can see from a quick look:
1) This guy has trained only 3 guys out of 15 from day-1, one is 78k (24yo) salary, one is 48k (24yo) and one is 11k salary (27yo). I have more training exemption from a single trainee.
2) His transfer history is -9.4 million. In the last 12 months he spent 16.3-16.4 million, while cashing 5.5. What does it have to do with training?

He didn't get there because he trained he got there by saving money and building a LI cookie cutter (as Wolph liked to say) with limited rebounding and flow. And because Koorliga doesn't seem terribly competitive, he's able to stay at the salary floor while he does primary training on 2 of his guys.

As a disclaimer, I'm training 5 guys in D1. Five, not two.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/7/2017 7:02:03 AM

So he trained 2 players and now he is in "Kõrgliiga" so you can train enough players.

Look you chose the wrong example, all you've proven is that you need to save more than the opponents in order to buy players. So this is the thing. Train 1 or 2 guys, primary training only, buy high TSP low salary guys, stay close to the salary floor so you keep making good profits. Invest 12 million net in 4 seasons in players and you will be ok.

It doesn't solve the problem of the game as a whole, though. Because let's say he trained 2 or 3 players over the last 10 seasons. Assuming he always trained that would be a total of 4 or 5 players in 10 seasons.

Restart the game, erase the auction market and allow only 1 to 1 trades. After 14 seasons how many trained (let's say 35k-40k salary) players would you reasonably have? Then you have the answer: either many users training and selling to others while playing with scrubs OR the system naturally creates a shortage of trained players. The fact that prices started to stop growing when they massively increased Free Agency should explain all of this better than I possibly can.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/7/2017 9:06:44 AM