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I think you said it pretty well. The market is very dysfunctional. Let me give you a different perspective from a guy in a micronation:

I'm playing in div. 2 where I started when I created my team. The salary floor in my league is 185k. So far my number 1 priority has been to finish my arena, which I did last week. This means I have put all my money into it, and therefore I have not had the resources to buy new players. My team's salary is at 85k. The next step for me is to reach the salary floor. To do that I can either buy one very good player or a few decent ones. Either way, it will cost me at least about 3 mil to do so, because I don't want to spend my money on a 33+ year old player who will only contribute for a couple of seasons. That is 3 million at least JUST to reach the salary floor. Needless to say, I don't have nearly that amount in the bank.

Furthermore I might very well promote to d1 this season or in the seasons to come. The salary floor in d1 in Denmark is 440K. My best guess is that it would cost around an additional 8 million to reach that. A hell of a lot more than the 1.5 million promotion bonus. And again this is JUST to reach the salary floor.
Because I'm developing players myself I might be able to cut a couple of millions off of this, but it is still a huge amount of money needed just to reach the minimum salaries.

So the problems with the market apply to managers in big as well as in small nations. In my opinion, the only solutions to this is to increase training speed and increase the amount of talent in the draft. These things would bring more talent to the TL and that way prices would be driven down.

Let's the new EGM trying to explain how it's always the same users and how they are only negative.

Listen to the voice of reason for once.

And Marin, it took you, what, 6 seasons?, to admit you completely messed up with Free Agency. We told you that not only were you wrong, but that even a loose FA policy might not be enough to keep the average talent level from nosediving. BB-Ryan/RiP understood this immediately. We also told you what the only other solution is aside from FA: more training, one way or another. We told you 8, 10 seasons ago, not now.

I think it's time that whoever takes decisions on the direction of the game takes a good look at himself and decides what needs to happen: 30 seasons of trying to bleed bank accounts and lowering the average player skill across any league level, which we know isn't working because people have most of their money invested in their players; or more training: everyone can create better players or more or faster, so that the relative advantage at the top is lower.

First fix whatever you have done to the Fan Survey though, please.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/3/2017 8:21:47 PM

And Marin, it took you, what, 6 seasons?, to admit you completely messed up with Free Agency.

He has? I have a 26 year old $90k guard and a 29 year old $145k centre on a bot team in my league. Seems counterintuitive to admit a fault and not correct it.

Well his policy went from zero to hero. First nearly no Free Agents and he defended that policy vehemently. Then he says nothing about changing policy and starts creating a lot of Free Agents, including 40yo with 60 TSP.

I think the market probably peaked and it is now flat, however as the OP was saying the general problem is that there aren't enough trained players.

Well, you just made sure that the new EGM is right about that when you brought this thread down to Marin-bashing. Can we have a constructive discussion for once? If you wanna start another fight with Manon, please do it in private.

A "I'm sorry, I was wrong about Free Agency and Training all along" and "I'm sorry, I was wrong about a handful of people being negative, I recognise I'm more negative than they are" will suffice. You read the suggestions and global forums and you will know public apologies from both Manon and Marin are in order. And they would be a good starting point to clear a lot of bad blood. Many people already quit because of what these 2 people have said or refused to say over the years, it's pointless to mention names, but they know who the most prominent ones were. And yes Manon also bears some direct responsibility for fanning the flames against specific users.

My point is that what the OP mentioned is a general problem that a lot of people acknowledge, a BB acknowledged, some GMs acknowledged, but other member of the staff are in denial and just prefer to blame the messenger instead of trying to understand the message. This must never happen again.

a) Give new team MUCH better players to start with, so the gap to the old teams and also the money they need to spend just to reach the salary floor is reduced.

You fail to grasp the real essence of the problem. The game cannot produce enough trained players. THIS is the problem. It was fine when numbers were falling and we had some Free Agency because enough FA were hitting the market, but when the users bottomed out it was always going to cause a drought in the transfer market. It would have happened even if we had gone from 50k to 40k users and it stopped there, although the change in prices would not have been so extreme (because they would have never become as cheap as they were 15 seasons ago).

The other factor is that the turnover of managers with trained players (and cheaters?) is lower now than it was when we had 50k users. The 17k users left are mostly long standing managers, while most of those who quit are new managers, who are returning or trying out the game and don't spend enough time to train any player before they quit.

Handing more money to new managers will not change the fact that there aren't enough trained players in the game. It will simply increase prices. And even assuming you have a positive impact because user retention increases, you will still be short players, because we cannot create enough players even if all 17k users were training efficiently, let alone inefficiently for whatever individual reason.

Do you think it's possible to field a decent homegrown D2 team (with players trained from scratch) or a top d3 team? If the answer is no, then it means we users cannot create enough players as a whole. Maybe it will be possible in the future if the average skill in the game keeps falling: by then D2 will feel like D3 from 10 seasons ago and D1 will feel like D2 in terms of player skill level.

b) Put randomly generated players with 25+ years and salary around 20-50k on the market. This helps much quicker than better draftees.

So you'd be in favour of randomly created, medium to high salary players, but not in favour of allowing users to train those players themselves? Why?

Training balances things out: if you are not competing it's easier to train, so top teams will not typically train, at least not out of position. If you create random 50k salary players, you are not giving any advantage to the people who need to catch up as everyone has the same ability to pick them up, but users at the top also have more money (usually invested in their players, which are now worth tens of millions) so they would be able to control the market and still not need to train.

If you speed up training one way or another, the up and coming teams will have an advantage over teams competing.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/4/2017 8:22:19 AM

a) Give new team MUCH better players to start with, so the gap to the old teams and also the money they need to spend just to reach the salary floor is reduced.
More detailed suggestion about this is here: (286547.1)
b) Put randomly generated players with 25+ years and salary around 20-50k on the market. This helps much quicker than better draftees.

I might have been a little narrow-minded when I wrote it was the only solution. I like your suggestions (and I read the suggestion you refer to and strongly support it) and they would be nice additions to a number of changes this game is in need of. I still think better draftees and better training options is a must though:

Better training: I'm not saying that an over radical change is needed. The maximum speed we have through 1-position training right now is fine in my opinion. The thing we need to look at is alternatives to 1-position training. Because at the moment you don't really have a choice if you want valuable results. Why not increase the speed of 2- and 3-position training? It would give users the possibility to actually make a choice about how they want to develop their players: you could choose to develop 2 or 3 great players, or you can make the choice of developing a few more players at a time and they would actually be useable but not superstars.

Better draftees: This goes hand in hand with the above. If we have an option to actually develop quality players through 2-position training then we would need more quality draftees to do so.

you could choose to develop 2 or 3 great players, or you can make the choice of developing a few more players at a time and they would actually be useable but not superstars.

It is already like that. 2 position training is faster than 1 position training as a whole: the penalty is around 25%-26%, so you can train 3 players at 100% (300%) or 6 players at 75% (450%).

The problem is:
- you get 6 players which look the same instead of 3
- it takes longer to get to the same skillset because the training is slower
- you need to sacrifice 2 positions for training instead of 1 (2 guards for OD or PA, 2 big men for ID or IS or SB), making it harder to compete, because you need to hide 2 players on defense instead of 1 and you need to play a big man at a guard position or play with no flow
- you won't be able to cap higher potential players (i.e. the ones that will help you in higher divisions)

I have done this at the beginning of Utopia and I still have 2 players with 74 and 83 TSP to show for it, they are well rounded but they don't excel at anything really. At the beginning of Utopia you could get away with it and compete because rosters were not that good all around.



Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/4/2017 8:46:21 AM

This is exactly my point. Say you lower the penalty to 15%. You would actually be able to make pretty good players. They won't be as good as if they were trained with 1-position training, but they would be good enough to contribute, especially at lower levels.

- you get 6 players which look the same instead of 3

I don't see this as an issue. If you only have use for 2 of them, then you just sell the other 4. This would mean more players on the transferlist, and the manager would have money to buy players for the positions he hasn't trained.

- it takes longer to get to the same skillset because the training is slower
- you need to sacrifice 2 positions for training instead of 1 (2 guards for OD or PA, 2 big men for ID or IS or SB), making it harder to compete, because you need to hide 2 players on defense instead of 1 and you need to play a big man at a guard position or play with no flow
- you won't be able to cap higher potential players (i.e. the ones that will help you in higher divisions)

Well since this thread originally was about new users, this might not be that big of a problem. You don't need to cap high potential players at the lower levels. Capped starter/star/allstar potential players will do the trick. When you then need the higher potential guys you can switch to 2-position training, but that is a managerial choice which, in essence, is what this game is all about.

Increasing 2-position training speed would be a way to make new managers see progress faster and it would increase the number of mid-level players on the transferlist, which is what the OP is asking for.

I don't see this as an issue. If you only have use for 2 of them, then you just sell the other 4. This would mean more players on the transferlist, and the manager would have money to buy players for the positions he hasn't trained.

The reason why this is a problem is as follows. You get to the same skillset when the player is older so he will definitely be worth less than the same players 2 or 3 years younger. So you trained 6, but it's unlikely that any of them will go for a lot of money. There is a premium for youth and for having more of specific skills and constant 2 position training is in the way of both. It is possible you make more money this way, but you get the money much later on.And this is all assuming that you are training average potential players, starter, star, allstar, perennial allstar, because if you train higher potential players you will be probably be left with untapped potential.

Your reasoning would work if everyone was training 6 players, but virtually nobody does that, so your players will always be either older or undertrained compared to the average trained player. And with the money you will get from the sale, you can expect to buy equally valuable players (which really means subpar or older players).

Also keep in mind that the slower training has a ripple effect, it is effectively compounded. So the 25% will be a lot more after 6 seasons, due to the elastic effect and the speed decline linked to age. The 25% is valid in a vacuum, it's valid on the first session, after that the single position will always train with better elastics or a younger trainee or both.

The way I see it, this is only a viable strategy to make money and even then it's debatable that you can make more money that way when you take into account time. The choice might be between: train 6 PAS for 8 seasons and sell 4 or train 3 Superstar (because you buy 3 players you can get better trainees) for 6 seasons and sell 1. If you choose the former, you lose a lot more games, you cash 2 seasons later and the remaining players you keep are likely worse. The numbers aren't accurate but it gives an idea of the trade-off.

You don't need to cap high potential players at the lower levels. Capped starter/star/allstar potential players will do the trick.

It really doesn't. If you plan to progress through the leagues as your trainees come along then you need higher potential players. If you plan: ok I'm going from D4 to D3 with one set of trainees, then D3 to D2 another set of trainees etc, then yes, I would agree. It will also take you like 6-8 seasons for each batch of trainees and you may not be able to create D2 starters this way. As I said, there is also the problem of sacrificing 2 positions instead of 1, each game, which will have a significant impact on winning.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 8/4/2017 10:35:46 AM