BuzzerBeater Forums

Oh, I agree it makes sense, mostly. I'd take issue with the $20M+ team value assumption, but my players don't have TPE within a few weeks of me training them anyway, and rarely have TPEs when I buy them (I'm one of those wierdos that insist on defense and side skills *gasp*), so I may not have a great grasp of what my team's really worth -- and this is my inaugural d.II season anyway.

If you're going to 2-position train and lose, why not 6-man training? 48-ing a player isn't that hard, and you don't get messed up that often, especially if you don't actually care about winning.

I wouldn't go basic on the doctor -- 5 week injuries can vaporate a LOT of trainee value. My assumption when I first switched to single position training was that the value of training 18yos with extreme height was somewhere in the neighborhood of $75k-$100k/week in their "formative" (under-22) years. Now, granted, my analysis back then wound up settling on low potential trainees because I was assuming there was no potential premium by 22 years old, so I didn't want to pay through the nose for trainees that I wasn't going to train more than 3-4 seasons. So if you're going with high potential training, you might wind up with more of a $50k-$75k weekly return to training, or even less. But is saving 10-15k/week on the doctor worth the significantly higher risk of +5 injuries?

The other thing you wind up implicitly doing with that plan is playing a market game rather than a basketball manager game. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that thing the transfer market should be regulated to the point where day trading or carry trading is impossible, or greatly laments inflation/deflation/etc in the player market -- I just know that personally I don't come here to play the stock market. If I wanted to do that, I'd go over to Yahoo Finance or something. Each his own, I suppose, but it seems to me that the basic premise of this is that player transfer prices will remain flat or drop while you're banking cash. If player transfer prices move higher, then your banked capital is being eroded and you're not getting the returns of higher income from being in a higher division.

I can say for certain that there's a big financial gap between even just II and III -- my player salaries are 30-odd percent higher than last season and I'm still clearing almost four times the typical weekly profit (salaries from ~180k last season in III to ~250k this season; typical weekly profit from ~40k to ~150k). Granted, I won't make a deep playoff run here, but if I were to burn the team and deliberately relegate, my gross receipts would probably be cut by 50% or more for each league level I dropped.

Well, come end of the next season to beginning of the one after, I'll be changing over my team a whole helluva lot. I can see 1 player surviving the purge. Will my team survive in Div II? I doubt it considering how long it'll take me to find the pieces I want. I'm going to be patient and make sure I bring in the players that fit the profile I want perfectly. This will surely cost me a lot of games.

And I will also be switching over to pure SF training. I plan on starting slow. As of now, I'm looking at buying 1 SF 18 yo, then buy another 1 season later, than a third one a season after that. There is 0 chance of surviving in Div II training up 3 18 yo trainees in ID/OD/whatever else, so I plan to stagger it a bit in a futile effort to survive. This will also allow me to buy players who are relatively young (trainable age still) at other positions and train them up. Big guys that lack a little D, guards that lack a little D. Also some Rebs and JS/HN/DR. It other words they won't have to necessarily be finished products, for the first season or 2 they'd get training half the season.

I considered buying a 20 yo, 19 yo, and a 18 yo SF trainee, but everytime I look for what I'd want, there is nada. So I'm going with the aforementioned route. And of course, I'm going to do my damnedest to stay American, home grown. Not sure I"ll be able to however.

This will most likely be the last bit of training I do considering the timeline I expect it to take in order to train up the SFs to the levels that I want. Many moons will shine before this is done, and knowing my past (taking into account HT), I'll be burnt and done. But it should be interesting, if not painful, if not fun.

So, in summation, enjoy my presence while you can because I don't expect to be around much longer than another season or 2. And things won't be looking up, so to speak. But at least it'll keep me entertained, can't say the same for anyone else ;)

your analysis is good but partly flawed. i originally thought like you, but you can't deny the game income is tempting, and keeping an arena semi-full depends upon some decent performances.

so in that sense. my goal is to keep 6 decent players.

greer is staying as he is my franchise player, was my autoassign when i signed up and im sticking with him till i can put him in the hof

bolden is staying with me because the market on him sucked (I shoulda waited to unload clement till the last week, because he was better than howell but got a lower price by far).

arreola is staying with me because hes still trainable with his height and skill-set. (age kinda sucks but oh well)

santiago is now staying with me because i need a decentish bigman, and hes prominent/prolific for a low wage.

durschlag is staying with me because hes my frankenstein.

and paiva might have to stay too if i cant sell him.


the rest of my team will suck. early in the season ill poop on a few cup parades, mostly lose games in d3, but starting around week 4-5, i should win at least one game a week of my choosing with my top lineup playing heavy minutes. i also expect a stud draftee, (though jelme is closing in on me!), and can thus finish with 8-12 wins in d3, which is semi-competitive. god forbid i make the playoffs, i can run small ball, and for one game i could be tough in d3 with a legit 30k sg and 28k pg flanked by my stud draftee at sf and maybe bolden backing up all 3 slots.

the salary struture for this team should only be 150k a week in wages, but will have ok performance, and more importantly i will be profitable even in d3 (d2 money is nice)

i have just shy of 8 mil now, would love to upgrade my over-salaried level 5 trainer to a 6 or 7, if i can find the right price point im so in.

once ortega goes and i get a coach i have 9 mil. if i expect prices to tank i sit on the money until they do. if i see a sudden increase coming, i will blow 4 mil on a dominant PF age 22-23, and 5 mil on a top top center, and look to flip soonish.if i see prices in a holding pattern ill keep stockpilng cash waiting for my run.

anyway thats the thought for now.

Good luck with the whole stud draftee thing.

In other news I went from being in last place to tied for second! Whoop.

Hmm.

Well, good luck with all that.

On an aside, does a level 6 or 7 trainer make a real difference? From last I read, and I admit that it was a while ago, but lvl 6/7s were not all worth it in the end. If I'm wrong in this, I may have to check into this after next season.

I also wonder if their salaries go up more quickly than a 5. That would be a downer for sure.

Last edited by Toonces at 5/26/2010 2:16:27 AM

the 6/7's are marginally better. but still, it matters, and its alot easier to manage minutes when you arent playing to win.

the salaries are always a fixed 2% increase a week. so you look at carrying costs, and replacement costs, and the math isnt too too difficult from there in terms of ok prices to upgrade at etc etc

the salaries are always a fixed 2% increase a week. so you look at carrying costs, and replacement costs, and the math isnt too too difficult from there in terms of ok prices to upgrade at etc etc

Incorrect.

Salary increases by week:
Level 2 - 1.25%
Level 3 - 1.5%
Level 4 - 1.75%
Level 5 - 2%
Level 6 - 2.25%
Level 7 - 2.5%

heh, shows i always carry level 5's

thanks for that!

Oh, I agree it makes sense, mostly. I'd take issue with the $20M+ team value assumption, but my players don't have TPE within a few weeks of me training them anyway, and rarely have TPEs when I buy them (I'm one of those wierdos that insist on defense and side skills *gasp*), so I may not have a great grasp of what my team's really worth -- and this is my inaugural d.II season anyway.

The $20M figure came from a 10 player team with an average player value of $2M.

If you're going to 2-position train and lose, why not 6-man training? 48-ing a player isn't that hard, and you don't get messed up that often, especially if you don't actually care about winning.

There just wasn't enough data available for 3-position training (or 1-position, for that matter) when crunched the numbers. Not to mention some things, like RB and DR, can only be trained 2-position (or Team).

I wouldn't go basic on the doctor -- 5 week injuries can vaporate a LOT of trainee value. [...] But is saving 10-15k/week on the doctor worth the significantly higher risk of +5 injuries?

You could always sell an injured trainee and replace him, though you're right, there is a lot of loss there. I don't have a whole lot of faith in the doctor portion of the team staff. If anyone has any figures on whether my lvl 6 doc is any better than, say, a lvl 3, I'd love to see them. I keep the lvl 6 around for piece of mind.

I can say for certain that there's a big financial gap between even just II and III -- my player salaries are 30-odd percent higher than last season and I'm still clearing almost four times the typical weekly profit (salaries from ~180k last season in III to ~250k this season; typical weekly profit from ~40k to ~150k). Granted, I won't make a deep playoff run here, but if I were to burn the team and deliberately relegate, my gross receipts would probably be cut by 50% or more for each league level I dropped.

One of the things that got me thinking on this was mostly the attendance factor. Jelme and TUG are still selling seats while their teams suck phallus, and some of my data came from Postal last season (she'd lost something like 9 straight, had 3 consecutive walkovers in competitive games (one of those a TV game, iirc), and was still selling ~7k tickets per game). What I couldn't really factor into my numbers were things like STH, as I have no idea what type of STH loss could be expected while falling through divisions, how much a team of such tiny value would hurt the TV money for an entire league, what sort of merch revenue to expect, etc.

The other thing you wind up implicitly doing with that plan is playing a market game rather than a basketball manager game. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those people that thing the transfer market should be regulated to the point where day trading or carry trading is impossible, or greatly laments inflation/deflation/etc in the player market -- I just know that personally I don't come here to play the stock market. If I wanted to do that, I'd go over to Yahoo Finance or something. Each his own, I suppose, but it seems to me that the basic premise of this is that player transfer prices will remain flat or drop while you're banking cash. If player transfer prices move higher, then your banked capital is being eroded and you're not getting the returns of higher income from being in a higher division.

You're absolutely right here, and preaching to the choir a bit. However, if you're in a higher division paying $350k-$450k/week on player wages while making a profit, how much profit do you think could be made if you suddenly cut $300k+ in wages?

Even if I still think my idea could be done, I seriously doubt my ability to follow through with it; mostly because I like the winning part of this game more than I like the training part.

Well, come end of the next season to beginning of the one after, I'll be changing over my team a whole helluva lot. I can see 1 player surviving the purge. Will my team survive in Div II? I doubt it considering how long it'll take me to find the pieces I want. I'm going to be patient and make sure I bring in the players that fit the profile I want perfectly. This will surely cost me a lot of games.

And I will also be switching over to pure SF training. I plan on starting slow. As of now, I'm looking at buying 1 SF 18 yo, then buy another 1 season later, than a third one a season after that. There is 0 chance of surviving in Div II training up 3 18 yo trainees in ID/OD/whatever else, so I plan to stagger it a bit in a futile effort to survive. This will also allow me to buy players who are relatively young (trainable age still) at other positions and train them up. Big guys that lack a little D, guards that lack a little D. Also some Rebs and JS/HN/DR. It other words they won't have to necessarily be finished products, for the first season or 2 they'd get training half the season.

I considered buying a 20 yo, 19 yo, and a 18 yo SF trainee, but everytime I look for what I'd want, there is nada. So I'm going with the aforementioned route. And of course, I'm going to do my damnedest to stay American, home grown. Not sure I"ll be able to however.

This will most likely be the last bit of training I do considering the timeline I expect it to take in order to train up the SFs to the levels that I want. Many moons will shine before this is done, and knowing my past (taking into account HT), I'll be burnt and done. But it should be interesting, if not painful, if not fun.

So, in summation, enjoy my presence while you can because I don't expect to be around much longer than another season or 2. And things won't be looking up, so to speak. But at least it'll keep me entertained, can't say the same for anyone else ;)

Best of luck to you with this.

My plan was similar, though instead of SFs, I planned to train really well-rounded PFs, and after the second batch switch to PGs. The "burnt and done" notion occurred to me as well, that somewhere in the process I'd lose interest in playing BB at all, which kinda defeats the whole purpose. The only way I think I could keep myself interested would be to make the entire experiment public (i.e. posting the premise along with weekly updates in the forums), though I don't even know if that would help me remain interested.

your analysis is good but partly flawed. i originally thought like you, but you can't deny the game income is tempting, and keeping an arena semi-full depends upon some decent performances.

I touched on this in my reply to Azariah (check out Postal's season 11 attendance), but with the amount of play available in ticket pricing, I think you could keep asses in seats no matter how much you're losing, and tweak a bit here and there to optimize income.

Also, you (and Toonces, if I'm interpreting him correctly) are planning to try and remain at least middling teams once you drop to dIII, whereas my model would have no notion whatsoever of winning for a few seasons at minimum. The idea came from both watching you and Postal blow up your teams in successive seasons, combined with a lot of talk on the forums in the vein of "if you don't think you can win the league, don't spend any money on players," which-- interpreted to the extreme-- means 15 teams every season are wasting money. I just crunched the numbers to see what could happen if you were to turn the waste into pure profit.