BuzzerBeater Forums

Having like 20 million in the Bank döes nothing good.

Interesting how the guy answered you with a rant but nowhere did he suggest $20m in the bank is good. So I guess he agreed with you.

He did not agree - unless I have a different understanding of the english language.

I think that "economic success" has to be penalized as soon as it reaches a certain limit of stored money. Ususally Inflation works like that, but the BB-ecosystem just changed too drastically in the last few months, so what we see now are the aftershocks of all the changes that happened (shrinking userbase, Money influx from Utopia and so on).

@Mike I am debating economics and BB. Two things that I like to talk about. If you want to minimizing my comments, by labeling me a "ranter" and subscribing to some conspiracy about the GMs and BBs not caring about lower division managers, then I guess I can talk about this issue with the other posters in the thread. The one GM who is posting in this thread has for years helped out lower division USA managers, so lets talk about the actual content of posts rather than the posters in the thread.

Some guy tanking for 20 million in cash to go on a run to a DI title isn't really going to impact the lower division user. The only guys they are competing for are the 20-60k DI backups. They are going to be going for the highest possible TSP guys for the salary they can afford. DV/DIV teams dont have any reason to have these 110 TSP + guys. The richest teams will always be able to afford the best players. Thats just a simple fact. If you want one of these elite guys, you need to train them yourself.

The fact that BB has been decreasing in users means that in the long run, the addition of Utopia money and users will do more to balance out the economy in the long-run unless the game finds reverse the trend of people leaving the game. The BB economic is a complex system, not a simple one. Changing one aspect without looking at the whole system can result in unintended consequences that could have been foreseen.

@knecht: You are correct. I am not against some guy saving for many, many seasons to get $20 million. Nothing wrong with that. I am against daytrading and against tanking, which allows people to unfairly accumulate cash. If people don't have an incentive to tank and accumulate cash, they won't do it. Putting a tax on cash right now will actual make inflation temporarily worse because all the hoarders will have to spend their money or lose it to the tax.

I think you can do this by increasing the penalty to teams that go into the over-extension tax, changing the way the draft works, giving players an economic incentive to want to be in the highest division possible while fielding the most competitive team that they can afford.

Are you going to require that people not evaluate, critique and discuss the individual components of the economy, but must instead merely list every single component they can think of and pretend that that qualifies as a rational analysis? Are you also going to pretend that components of the economy earned by managers or spent as the result of a deliberate decision are the same as components over which managers have no control whatsoever? Sorry, you are going to have a very poor conversation if you do that. Short, but poor.

Only if that is relevant to what is being posted. For example, let us consider the following quote (with part of it bolded by me for emphasis) :

So you have bankrupt teams pumping money into the game, new managers getting $300,000 free money, all causing money to flow into the game. There is no corresponding process to counter-balance this, and the problem gets worse and worse.

In the last day, you've pretty much flat out stated I've made conversation worse by not putting enough detail into discussing an assertion of yours that I disagreed with, and now that I logically laid out a case that demonstrated unequivocably why what I bolded above is factually wrong, that's also causing the quality of the conversation to drop? Good to know. Is there an appropriate level of discourse that you would accept as constructive, or does the mere act of disagreeing instantly render the content useless?

Look, we all know the economy is out of kilter. Not many people are going to leave BB over that. But the attitude that people in position to do something about it don't give a rip, or worse yet just joke about it or mock those who make suggestions, THAT will do it. Who wants to waste their time on a site where that attitude prevails?

The economy is always out of kilter if you look at it from the right (or wrong, I suppose) perspective. For any given player skill level, if prices are rising, people who net consumers of players are disproportionately affected. If prices are falling, people who are net producers of players are disproportionately affected. If there were no mechanism for a manager to adjust by creating their own players or by choosing not to, as circumstances warrant, that would be a severe problem. Fortunately, in this case, there is every opportunity to react to a lack of talent by training said talent, either to improve one's team or to sell to others, or some combination thereof. Choosing not to do so is valid, but like going home-grown, all native, or any other self-imposed constraint, the decision has consequences.

... Only if that is relevant to what is being posted. For example, let us consider the following quote (with part of it bolded by me for emphasis) :

So you have bankrupt teams pumping money into the game, new managers getting $300,000 free money, all causing money to flow into the game. There is no corresponding process to counter-balance this, and the problem gets worse and worse.

In the last day, you've pretty much flat out stated I've made conversation worse by not putting enough detail into discussing an assertion of yours that I disagreed with, and now that I logically laid out a case that demonstrated unequivocably why what I bolded above is factually wrong, that's also causing the quality of the conversation to drop?

No, I think mocking sarcasm does not elevate the discourse. Considering and attempting to respond to my comments and the comments of others elevates the discourse, and thank you for that.

My point about the bankruptcy and replacement of teams was that nowhere in that process is there any counter-balance to the money it introduces into the economy. And there isn't. You rightly pointed out other factors. I think the bankruptcy/replacement of teams is under-appreciated as part of the problem. It is, of course, not the only significant contributor to the over-heated economy.

I like your posts because they look like prison jumpsuits.

My point about the bankruptcy and replacement of teams was that nowhere in that process is there any counter-balance to the money it introduces into the economy. And there isn't. You rightly pointed out other factors. I think the bankruptcy/replacement of teams is under-appreciated as part of the problem. It is, of course, not the only significant contributor to the over-heated economy.

Bankruptcy isn't injecting money into the game, but instead is another hole in the ground, since the only way to reach bankruptcy is through "fixed" expenses (i.e., you can not buy a player if that purchase will put you below zero). Of course, you can get down to zero either by spending all your money on transfer listed players (which recirculates that money minus transfer fees), or you can get there by overloading on wages or overloading on staff, neither of which recirculates money.

As far as replacement of teams, it depends - there is 500k "added" to the economy, and an amount of money removed if the team being replaced had a net positive balance.

In terms of the issue here, though, I don't see how these conditions would be related to one another. If the contention was that it was simply impossible to find a single player under 300k, and that was because new teams were blowing their initial cash on whatever they could find on the TL, I could agree. If players were becoming unaffordable because managers who routinely flip nearly worthless players for money from new teams were suddenly buying up all the players in a higher price band, there would be some correlation. In this case, though, I keep coming back to the concept that price is essentially demand divided by supply multiplied by some factor representing the overall fixed amount of money in the system. The number of things and the amount of money involved in the non-related factors I would think keeps that amount relatively low, and supply is slow to adjust since training players takes time, so unless a spike in prices can not be explained by a corresponding spike in demand, that is when the problem is something fundamentally wrong with the economy.

I like your posts because they look like prison jumpsuits.

I like your posts because there are few other people in the game who have played a game with me where both of us have combined to 100 points.

Bankruptcy isn't injecting money into the game, but instead is another hole in the ground, since the only way to reach bankruptcy is through "fixed" expenses (i.e., you can not buy a player if that purchase will put you below zero).

Wrong. A bankrupt team has poured all its money into the economy somewhere. It doesn't much matter where -- the money is in the economy. Then the team simply disappears (with a negative balance) but most of the money remains in the economy. No one goes around removing any of the money it injected into anything except what remained in the team, which was already a negative balance.

As far as replacement of teams, it depends - there is 500k "added" to the economy, and an amount of money removed if the team being replaced had a net positive balance.

No new team starts with a negative balance, so no money is removed from the economy in the formation of a new team. Rather, there is another $500k in the economy. And I'm talking about the replacement of bankrupt teams. Replacement of solvent teams is another matter altogether.

Overall, the bankruptcy and subsequent replacement with a new team is one factor in the overheated economy. I don't know why it is so important to try to disguise this instead of squarely facing it. How are you ever going to correct the overheated economy if you don't squarely face all of the factors causing it?

@Mike ... If you want to minimizing my comments, by labeling me a "ranter" ...

I think you're thinking of someone else. I don't remember you making any rants.

Bankruptcy isn't injecting money into the game, but instead is another hole in the ground, since the only way to reach bankruptcy is through "fixed" expenses (i.e., you can not buy a player if that purchase will put you below zero).

Wrong. A bankrupt team has poured all its money into the economy somewhere. It doesn't much matter where -- the money is in the economy. Then the team simply disappears (with a negative balance) but most of the money remains in the economy. No one goes around removing any of the money it injected into anything except what remained in the team, which was already a negative balance.

If a new team signs up, logs in one time, spends 1k on a trainer with a weekly salary of 100k, and then logs in enough to not be removed for inactivity until they go bankrupt, how does any of that money move the needle one inch on the transfer market? The amount of money available for everyone else to spend on player transfers is literally unchanged, and since the user neither participated in buying or selling players, there is no component of this team's existence that would have influenced the transfer market. Every dollar spent by the team has been thrown down a hole and does not cause the amount of money created from nothingness to consequently increase, nor does it make more or less money be thrown down other holes.

As far as replacement of teams, it depends - there is 500k "added" to the economy, and an amount of money removed if the team being replaced had a net positive balance.

No new team starts with a negative balance, so no money is removed from the economy in the formation of a new team. Rather, there is another $500k in the economy. And I'm talking about the replacement of bankrupt teams. Replacement of solvent teams is another matter altogether.

Overall, the bankruptcy and subsequent replacement with a new team is one factor in the overheated economy. I don't know why it is so important to try to disguise this instead of squarely facing it. How are you ever going to correct the overheated economy if you don't squarely face all of the factors causing it?

How many teams are replaced by bankruptcy as opposed to replaced through inactivity or bans, though? Seeing a team actually even reach the point of their players being transfer listed at $0 for not being able to get back above -500k for two weeks is pretty rare, while teams being replaced because they haven't logged in for a long time is much more common. And those teams can quite often have a fairly substantial bank balance, especially at lower levels where the whole "get a team, log in a few times, disappear" phenomenon primarily occurs - and was exclusive until recent changes in signups allowed new teams to start at higher levels.

Regardless of how many things that may be proposed as a "factor in the overheated economy" (your words), though, the primary factor in transfer prices by an overwhelming margin is supply and demand. Sure, having to pay a week's wages when you fire a staff member may also have some tiny, incidental knock-on effect, but if the market is saturated the prices fall, and if the market can not meet demand, prices rise. If you wish it to be otherwise, feel free to propose a fixed-price system and I'd certainly entertain a discussion on that, though I might not consider it an ideal solution.

If a new team signs up, logs in one time, spends 1k on a trainer with a weekly salary of 100k, and then logs in enough to not be removed for inactivity until they go bankrupt, ...

(A) That happens a lot, does it? If not, then the example you made up has little or no bearing on the discussion, it is totally beside the point. (B) Obviously a team that disappears largely because of inactivity isn't what I'm talking about, now is it? The way you keep changing the subject, making up irrelevant examples as though they were meaningful (when you yourself admit they don't move the needle) makes me think you understand my point but don't want to admit it.

How many teams are replaced by bankruptcy as opposed to replaced through inactivity or bans, though?

Darned if I know. You're the expert, you tell us. But the ones that go bankrupt never have a positive balance when they disappear, always have a negative balance when they disappear, and sometimes the negative balance is over half a million dollars, isn't it?

So I guess we can agree on three things, eh? (A) Teams that existed for maybe one day "don't move the needle." (Those weren't the teams I was talking about anyway, as I am certain you realize. Bringing them up was a red herring.) (B) Some bankruptcies occur after the team has pumped all its money into the economy, and then pumped in more money that it didn't have, sometimes more than a half million dollars, and then disappear. This puts a lot of excess cash into the economy. (C) When the replacement for these teams get a new manager, another $300k is pumped into the game, plus $50k per week for several more weeks.

Now you can continue to say "other things overheat the economy, too," and I'll agree. But you cannot honestly deny that bankruptcies are a factor.

You think "supply and demand" of players is the root of the problem. I say no, too much cash chasing too few worthwhile players is the root of the problem. It would be easy to see who is right -- leave the same number of players and managers in the economy and start withdrawing cash. If it helps, I was right. If it has no effect, you were right.