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Agree it isnt cheating but it is stupid. While you can't force a team to play a decent team - have a look at NJ or WAS this season, you can force them to play some sort of team. If a team dresses less than 5 players for a game they should be "fined" their weekly TV money and gate money. Easily solved. While playing a bunch of "b" team scrubs isn't the best it does make more sense than playing no-one at all.

A more difficult fix would be doing something about their season ticket holders that could have a long term impact that would put people off doing this. I think this should also apply to people who tank a season and I am in this situation right now where I could do that but I am still trying.

i think this is it really - im sure the designers never thought this would be appropriate and/or correctly rewarded given there seems to be little negative impact on total revenues.

5 reasons for restricting zero-rostering or changing the financial consequences of doing so, are in bold below:

From the BB front page:

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I think the last reason says it all!

Last edited by Fluff at 5/23/2010 7:10:57 AM

You're the manager. You pick the players, you train them, and you tell them how to play. Want a bigger arena? Build it. Want to draft a superstar? It's all about scouting. You make the decisions and you’re in charge!

That supports the argument that he has the right to not have any players at all and still receive a lot of income.

Although I think that if you forfeit a game, there should simply be no attendance money. No need to affect tv income of fine people etc. No attendance money is more than enough of a deterrant.

Agreed.

You're the manager. You pick the players, you train them, and you tell them how to play. Want a bigger arena? Build it. Want to draft a superstar? It's all about scouting. You make the decisions and you’re in charge!

That supports the argument that he has the right to not have any players at all and still receive a lot of income.

Although I think that if you forfeit a game, there should simply be no attendance money. No need to affect tv income of fine people etc. No attendance money is more than enough of a deterrant.

And just how exactly does that support not having players? If instead it said, "You're the manager. You pick the players. Or if you want, pick no players at all." Then I could see your point. But no where does it even hint at having a roster with 0 players. And in response to the Israel poster, yes, cheaters and exploiters are a part of life. It still doesn't make what they do any less illegal just because they had the means to do it. And they certainly do pay a price for doing it.

other possibility:

Agreed but even if the injury chance is small, I would not take it. As for the experience gain, I guess that depends if the trained players are being trained for use later or to be sold. If they are to be sold, a half level of experience (or less) is probably not worth it.

But it is just a question of philosophy and your personal feelings about taking risks. ;-)

This interesting discussion reminds me a bit of the "big vs small countries" debate from a while ago, and the suggestion there (originally by LA-Emilio) to link a team's revenue to salary expenditure. I believe the BBs hinted then that this suggestion was not picked up because it would prevent new teams in tiny communities from catching up with established teams in their (first or second division) league. For the same reason a simple link between salary expenditure and income is probably not the solution here either.

There's a main differebce between the two questions
having zero players in the roster is a matter which affect the single managers,that have to value the advantages and the disadvantages of this kond of choices.I can say you that,where there is a strong competition,this strategy is dangerous and often give damages to the managers who play it.You are not sure that you can rise from the lower divisons to the top again
Big vs small country is a general question,because all the people had to use the market

Although I think that if you forfeit a game, there should simply be no attendance money. No need to affect tv income of fine people etc.

Well if there is no match, not have to be any sold tickets. Therefore it sounds to me like a bug.

It's hard to consider this case as the team being exploitative when you consider that he is losing millions in potential revenue for not training his players. He could be spending around 100k on salary over the course of the season, around 5-10k a week, in order to make several million in additional income from training.

The main difference between this and a few scrubs to dress for each game is that other teams in the league all end up with a 25-0 victory/ies when facing him instead of a silly high score contest wherein other teams increase their point differential by different amounts, which, being used as the tiebreaker between teams, would have more of an effect on the rest of the league.


Teams folding their roster and rebuilding is a major component of this type of game considering it has no salary floor whether it is done by having a few players with low salaries or none. Establishing a salary floor would cause issues as to its effect on teams that go bankrupt and have to rebuild and teams that succeed in competing to some level with far lower salaries than their league peers. At the same time penalizing walkovers with additional lost revenue will do more to penalize teams that have an incorrect roster for one week due to browser issues with setting a lineup, an out of date default lineup when forgetting to set a roster, or any more common reason than something as rare as this.


TV contract being limited to the weekly salary expenditure would be fairly appropriate, but would probably do more to penalize the many lower division teams that manage to compete in or win their divisions while having team salaries much lower than the rest of their league, than it would prevent the extremely rare cases like this one.

I think people raised some very good points in this thread, although I just want to make clear such a tactic is by no means cheating. There are many situations in BuzzerBeater where you have to choose between long or short term success. In some situations you choose to sacrifice some short term succes in order to gain more long term succes and visa versa, for example selling a starplayer to invest in awesome rookies, or buyin your new Lebron instead of expanding your arena.

As maleshka already pointed out in (144528.10), this manager probably, unfortunately, decided to quit the game and therefore sold his whole roster.
But let's say he really choose to do what the original poster suggest he did; sacrificing tons of short term succes in order to be able to bounce back in the long term. I really doubt the effectiveness of such a tactic. As Steve Karenn already pointed out, in many divisions you are not guaranteed to promote back straight away with a new roster. Relegation is disastrous for your economy, and quite some people underestimate the (financial) effects of being relegated.
Let's say you apply this tactic in the top division which earns your an extra $500k/wk, this is about 7M per season. In most top divisions you can buy just 1 new starter for your team, I'm not sure if that's worth relegating.