I wanted to ask Nik0 if he's in a similar situation to me or E.B.W. or can offer a different perspective on how the current market affects him. He's the third capable manager and GM after Manon (no longer GM unfortunately) and hrudey, who has intentionally demoted in the last couple of seasons and is in the process of rebuilding. Perhaps it's linked to the current economic environment, perhaps not and it's just a coincidence, perhaps they anticipated further changes or think the price of good trainees will go up much further than today. It would be great to know their perspective, if they want to share.
I haven't intentionally demoted yet - I failed to promote yet again last season, but I've never finished below 5th with either my primary or Utopia team, though that obviously is going to change when this season ends.
And in my case, it has nothing to do with the training/economy environment and everything to do with my players. My main core of players simply started to get too old and I knew that I could possibly ride them maybe another season and have one more shot at promoting, but I was already getting skill drops on Menard and Wray was going to have some this season as well. The whole core of my team was having a deep bench with guys that I felt could play legitimate backup minutes at the highest level supported by starters at big men that I created and the guards that I had purchased to round things out. When those guards hit 33 (some last season) and I started already losing some skills, I knew it was pretty much the end of times for this team. Either I was promoting last season, giving the NBBA one legitimate season, and demoting, or failing and starting the process a season earlier, since I was not going to be a guy who was going to promote knowing full well he wasn't going to compete the next season.
The sad thing is I still haven't figured out entirely what I want to do. I've actually thought about maybe trying to create an isolation team to see if I can make that work, or maybe actually start out aiming toward a full-on outside team rather than deciding on that halfway through the process. But instead I just sort of sputtered around below the salary floor until I found a guy that had godawful OD so I could at least feel like I was doing something by rectifying that, and I suppose I'll see if the draft has anything for me.
So in my case, the economy is in no way a factor in what I'm doing, nor is it likely ever to be. If I ever reach a point in the game where I let the state of the economy be a factor in deciding what I want to do, I've stopped playing the game and let the game play me, and at that point it's not worth the effort any longer. I play because I want to figure out a strategy that I want to adopt, hopefully one that's unpopular, and then see how effective I can make it within whatever parameters I decide to follow.
