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#1 this is a manager game. You don7t coach the games, you don't train the players. You pay someone to train them, the GE coaches them.

you manage the BUSINESS. In business you buy and sell. It is, in fact, by design, a game where buying and selling the right players means winning or losing. Training is an aspect, which this thread is about. So for the sake of this thread, I needed to clear out the reality that low potentials is not profitable, at any level.

You buy and sell, yes. But not just players - seats in the arena. Week to week turnover is far more important than what's made on the TL. My model has been to go with lower salaries, high arena investments, and to hold on to players for the additional merchandise. And my weekly balance was roughly +90-100k/wk the two seasons in IV, and was at about +170k until I bought the two big men and decided to put some money in scouting points, now it's down to about +70k/week.

Depending on how you define profitability, there's no such thing as profitable training at lower levels. You can't increase value on 6-9k players by stamina/FT/gs training at anything even remotely reasonable. You can't make enough to offset the cost of a low level trainer. So if your idea of the team's balance sheet exists exclusively on the "sold - puchased" value, you're right on.

But winning is profitable. Keeping salaries down, keeping merchandise up, not having a lot of transfers and a lot of money eaten up by taxes - these are all things that are good too.

You like to beat your drum about where I play and what level I play at. Like i showed you I buy and sell players in that value range and profit, since I signed up, and recently as well. I use them for roleplayers and to beat bots in the cup. You might use them as starters in a lower division, and you might start slowly now to use higher salary players.

Not in V, unless of course the only economic balance you care about is transfer balance, not revenue - expenses.

Its not hard to win out of DIV and DV. IF you think it is...its cuz you been spending money on bumb trainees ;).... its really at around DIII that you hit the wall, some much older teams in the playoffs/top of league often that are yoyoing out of DII, and DII promotion, if it happens, can end in relegation for lots of people.....

Like your daytrading friend? ;)

I'm quite content. I'm still pulling in 70k/week in profit, I'm training my next set of guys into the actual quality big men that I desire, and were it not for only netting +25 points because the opposition forfeited, I would have already locked up a playoff spot instead of just being very likely to get in. I'll survive.

Anyway you'll figure it out. You didn'T do anything special and it don't take anything special to get where you are. Its gonna take something special thoug hto get into DII and stay there. Good luck.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. The consensus is always "train guards, buy big men" -- but of course, the big men on the TL almost exclusively suck because they're three skill donkeys. Of course, one can find good handling and passing on occasion on the lower-salary guys, but there are a lot more well-trained guards at higher salary levels than there are well-rounded bigs (at least, as I see well rounded). So knowing that, I know that I'm going to be more likely to purchase high salary guards and train my bigs.

But, hey, what do I know. Everybody makes it to III in four seasons and sticks around, after all. ;)

Thanks for the compliment. :) This discussion is quite robust, but we should all recognize that Wolph, Hrudey and Tangosz are all top line managers with very good teams and very good ideas about how to build them. I'm personally training a few good potential guys, but also have a starter and star in as six man rotation (at least for the remainder of the season). Four of them look like they have or are very close to soft capping, so I'll have to stop training them. This is quite a bummer and I wish they all had higher potential. Now, reading this thread, I realize that Wolph is likely right that I won't make much money from them if I sell them (taking into consideration opportunity costs of training higher potential players and the cost of my trainer over time). But, Hrudey and Tangosz are also right, in that my star and starter have a unique skill set that have helped me win games through DV, DIV and DIII. Though Wolph is correct that they won't be good enough for DII or DI.

But hopefully I can sell them for something reasonable and use the money to build out my arena or buy a seasoned veteran. I would not use the money for the next couple of seasons on trainees as I'll switch to single position training for my 20 year old Superstar and 19 year old PAS. Well maybe 1 trainee if I can't get one in the draft. :)

That's way too reasonable. Flame someone! ;)

my weekly balance was roughly +90-100k/wk the two seasons in IV, and was at about +170k until I bought the two big men and decided to put some money in scouting points, now it's down to about +70k/week.

This is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. you were +$$$ each week because of the total of decisions, to expand arena and set prices productively, to be frugal with staff and player's etc. It's besides the point which kind of player's (potential wise) you trained.

A lot of that started with not going out and buying two high potential guys (let alone three) at the very beginning, and instead buying four lower potential guys. Let's say, for simplicity, that the difference is $300k. That gets 1000 bleachers and 5 luxury boxes, with some 20k left over. At even $8 per bleacher and $500 per luxury box, prices which are far too low for a new team, that's $12k / week right there above the guy who has his money in high-cost trainees. Which means the second arena expansion can come sooner, which compounds the difference.

I may agree that there is no profitable training. but IF its possible to make much profit, its most likely with the higher potential, sicne the base line cost of staffing a trainer is so high, and the base line cost of skills is so low in this deflated market.

Which makes it even harder for a new team who sunk his initial money into high value trainees - he's also got to pay a trainer, and doesn't have the increased revenue I mentioned above to offset the cost of a trainer. I mean, 12k won't entirely cover the full cost of a level 4 trainer unless you sink up-front money into it, of course, but it's a large chunk of it.

You do realize that you DONT HAVE TO HAVE A TRAINER to train these skills AND that ST/FT/GS can be huge improvement in performance.

Yes, of course, and it's for that very reason that we should all rush out and invest in performance-boosting accessories if we own cars from 1997. In the end, a 5k guard with improved stamina and free throws is still a 5k guard, only a season older. And as you've delighted in pointing out, is a capped star guy of some 20+k salary in his early 20s is only worth a couple hundred thousand max, surely you don't expect to see any profit from selling a 5k veteran with improved stamina and free throws? But on the bright side, your team isn't any better for it -- but that extra 300k saved by not having a trainer is almost enough to start to upgrade from 5k players to 7k players!

LOL merchandise is a very small part of your financial picture.

I'm making roughly 12-20k/week above league average this season . I concede that is, in fact, a small part of my picture. And yet you go on about how spending money on a trainer is such a waste -- what's a level 4 guy get these days?

Even if you can make profit by training currently, it's not done with lvl7 trainer. The transfer market is too hectic right now. The best way to make money with trainees is flipping the bought ones later in a season and wish for someone needing a good starting skills blank or training 23-25 yo's. Getting them a few more skills and then selling them on.
Still the best value in training is training the players for yourself. Depending on the level of the team, potential varies. DivI starter needs atleast superstar potential, in case you want to add a few skills to them while they play for your team.

Last edited by Kukoc at 4/28/2012 6:34:12 PM

Level 4 trainer, mostly all over 10k and salary goes up eveyr week, so you under pressure to keep rehiring over and over...which leads to the conclusion I made that its about 15k a week, besides which you know very well that players do not pop much at all with that level 4 lol. IF you can sell a star for a couple hundred k, with a level 4 trainer its gonna take you 4 or 5 seasons to get his skills up lol......Check the crowdsource site for speed differences.

Hardly. I two position trained for the first two seasons and still had to hold back some training weeks to avoid capping the players too soon, since I was hoping to get them 1v1 forward training to improve IS. Besides, you know as well as anyone that a star, role player, or MVP will train at the same speed, so I don't know what you mean by speed differences.

Also you can not account the new user's lack of money as a reason to LOSE money training stars. That is insane. My whole premis is that buying and training the stars....is a WASTE of money, minus effort or lucky to break even. If they don7t have money to buy good higher pot. then DON'T TRAIN, save that 15kish a week and invest that, ON TOP of the 50k you spent for the star potential in your arena.

Then all you are doing instead is having to "waste" money buying veteran players every time you want your team to improve, and those guys bleed value. I mean, sure, you can find nice players for V at very low prices, but you aren't going to go out and buy a roster to move up from IV cheaply. If you are not training, and you are not daytrading, the money you put into players is "wasted" because you'll get back less than you paid for them.

I'm sorry to be so aggressive in this conversation, but you seem immune to a logical argument and keep coming back with garbage counterarguments which actually work as evidence against your own theories (espeically when we look at your transfer history and roster).

The aggression isn't a concern - you believe strongly in this and are attempting to educate someone. I just think you're using "worthless" where you could get away with "worth less". I am not advocating that training star players is the only way, the best way, or a "profitable" way by your measure or many others. But I categorically reject that it's "worthless" and continue to do so.

Yeah, let's look at my transfer history and roster. My roster, after adding two players that bring my weekly wages to 210k and after some recent selling off by a couple of teams, is now within 10k of league average. I have spent a total of 3.3M on players, with $1.4M of that in this season, of which almost 600k were on two trainees (7 and 8 potential big men). So, of course, without those purchases right now I'd be at about a net -600k in my transfer history, and with three star potential guards with wondrous OD, I am fairly certain that if I had decided instead to tank and sold them and some of my vets, I'd be at a net positive.

Of course, foolish me, I decided to stick around despite it being "worthless" (well, I'm making around 70k a week now, but I was making about 170k/week before the two big men). I'm still carrying around one player more than I'd like (and of course, probably several more than teams that eschew depth would use). Had the misfortune to draw a II team in the early round of the Cup for the second time in my four seasons, so I didn't get much money out of that this year.

So I guess now that I know that how I built my team is worthless, I imagine that I'll wake up and see myself in V with no real resources. I'll see a flood of teams who didn't train at all or went out and spent their early money on super trainees all way ahead of me, with me having no hope of catching them. Someone pinch me!

Look, let me just say that I'm not saying you can't do it without training, or saying training stars is better, even for new teams. But it can (and does) work too, despite your be

Still the best value in training is training the players for yourself. Depending on the level of the team, potential varies. DivI starter needs atleast superstar potential, in case you want to add a few skills to them while they play for your team.

This, I entirely agree with. It is far better to create players that are distinctive than have to pay the premium to acquire them.