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When you say that the BB economy is globally balanced and self-managed with the new salary formula, I understand that you are working with just these global numbers: global incomes vs global expenses, and the salary formula keeps the balance by adjusting the player salaries. Am I wrong?

Therefore, as the salaries increased 10-15% this season, this means that last season we have had globally higher incomes, and I have heard several times that this is something which mainly affects to the top divisions: Teams do not use most of their income in player salaries, they can save a lot of money and thus the difference between divisions grow up.

All the time we are using these "global" terms, so I guess we are not talking about the economy of a particular BB country, but about the global economy, and the salary update is an automatic answer to a global situation.

So..., and this is my question: have you taken into account the differences between large-medium-small countries in these calculations?

Because, for example, there are 98 top leagues in BuzzerBeater, but only very few correspond to large countries. So, if we calculate the top-leagues average, very probably the result will be very representative of the situation in small countries, and a very bad representation of the situation in large countries. The salary update will perfectly fit to the global situation, however the impact of these measures is very different depending on the size of the BB country.

As in the real world, a global market and global measures may bring some kind of unfairness which will affect more strongly to the weakest members of the community.

In the spanish forums (where we really miss very much the presence of a BB), I have heard the complaints of many teams and the hard time they will have to run through because of the salary update, and curiously most of them are not top-teams, but teams from all the other divisions. Have you considered that your global measures may have very bad side-effects in the lower divisions of large leagues?
It seems that all these global measures will take many small teams in Spain into a lot of economic problems. The inflation/deflation sequence you have caused in the BB-economy (even if they are good for the global game health), will always affect more strongly to the weakest teams in large and very competitive leagues, but I don´t think they represent a real problem for any team in a small BB country.

So let me try to address spain in particular, and not make general claims, as you seem to be worried about general claims averaging over individual differences (which is a legitimate potential concern).

In spain, what we see is that top division teams earn more, and are spending a smaller percentage of their income on salaries... though not that much smaller... about 7% less than a division 2 or 3 team. (63% vs 70%)

Salaries for Division 2 team are 68% of D1 salaries, and D 3 are 45% of D1. So lower division spend less... and make less... and end up spending just slightly more proportionally than D3 divisions. Now we raised salaries proportionally... so even if we had done it in a way that was proportionally flat, i don't see how we could have made things significantly worse for D3 teams than D1 teams. Of course we actually raised salaries more on a percentage basis for upper division teams, so this is even less possible. Also we don't see evidence that d2 and d3 teams cannot afford the players that they are paying...and the obvious question if we did see that would be... why aren't they cutting their salaries.. they can't afford players that expensive, they should be employing less talented players.

Now this gets at the heart of what I think is actually going on with everyone freaking out about increased salaries. At the start of the season, all the increased talent you now have on your team gets their salaries adjusted to their new levels. As a result, players are going to get sometimes significantly more expensive, as they are more talented. These players are suppose to be moving up to play in higher divisions... eventually an 18 year old drafted by a d6 team, should get enough training to be one of the best in the world.. and that player is suppose to play on a D1 team probably.

Its maybe difficult for owners to accept that a necessary part of the new season is getting rid of players that don't make sense to have on your roster anymore, so that your financial situation is on even ground. You think, damnit i'm not going to be able to compete when i cut my roster, but the truth is that everyone is going to have to go through the same thing. This is always going to be more true for lower division teams than upper division teams, because what we've said is that we want to keep the salaries of the best players in the game roughly constant once we have the economy in balance and don't have massive inflation (we think we have accomplished that now). So as the best players in the game get better, their salaries will not increase that much in the future... but the 18 year old superstar potential who went from making 5K to making 35K in one season will always maybe not make sense for a dIV team to hold onto once he makes that jump.



Last edited by BB-Forrest at 3/25/2010 9:13:29 PM

I understand and probably agree with most of what you say, but I can't find an answer to the question I made.

I guess thats the real nail on the head.

The enjoyment factor might go out the window for those that want to keep the players they have so carefully trained. If a IV team takes 6-7 seasons to promote to a II league (i assume realistic?) then if they have put in 4 seasons of training of an 18/19 to find out that they cant afford to see him grace the court wearing their own jersey and he will have to be sold only to benefit someone else because they arent in a league where their income is high enough to employ him.

This now reminds me of the time we all had allstar caps put on the players we hoped would be with us for their careers. In order to improve beyond this we have to build a roster of higher potential players because there are severe limitations as to how many skill ups you can give to an Allstar. Now we have a scenario where if you have 5 trainees greater than Allstar potential which we can now train as we first envisaged we are being told 'hang on' it is now not intended for us to afford them!

This is why I question the need to continuously add more countries and why we dont all go into one big melting pot. A Division 1 Macau sign up will never have to make the choices a V Series new manager has to make. He can buy keep and train almost anyone he pleases where as the lower league manager has to continuously cut his cloth which often means sacrificing players he has trained (which I imagine is the one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game.)

Also we don't see evidence that d2 and d3 teams cannot afford the players that they are paying...and the obvious question if we did see that would be... why aren't they cutting their salaries.. they can't afford players that expensive, they should be employing less talented players.

And this is exactly the sort of adjustment I've been really hoping we'd see sooner than later. Now it's just a matter of time before teams realize that they're bleeding money and need to adjust or they just run out of their cash reserves in the hope that they'll be dominant teams for a season or two. There's one team in my league that knows darn well that they'll be operating at a deficit this season, but the manager doesn't care about that and has messaged as much that he knows he'll lose money this year. He'd still rather have his two best Centers making a combined $160k and two Point Guards making $110k (and his starting SF ain't cheap, neither!) because he want to challenge the best teams in the league. If I can survive this season without relegating (and actually making a financial profit in the process, which I intend to modestly do even with a competitive roster), I think I'll be better in the long run.

It's now going to be harder to have your cake and eat it too, since now you can't just horde the best players while still making a ton of money. The game is now more about smart roster management and not just relying on trying to overwhelm your opponents, which then means having to think more about strategy with your lineups and game plans... Unless there's major shift in the development of the game, I give this current direction abut a season and a half before the new economy really sinks in.

I applaud your restrain and vision - I just cant help but feel that giving managers 'shiny new toys' and then not letting them keep and play with them

Its evident this is much more than a Basketball sim and economics plays a crucial role in somebodies success/failure. I work with numbers for a living and I'll run with whatever is thrown but do you not feel that for the last 4-5 seasons the large majority of news items have revolved solely around 'finances' with no real enhancement (bar some match engine tweaks) on the basketball content?

Its now gone beyond a simple pick up and play online game which is ok for those that have played for some time now. For new users there are pitfalls that they would be unlikely to forsee at such an early stage and with money even harder to come by in any division these days, it would be a shame to see people view this game as more an economics sports sim with a basketball flavour as opposed to a basketball sim with a need for some basic economic skills.

In other words to be at the very top of your league/division you are now having to calcalute to the $ what skill ups equate to what - what additional output you get from each skill up - even the replacement of coaches has formulas worked out for the optimum time to replace..... this is all well and good for anyone willing to put in the time.. those that dont and dont watch the pennies (and there is a difference between ensuring you never spend more than required vs spending frivoulously) are never going to get ahead. Before it was if you spent more time on the transfer market you could forge a competitive advantage - now its if you use the JosefKa spreadsheet and various other BB help tools you automatically give yourself a leg up over Joe Casual.

I agree economics plays a big part in having a sucessful BB team, and particularly important for the new players. I can't see any problem with having tools and spreadsheets for the game though. A simpler game like hattrick has all sorts of tools to play around - it's a sign that the game is popular and it's bound to happen. It helps those who are more willing to dedicate to play this game and naturally they are more successful than those casual players. What's wrong with that?

I think the fact that we have had to spend so much time on economics in the news posts is because Charles and I understand how basketball works, and what basketball should look like, and how to design a system in which a game looks like basketball.. but we aren't economists.... i mean... we clearly don't think about money that much.. we are both graduate students. And so we've had to spend more time tweaking the economics than basektball.

But I think you are being a bit too unkind to say that we haven't been working on the basketball as well.

We have tweaked the end of game coaching logic, we have changed the rebounding model, we added matchup ratings, we added alternative defensive matchups, we tweaked outside shooting, we added help defense, we tweaked the importance of passing and outside defense, and i'm probably forgetting some things... this season we've announced we are working on more tactical options.

Keep in mind whenever we make any change, people get up and yell because they made a strategy and designed their long term plans around one set of things, and when we change something they feel betrayed. So its difficult to do a ton.

It was by no means my intention to be unkind in my 'yell'! I accept there have been numerous improvements to the basketball side and i guess the majority you mention are less visible to me (which doesnt of course detract from the fact they are still changes that have been worked on and implemented.)

Sure, I/we have adapted to the way that player skills are represented in the game engine but Im sure you'd agree that from a new players perspective the match-up ratings carry less assistance than previously and again for newer teams this is a grey area as they won't have what many considered a decent barometer to check how their training is effecting their improvement.

I know that the fundmentals of the game are solid and don't require changing - but I always comment using my own situation and that of someone who could be starting out (in Japan I hope!) and I guess the overall point I was trying to make is that certain aspects of the game are now being solved (not neccessarily 100%, but close) so the variable factors that led to the disparity in performance/growth of franchises before is far less likely now and future success is based more on an economic formula that you have to follow using the players as pawns. Sorry again if this sounds crude - its ironic cos at the beginning of the game I myself viewed each player as a financial asset and now I'm at the stage where I don't wish to. Of course the counter argument is that everyones training methods will vary and this will result in different teams failing and succeeding but as we've seen before when transfer fees are rangebound with a topside of $7-8mil vs a topside of $12mil, each training skill up carries less monetary reward and you are likely to be able to throw a net over teams that start in a certain era and again the luck of your global position is then based entirely about which country you sign up in.

I don´t like at all the idea "people are crying because they don´t want to sell their expensive players". I think this is something that may be considered as offensive.

Of course managers do not want to sell their stars, because this is not only a economic game. It's basketball and you want to build "your" team, and one of the coolest features in BuzzerBeater is that you can design your own players in your way.
Some people may have wrongly trained their player and make them too expensive. But others had long-term plans to build a key player with very finely adjusted salary. But these plans are useless if every year we have this kind of economic adjustments. We are talking about a 10-15% increase over the expected salary increase due to training. This is destroying people's plans, so I don't think it is fair to say that people are crying because they don´t want to sell their players.

In addition, these adjustments seem to be based on the income/expense balance mainly dominated by the economy of many small countries in the game. Each new country in BuzzerBeater is a new source of economic imbalance. Because you get new users with lots of economic resources, fast and easy, and very low knowledge of the game: In Spain we call them "New rich people". This is the main economic problem of BuzzerBeater, to have a global economy with mixed conditions (the so-called Small Countries Advantage). We play different games but we share the global economy.
So, it results that some spanish users will have to sell their player because the salaries increased too much (with respect to the normal training update), because the users in small countries have an imbalanced economy... and in addition they are blamed because they don´t want to sell, and also we can´t complaint about the small countries advantage.

The BBs don´t want to understand this, and all the time they are hiding behind a set of raw and biased global numbers, but it is clear that the existence of these small economies, which grows at the same speed that the large ones but without a real competition, is responsible of all the economic problems, whereas the large countries are mostly self-regulated because of the high level of competition in the top divisions.

The prices inflation of 2 seasons ago, and probably deflation of this season will always hurt the weakest teams. Do you really think that in the real world, a rich person is seriously damaged by an economical crisis? Of course we are all affected, but it will always be more harmful for the poorest people. I don´t think this can be argued.