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What hurts retention among new users is how frustrating it is to upgrade your players from the automatically generated dreck comprising the roster of a new team. 99.9% of the initial roster is useless. The TL is expensive and frustrating. And training is difficult to figure out at first as well.

Frankly, if you want to do something to encourage new users to stick around for whatever benefits you see that accomplishing, forget the 18 yo all-star talent and give the TSP's of the randomly generated roster a 10-20% boost. Make so they can actually be a tiny bit competitive out of the box.

Finances don't impact whether a new user sticks around. If it's not fun, or seems overly complicated, they bail.

I agreed for the most part. I did not find it all that expensive to significantly upgrade my roster. But, of my original 18 guys, only 2 of them total were worth bothering to keep. Even then 1 of the 2 I kept was the 18 year old AS and really he's prob my 2nd worst player on my team if not worst now. So essentially I only got 1 player worth anything from my original 18.

But I was able to find several players between 50-60 TSP for 1-15K which for the division I start in, is all that I will really need for the short term.

Let's have a look at the problem called "tanking". What are those tanking teams managers doing?

1) Usually the sell off most of their valuable players at the end of the season / start of the new season.
2) They have or buy new traineesm 18 years with high potential.
3) The have a team earning ~ the salary floor.
4) The prices for their seats in the arena are near the minimum, though their having a lot of fans (at least at the start of the season).
5) They dress a trainee and often 2 scrubs during league games. Or they dress a team with a salary of ~50k for a league game in Div. I.
6) They play TIE in their league games.
7) They dress their best players in their Cup games.
8) They play CT only in Cup games.
9) They lose their league games by -50, even -100 regularly.
10) They lose not one, not 2 but usually 22 league games in a row.

So why does it seem to be so difficult to code something that makes the fans run away from the team?
I'm no IT guy, but couldn't you code something like that for attendance (all are accumulative:

1) If team's salary is < salary floor then -5% attendance.
2) players age: if average age of players is <20 or >35 then -5% attendance.
3) Last game:
team lost the last game by <5 = normal attendance
team lost the last game by <15 = -5% attendance
team lost the last game by <25 = -10% attendance
team lost the last game by < 35 = -15% attendance
team lost the last game by <45 = -20% attendance
team lost the last game by <75 = -30% attendance
team lost the last game by <100 = -50% attendance
4) Series:
team won last XX games: +(XX*5%)
team lost last XX games: -(XX*5%)
5) dress less than 5 players in a game: -20% attendance - or perhaps override the lineup totally and use any available player on the team.

Those numbers and variables are just made up. But I hope they'll help this discussion as a basis.

Last edited by LA-Karangula at 2/28/2016 6:04:45 PM

Thought that my utopia team would save some money for a better coach and now this. 40 000 $ short of meeting the salary floor requirement, so I'm in frantic search of players, who I obviously cannot afford to buy. F... great.

If you are $40,000 under the floor, you can either buy player(s) with wages totalling that $40000 or more and pay those wages weekly, or pay $0 to buy zero players to pay that difference exactly weekly. If you're going to pay the difference anyway, and you're not yet in a position where expanding your roster makes sense to you for whatever reason, it's probably better to not spend extra money simply to replace forced salary floor spending with actual wages.

The floor raise is kinda annoying, I will say since I'm only into like my 2nd season. Barely had a chance to expand my arena. I went from making 16k a week to only 3k a week now... so it'll probably be forever and half before I have the money to either A: expand my arena and increase the weekly earnings or B: buy any worthwhile players... which in the case of B could either be guys to train and get myself some money or just guys to be competitive with.

I'd say this change makes more more want to tank because I know my team can't improve this season and I have no money... so the best I can hope for is a good draft pick so I have a good guy who's either sellable or trainable next season.

Look at my Utopia team, I just passed 16 weeks. I've made a transfer profit, expanded my arena a bit, and now have a roster right at the salary floor which has been cheaply assembled. 200k in the bank. My top 8 players have 65+ TSP.

I sold a couple of only 5/6 potential guys for 250k combined after 1 season training and they probably could've gone for more (on the other hand, one of last seasons trainees only went for 14k after being listed at least twice before that. I guess people value some skills more than others...you've gotta work it out, then be smart about what you do in future...). People ignore the low potential trainees and think they have to spend loads on a player with 7+ potential who won't be any better for idk, 3+ seasons anyway (and/or think they need an expensive trainer). This year I've got 3/4 Utopian trainees to try to grow some home grown players...

I can't say I liked the salary floor raise in this position but my weekly profit is still at 40k.
I'm not going to win my league, and I can't compete with the top few teams but I got a great win the other week vs Waikiki who had a much higher starting 5 salary than mine.

(and being Utopia, this is without any of the starting money new teams in any normal nation get)

Bit of a ramble, but some thoughts on being a new team. It's not that hard? I'm not saying this is the best plan or anything, I'm just saying it's possible to be new, and make a profit / make progress, and also have fun.


Last edited by Bergkamp at 3/7/2016 3:23:07 PM