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I think your argument is really part of the much longer standing debate about small versus large countries... which is another larger design issue. You could indeed imagine somehow scaling income more dramatically according to country size and league salaries... but we already do this to a large extent... Spanish D2 for example makes about 20% more than Hong Kong's D2. Now its still true that Hong Kong D2 teams spend even proportionally less than spanish d2 teams.... but this is a bit odd because its had to say Hong Kong teams have a strict advantage, in that spain has more money to spend on players, and clearly has the more talented players... but yes Korean teams clearly have it an easier time of competition.

So on one hand, Spanish teams are all on the same boat... i again would argue that we haven't made it impossible for a spanish d2/3 team to compete. On the other hand it has always been true that you need less of a team to win in Hong Kong than Spain.... then again, Spanish teams are going to beat Hong Kong teams from the same division.... so .... its hard to say that Hong Kong really has an advantage... though an equally skilled manager probably does have an easier time being successful within hong kong.

The best solution to this is not a dramatic re-imagining on the Buzzerbeater economy.. but rather growing smaller countries, and with increased competition, you'll get a balancing out of the competitive levels.

I'm sorry that my language was offensive, I should be more sensitive.

But, I feel like your first paragraph seems to indicate that you didn't really listen to my point about the best players in the world. Given that we have chosen to have a game with a tiered economic system, we cannot have players getting better over time, and getting paid more over time for those increased skills, and have a system where it makes sense for a team to have a "long-term plan to build a key player" because eventually if the team is in a lower division, that player will cost too much for them to afford.. regardless of the salary tuning formula... which again ... was 5-10% depending on salary level (lower for lower salaries/lower divisions). The vast majority of salary increases this season are due to training, not due to this salary formula adjustment.

So that's not really the best representative of what percentage of income is spent on expenses. Spending 70% per week during the regular might seem conservative, but if you include the offseason weeks that jumps to 90%.

2 things, 1... 22 weeks of regular season >> 2 weeks of offseason. 2 earlier in the season there are teams in the cup which are going to raise revenue, and actually 3 in the first week you also have promotion bonuses etc.. so yes.. during the offseason teams are losing money, but those couple weeks of lower revenue are offset by other factors throughout the season.

Last edited by BB-Forrest at 3/26/2010 10:37:53 AM

We cannot compare accurately the numbers of any spanish league and any other smaller league. Of course, you can, but the conclusion you will take may be wrong if you don´t do a deeper analysis. And this analysis is not possible without knowing what is really happening in the spanish leagues. This will not come out from the raw numbers.
For example, in the spanish D1, the last 3 seasons we had teams that sold all their players from the beginning of the season. So no salaries to pay, just scouting players for the draft and prepare the team for the next season. This strategy has proben to be succesful, as some of those teams are now back to D1. The statistics you can take from the spanish league those seasons are not accurate because of those teams, and any comparison with the Hongkong league will be rather useless.
I understand your plan for the global BB economy. But I think your diagnostic is focussed too much on those numbers without getting closer to the reality of the largest leagues, where the real BuzzerBeater is being played.

I think the spanish (italian, german...) economy is quite healthy because it is self-regulated by a strong competition, which is now too often distorted by the global economic measures you are taking. I am quite sure that we are not responsible of the problems of the BB economy, but we had to deal with, for example, a masive inflation created by the new TV contracts and merchandising revenues. Now the same with a very likely devaluation of the players. And at the same time, we have to hear that there is not such "small countries advantage". In the spanish league we are on the same boat, as you said, but the economic changes are giving a big advantage to some teams (i.e. those who bought player before the inflation, those who sold players before the new salary update).

In my opinion, most of the economic problems of BB come from a bad design of the economy in small countries from the very beginning of the game, and it makes no sense to take global measures to solve a local problem.

I agree that there is other income from cup games, playoff games, promotion bonus, etc. When I'm trying to plan for the season I don't want to count on those as income since they aren't assured.

For this season my salaries are up to 650k from 475k from last season. When I plot out a baseline of income based on 11 home games, and 14 weeks of all the other incomes/expenses (barring a drastic increase/decrease in TV money) I've come to the conclusion that to break even I need to:

- at least finish 2nd in my conference AND make it to the SF
- make it to at least round 8 of the cup

Those are realistic based on performance, but they are not assured. I think this is probably a good exercise for managers to take before they decide how much salary they can carry. I'm not saying it's wrong to be aggressive, but if you at least know what you're committing to then it won't hurt as much if you're forced to shed salaries in a declining market.

Last edited by brian at 3/26/2010 10:51:29 AM

I really didn't consider your post a yell... and when i said .. i think you are being a bit too unkind... that was really not meant in an aggressive tone, though i can see how it could be read that way. I think you are generally pretty reasonable, but I thought you were maybe forgetting some of the changes we have made over the last 4 seasons.

I see your point, that you wish you could play a game in which you had to think about the money less, and I could imagine a game in which we made the economics totally flat across the board, had a global salary cap tied to the global level of salaries, no modulation of income with success etc, but I think at this point it would be impossible to make buzzerbeater into that game... and I do think the economic complexity makes the game more dynamic in some good ways. We want there to be an economic incentive to advance, we want to avoid teams avoiding winning their division in order to continue to be successful. We could distill all the tradeoffs into the ones about choosing to build this sort of team versus this sort, and choosing this tactic versus this one, but I personally like the fact that there are too many tradeoffs to make it difficult to write down a globally optimum strategy, and the interplay of an economic system makes it very much unclear whether there even is a global optimum which is independent of the state of the all the rest of the world's strategies.

I think I have already said that I understand and agree with most of the things you said. I understand your economic plans, so no need to explain it again. I´m not complaining about the salary update. I actually don´t care very much about it, as I always try to adjust my team to the new conditions.
I´m trying to give you some information from the spanish community, very poorly represented in this forum and very lonely with respect to the presence of BBs in our forum (I have read more posts of BB-Charles in some private federations than in the spanish forums).

I hear you!

I agree with LA-Emilio about the small/big country different economic situation. Appreciating there is an interested BB audience in Macau/Barbados/Jamaica even Japan, it is obvious that teams are playing a very different game when they sign up to those that start their BB career in a Spain/France/Germany.

With a growing userbase and so many contrasting and conflicting opinions of the changes you impose you are likely never going to satisfy everyone. I still maintain that structuring the BB-world into regions and merging countries so that they have as close to equal users and leagues will make future decisions much easier but I do also appreciate that this would make many of the games facets obsolete and lead to even less alternatives to build your team successfully.

Season 12 is almost upon us... time to let the players do the talking on the court...... have a great season everyone!!

the problem of course is that neither charles nor I speak spanish. We could try to have a google translate dialog...but I think that generally is a bad idea as both sides get misinterpreted.

I know that, but although people from Spain are not very good in speaking english (things are slowly changing in this sense), we have quite a lot of users that can understand pretty well. We have also LAs that can help. And of course, your effort would be greatly appreciated by our community. Maybe is not the topic of this thread, but the influence of the native english community is very strong in BuzzerBeater compared to other larger communities. As an silly example, most of your contests giving Free-Supporter prizes are actually reserved to english speaking participants, and how big is the spanish speaking community? It is only question of these small details that make people feel part of a global community or feel excluded (including all spanish speaking users from south, central and north America).