BuzzerBeater Forums

So what's your take on the FA changes?

You know there used to be people saying categorically that FA has no impact or very little impact on the TL.
Some people justify the changes in order to create even more inflation and therefore reward people training.
Others say that FA in some cases has no effect and in some others can destroy the market.
Another take is that FA should be used to regulate the transfer market (prices too high=let the free agents loose, too low = close the taps).

Ultimately we will always be faced with the problem that nobody can create a homegrown team of trained players (of reasonable level) and therefore, without the possibility of acquiring free agents, there will always be a shortage of trained players for the game as a whole. So people who don't want FA are making the conscious choice that teams should be, on average, worse across the board (how much worse depends on the turnover of teams and whether the game is growing or shrinking).

The official position by the BBs in the past was this:

As I've said a few times, the BBs read all of these threads but try not to enter into them in order not to alter the course of the debate.

I just wanted to remind everybody that we do obviously keep a very close eye on prices and that we've seen major threads both with people complaining about inflation and people complaining about having no money to pay for things in the past season. This combination would seem to suggest that the balance is reasonable at the moment, although we'll of course continue to monitor it.

We're definitely aware that transfer compare has limited utility -- one of the side effects of having so many different ways to build players is that it's often difficult to find enough close comparisons to pick the correct value. If you really want to solve this problem, get everybody in the game to invite 5 friends and the volume will be high enough that transfer compare will do a better job. :)
BB-Charles 17/08/2009

You can already see here that they had no clue about where they wanted prices to be for the game as a whole, but their decisions were driven by people campaigning one way or another.

Of course there are also other issues to consider such as how the FA policy impacts NT teams, like when Perpete had a run in with BB-Charles over a French player called Riaud. With no FA we could just forget about any micronations' NT as there is no way they would have enough players to have one.




Last edited by Lemonshine at 4/3/2016 7:45:20 AM

I think the BBs have to start releasing the above 60k FAs again. We can't have high skilled players costing so much. Trainerman always likes to say we should make the game tough for high division teams ("the old grandpas" as he calls them), but he neglects to consider that when prices for high skilled players rise so dramatically, the teams that already have these players on their rosters aren't actually hurt that much and may even benefit, since their players are now worth much more. The teams that get hurt are those up and coming teams and newly promoted ones that need to improve their rosters, but are unable to since they can't afford high skilled players.

Micronations are apart of the problem. lf we want TL prices to go down, BBs have to find a way to increase the supply of players on the market or to decrease the amount of money able to be spent. Merging micronations together would do this as it would decrease the number of Division 1 leagues, increase the number of micronation teams in DII to DIV and prevent micronation D1 teams from being able to field barebones teams to hoard money as their leagues would be more competitive. In the short run it might inflate prices as micronation teams would have to spend money to make their leagues more competitive but in the long run it would decrease the amount of money being earned by micronation teams. I don't really care what happens to micronation NTs. If you want to keep them, just have any player drafted by a team in a micronation league to be the nationality of that team, but in the end we should help destroy the BB economy for the sake of micronation users.

I don't know who disagrees with this.

I mean, obviously some of the official decision makers do, but what exactly is the logic behind leaving those FAs behind? Especially as they acknowledge there's too much money in the game seen with the tax on the highest bank balances. It's contradictory.

The teams that get hurt are those up and coming teams and newly promoted ones that need to improve their rosters, but are unable to since they can't afford high skilled players.

It would help if those high division teams / long term managers viewed the Div III and IV teams as anything more than farm teams to do their out-of-position training for them.

Right now the training system is such that those newer/lower division owners are stuck in yo-yo land bouncing back and forth between III and IV because:

1) They can't afford to upgrade their rosters through FA's, and
2) They can't build players fast enough to compete with those long established teams.

Not to mention the fact that a lot of this focus on removing money from the game seems a lot like some people saying "I got my bankroll now we're gonna change the rules so no one else can and I can rule forever."

I think you are taking that one step too far. Any rational individual wants to pay the lowest cost for the thing that they want. It doesn't matter if that player is owned by a FA or real team.

With all of the inflation all FA sales would be help the market correct itself because as you said the money goes to no one and money is taken out of the economy. Less money = lower prices.