BuzzerBeater Forums

I just caught this thread now but with the new rules in place, I think you're always better off to try and stay in your current league than go back a level.

You have a floor salary so you're not going to gain a whole lot by tanking (you'll lose tons of arena revenue if you do that too) and then you'll make even less arena $$$ in a lower division next season. Plus there's always the fear that you run into strong teams in that lower league and are stuck there for more than one season.

As others have said, your team looks like it belongs in D4. Focus on staying there by being smart. Focus on making money, managing gameshape, enthusiasm and winning the games you can win instead of trying to win every game. If that means playing TIE and benching your starters against teams you aren't going to beat losing by 60 instead of 20 in the process, than that's the smart thing to do. If that means saving your cash and buying a new player at the end of the season (instead of paying his salary for the entire season) in order to make sure you win your relegation series, than that's what you do.

Last edited by Beener not Beanerz at 2/24/2012 7:06:11 PM

You've gotten some good advice already, but here are my 2 cents.

1. Don't think that doing well in DV means anything. DV can be won with scrubs if you just manage enthusiasm. I suspect that at least half of DIV teams don't manage enthusiasm so it should be easy to stay in this league. Early in the season, you can always lose a couple of games if you play TIE since your enthusiasm is reset to 5. Also, I think it can be easy to win DIV if you get one stellar defensive guard, and 2 old inside men (at least 12 IS, and 12 ID) and play LI. DIII seems to be where the significant competition begins (at least in the US).

2. Training seems overrated to me (as compared to just using the TL). Practically speaking, it is impossible to 2 position train in DIII and above unless your trainees are quite advanced already. And, even 1 position training will be difficult to win games unless your trainees are again quite advanced already. So, it seems to me that you have to sell and rebuild your team at every level. I now believe that you'd be better off buying pretrained 20-23 year olds and just finish their training if you want to be competitive at higher levels. Perhaps with cross training, it would be even better to just train FT and not bother with trainees and keep all that extra trainer salary to buy players?

3. Arena expansion is necessary long term, but the ROI per unit is very small since you can just raise prices on your existing seats, and added seats reduces the price that fans will pay for those units.

Anyway, stay in league DIV and try to get into DIII. DV is boring as heck and most DIV leagues don't even have any activity on their forums.

Good advice here from Beener. You need to probably win half your games to end up 5th and be totally safe. Look at who your rivals are and who you are playing each week and who they are playing. Especially while the cup is on you can steal a couple of games easily that can be MASSIVE at the end of the season.

I know a USA team that won division V by having three trainees and just buying $1k scrubs in good GS each week and firing them sunday night. It is that easy.

Making money is also critical. If you find yourself in 6th or 7th at the end of the season you can "rent" some power players to win you the series, but it is better to not have to do it.

I totally disagree with whoever said you can't do training in higher level leagues. I think it is critical but in your situation you will need one experienced and established player in at least one game per week - the one you plan to win.

I wanted to come back to this thread and thank everyone for their advice. I started to get my game shape up and I've won my last four games in a row to even my record at 4-4 and move into 4th place overall. I honestly didn't think my team could do it, but at this point I fully expect to at the very least be in great position to make the playoffs at the end of this season. Not bad considering I was dead last just two weeks ago.

My only roster change was to buy one player. He wasn't even a good buy overall considering I'm paying him $55K per week. But I'm still making tons of money, around $80K per week when it shows my league average is negative $1K per week. I currently have nearly $1M in my bank, so I'm doing ok, I'd say.

Anyway, thanks to all for your advice.

Congrats and good luck for future