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What this free agency change has done, has in one stroke removed a chunk of players who are valuable to D1 and D2 teams, probably the most important part of the market.

The part I disagree with strongly is in bold. Teams in I and II are presumably there because they've got the acumen to adjust to the game and its changes, and expecting the game to be catered to them is simply not what I would expect.

Of course you are correct that I and II teams can adjust more easily to changes and they don't need to be pampered, but ---

But I think you're actually missing the point here. The inflation, as I see it, is a direct result of smaller supply of high quality players; there are not so many high profile players available (normally, most users prefer to keep them for themselves - at least for the time they want to compete - and sell them only when their salary get out of hand or they decide to rebuild or they get eliminated from the cup/play off and will get a good price etc.). And that's how I and II teams adapt: by spending more money on the players they need (and trying to sell those players who are not needed for more than before, because they need more cash now). Unfortunately, this also has certain effects on III and IV teams which are also forced to spend more on the lesser players (not 140k PF) - the spiral goes from top to bottom.

Of course the problem is supply and demand. The problem is supply and demand when tons of players got dumped on the TL years ago, and the problem is supply and demand now when there are fewer players of a high end stature. If there's a proposal to try to have BB push down on the supply and demand balance, I'd rather see it be on the side of those who are more in need of assistance because they have fewer resources available to make changes.

Firstly I appreciate your "brief" reply. At least you've read what you're replying to.

It was intended to be brief, honestly! I didn't go back and edit nearly as much as I might have otherwise, or put as much thought into what I'm saying, but I appreciate the fact that you're discussing this constructively.

Teams in I and II are presumably there because they've got the acumen to adjust to the game and its changes, and expecting the game to be catered to them is simply not what I would expect

I'm in a country where D1 and D2 are the only full divisions. So perhaps I'm blinkered there. However, I don't really feel I was asking for the game to be catered to them since I don't think what I said would cause problems for D3/4 teams. If those free agents were released, it would reduce the demand for the players D3 teams want, and so on down the chain. As I believe I said earlier.

One of the things I probably would have said differently - I don't mean to imply that you wanted the game catered for you or your division (and I didn't realize there wasn't really III in England any more, but I don't keep up with user counts much). There's a whole separate issue with small countries and while a populated II isn't suffering from it quite so strongly as other nations, it's still far from ideal (but it seems like some change might be upcoming). I do think that even if every single player hit FA, though, it wouldn't saturate the demand for those high level players enough to have the knock on effect you're suggesting. High level teams tend to go inactive far less frequently and often when they do, they've already sold off their players with the thought of demoting and stockpiling cash.

I edited out most of the middle of your comments for character limit purposes, not because it wasn't interesting - I'll address it more in the comments below.

I hate to bring up realism but I find it a complete nonsense than usable players under 33 are retiring and older players who are deteriorating are on the market.

It's the same thing with people shooting 0.0% from the FT line, or my draftee who three seasons in has zero real assists (one I think in a Cup game). It is, in the end, a game, and one of the fundamental covenants of any game is that players' decisions should have expected and fair results. If I choose to spend three seasons training Jump Range on a draftee with absolute minimum passing, no matter how unrealistic it is, I expect that the consequence is an abysmal A:TO ratio. I'm not sure I'd have made the same decision in designing the game, but fortunately for everyone I was not consulted then. ;)

I'm also not sure I disagree that the release of more FAs on the higher end would be good. I don't think it would make a significant effect, because I'm not convinced enough of those players are lost to be significant in any way, but I don't necessarily think that retiring them is a better choice. But this is where the idea of choice and consequence cuts the other direction. For RL years, more and more people chose to eschew training because there was always some cheap talent available on the TL. The consequence, of course, is that fewer and fewer players of that age group are now available, and while a percentage of them were further lost in the whole free agency changes, I doubt that the amount of players trained would have been sufficient for the market demand now anyway (especially with Utopia added).

So the question then becomes whether BB should be in the business of overruling the consequences of the behaviour by somehow coming up with enough players to saturate the market, and then trying to come up with something similar if oversupply occurs, or simply let the choices made in game affect the in game world. I think things like boosting training (giving players tools to affect their own change) would work; I think increasing the player pool directly would just be a bailout

You know as well as anyone that nothing has been removed from your toolset as a manager; you can still buy players, sell players, train players, draft players, and for the most part all of those options remain fundamentally unchanged.

... You see, that is what they call different ways to play the game.

You are missing the point, probably deliberately, eh? Compete is what I said. "Play the game" is not the same. Neither is a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Trying to compete without training is being made increasingly difficult to the point where it is becoming no longer viable, i.e. cancelled. We all know that, so no need for you to blow smoke.

I am wholly and entirely unconvinced that it is not possible to compete in multiple different ways, not limited to the ones I explicitly stated. Whether you personally can compete effectively or easily or not is beyond my knowledge.

I don't really think we're a million miles apart here as it might seem at first glance. I even agree that the free agents I'm talking about might not be enough.

I'd actually ignored the possibility of boosting training, because I just don't see the likelihood of an improvement to training. I was under the impression that the BBs were happy with training as is. Were there to be a significant change to training I'd be ecstatic. Both for my own team and the NT.

I don't really think we're a million miles apart here as it might seem at first glance. I even agree that the free agents I'm talking about might not be enough.

I'd actually ignored the possibility of boosting training, because I just don't see the likelihood of an improvement to training. I was under the impression that the BBs were happy with training as is. Were there to be a significant change to training I'd be ecstatic. Both for my own team and the NT.

I would have liked it say three seasons ago, when I was getting ready to embark on my next challenge. It would help now too, of course.

I don't think boosting training would fix everything, either, unfortunately. I think that replacing a reasonable chunk of each draft pool with players along the lines of 15-20k salary, decently rounded 22 year olds would make the draft useful for teams *not* in the chase for the top prospect, when one worth a darn exists, and allows teams to still build somewhat internally without having to rely solely on training. There may be some balance issues with that specific salary range at the IV level - a manager in a mostly bot league who already has trainees could well pick up three players better than anyone else in the league in a single draft - but that's all implementation details.

I just like the training speed improvement as a major component because as things stand, it takes way too long for someone to notice a lack of supply and decide that they're going to capitalize on that opportunity. In the end, I suppose I'll always be one of those "if I want a specific player I have to plan on creating him myself" managers, but something that would allow the quality of available players to increase that still rewards managerial choice rather than just a straight player dump seems like the best avenue.

I just don't see any desire on the part of the BBs to do anything about training. The last "improvement" which allows out of position training, actually allows us to choose to slow training. If there was to be a speeding up of training, or even just an attempt to balance training where training JR gave the same total training (ignoring outside factors) as one on one, then I'd be as delighted as you.

I just haven't ever seen much point in discussing training as its largely dismissed. (The discussion, not training)

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That's 3 starters, which I play every week in the same position thanks to the current training system. You're welcome.

Now if you have a problem with the current training system because it's literally impossible to raise an entire team of trained players, well you have a point. However, you, like the other self-proclaimed 'joker', are misrepresenting the problem, in a way convenient to you. Marin wants to incentivise training, make it 'king' as you say. Unfortunately training can't build you a team. So we have a bit of a problem.



Last edited by Lemonshine at 3/23/2016 6:18:43 PM

if market is like that is because the number of users is decreased and with him the number of users so train....

Now, this is also incorrect like many other things in this thread.

If the same percentage of people train today as they were training 15 seasons ago, there should be no difference. Say we all produce on average 2 players every 5 seasons then we have 6 homegrown players and we need to find another 2-6 extra players somewhere else or use untrained players. The extra players can only come from teams who are no longer in the game.

However it's not a problem of how many users you have, but how many trained player each team can produce and how many teams quit as a percentage of the total.

When you drop the size of the userbase from 60k to 30k as fast as it did, and dump out the orphaned talent into the player pool, that will naturally boost the amount of players available and therefore reduce the prices.

Oh poor hrudey, it seems like sometimes then Free Agency has a bit more than a marginal effect. So hrudey has it both ways:
1) when it's convenient to hrudey Free Agency has 'very little' impact
2) when it's convenient to hrudey Free Agency does 'naturally boost' the amount of players and does have an effect
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Ah the irony!

the time spent not training has essentially removed an entire generation of players from the market at many levels.

You know that could be actually believable if you stated that the people who quit the game actually were training much more than those who are still here. A claim impossible to verify, but at least it would make some sense.

Are we refusing to admit that it's quite literally impossible to train enough players for everyone, something that even BB-Ryan has acknowledged? It should be obvious to anyone that this is the case, since it's impossible to build a fully trained homegrown team if you need 5 or more seasons (this is much less than 8+ potential players) to fully train a player and you can simultaneously train 3 players at most. The system is sustainable on 2 principles: people quitting leave trained players behind and, more importantly, a number of teams actually play the game with untrained or badly/partially trained players. In the current environment the untrained and badly/partially trained players will inevitably grow at every level.