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Tanking is certainly an issue to a lot of people, it seems. I hope the BB gods do listen.

One idea I thought of, to help maintain longevity in a manager's roster, is to (slightly) increase a team's "chemistry" after each game/week/month that they play together.

I like that idea, not as a solution to tanking itself, but just as a general idea that would benefit the game experience.

HT has something similar, where each player has a 'loyalty' stat. A player gets a bonus to his skills equivalent to the length of time he has been on your roster, up to a certain period of time (three season in HT, although I would like to see the maximum bonus be a little longer than that).

Players that originate from your team (i.e. players you have drafted, or in the case of HT, scouted) also get an additional bonus to their skills on top of the loyalty bonus, to encourage teams to train their own players.

The chemistry idea has been thrown around plenty of times. The reason why it sucks is the fact that it favors older established/rostered teams. It would get even harder to close the cap.
Does anyone have a decent example where a tanking team comes up and wins it all (remember we are talking about big countrys here)? I have seen nothing but fails in Estonia. Teams filling rosters, sitting in minus and are struggleing to get out of divII. I still think you lose money if you have to establish a roster in the first week to compete. This makes them settle for lesser skill for money.
It's funny to see divV team thinking about tanking. If you can't manage that level and have to tank, then you don't have divI in you, I'm sorry.

It's not purely tanking that's the issue, but more the ability to tank for the majority of the season, before buying up a bunch of players to win a relegation series.

This has become the optimal strategy in leagues were a team has gone bot, as the other teams can safely dump all of their players, safe in the knowledge they are assured a relegations series as they can't finish lower than 7th. Then they buy a bunch of unsustainable salaried players, use the money they made from tanking to pay the unsustainable salaries for two weeks before dumping them after that.

This is just one example where tanking is used as a viable strategy, due to the ability to buy players right before the playoffs. There are plenty of other examples where teams will tank for all or part of a season, knowing they can buy the players they need right at the end of the season.

Surely a better game experience is one where we don't have the option of buying in a group of hired guns and paying them unsustainable salaries, just to win in the playoffs/relegation series?

So if 6 teams in the lower section tank (8th seeds are bots or tanking to relegate) the season. Both 6-7th will buy those players for the money they have saved during the season. Doesn't that mean 4 out of 6 still relegate and 2 of those with nothing in their pocket?
I have relegated once. I tried to stay in DivI when I first promoted. I kept building my team. I never want to relegate again. It messes up your economy and I had to get a 22-0 record to get back up. How can anyone say relegating is good in a big country? Bizarre.

It's not purely tanking that's the issue, but more the ability to tank for the majority of the season, before buying up a bunch of players to win a relegation series.

Exactly, here is one example french D1 :
(http://www.buzzerbeater.com/team/35796/schedule.aspx?seas...)

Winterfoll Wolves won the relegation series without any opposition whereas he did 5V/17D against 11V/11D for his rival Azur BC.
Why ? Because he tanked most of the season before recruiting these players before the deadline:
(5655072)
(10843522)
(9372068)
(17113306)
(6878529)

Azur BC tried to do his best during all the season but when he saw this, he knew he would have zero chances so he decided to let down to make a few economies.
Now, what is doing Winterfell Wolves in your opinion ? Tanking as he sold all this players after winning play downs. Great ...

Winterfell could do so why ? Because the last in his conference, Tenakha, decided to tank from the start of the season so he knew from the beginning that he could be 7th and still get a chance with this strategy. And you know why ? he is in the exact some situation this season with the last one tanking too
This creates another problem : it tends to create differences between conferences that last during seasons and longer than before. This is the problem of my own division where 1st conf is ususally weaker so they don't hesitate to keep low salaries compared to the 2nd where it sometimes looks like an armament war from the start that leads promoted to act by the same way.
Effect : in some divisions, playrEs prefer to tank one season in order the come back in another division. it happened during almost 10 seasons in french D3.14.



Of course, there are also every season the example of the B3.

from Kukoc :

The chemistry idea has been thrown around plenty of times. The reason why it sucks is the fact that it favors older established/rostered teams. It would get even harder to close the cap.

Not a problem if you give 100% of chemistry rate for the creation of a team and that you give a limite to this chemistry so that effects don't add up infinitely. What's more, during offseason, there might have a reset or a 66% impact on chemistry compared to the rest of the season. This might also help the fansurvey line about "scared to loose our best players" more accurate.
What's more, taking in account the time played by these players might be interesting too. A back-up or a trainee recruited during the season should not have the same impact than a big salary recruited for the final laps.

Since a few seasons it has become easy for promoted team to do better than average teams already there because of the promotion bonus and because market was so low that you can have a big team without problem.
Once again, The example of french D1 illustrates that : the winner was a promoted team last season.


Last edited by Dunker Joe at 5/29/2012 5:04:57 AM

So if 6 teams in the lower section tank (8th seeds are bots or tanking to relegate) the season. Both 6-7th will buy those players for the money they have saved during the season. Doesn't that mean 4 out of 6 still relegate and 2 of those with nothing in their pocket?

In that situation I don't really have any sympathy for any of those teams, as they have all chosen to tank. In reality, it doesn't really happen like that though.

More often, you'll have one team on one side that tanks all season (let's assume there's a bot in 8th spot) and buys up a bunch of $200k players to beat the guy in 6th place that has been playing to compete all season. The guy in 6th (who has been playing 'properly') has little chance of beating the guy that tanked and bought in a bunch of hired guns for the relegation series.

Whether the team in 7th is financially better off (I'll get to that bit further down) is irrelevant, as the team that is in 6th has been relegated as a direct result of his opponent tanking all season and buying players in for the relegation series. The team in 6th doesn't even have the chance at competing in the relegation series - short of buying a bunch of hired guns himself, there's nothing he can do about it. In this situation, tanking has become the 'optimal' strategy to survive. Surely this has a negative impact on the game experience?

As for the financial aspect, it's debatable whether the team is financially better off or not. I don't want to get into a long debate about the specifics, as that's not really what the issue is about, other than to say they are probably better off financially. Using a quick example...

Assuming a team can save between $200k - $250k a week by only paying the salary floor, they will save something like $2.5m - $3m a season compared to a team that is competing with an average roster (this is II in Australia, just as an example). The high salary guys they buy in are generally not that expensive to purchase (due to the wages), but let's assume they will sell them off for around about the same amount they purchased them for, give or take $300k total. Let's say we buy in 2 guys with $150k salaries and 1 monster $200k guy to win the relegations series, two weeks of wages for these guys is $1m, plus a $300k loss on the sale (estimate), it ends up costing them $1.3m to buy in the hired guns for the relegation series. Take this away from the ~$3m in saved waged for the season is still a profit of ~$1.7m.

Given this financial incentive, as well as the ability to not relegate, and it suddenly becomes clearer why this is becoming the optimal strategy to succeed.

I have relegated once. I tried to stay in DivI when I first promoted. I kept building my team. I never want to relegate again. It messes up your economy and I had to get a 22-0 record to get back up. How can anyone say relegating is good in a big country? Bizarre.

I fully agree with you. I don't think relegating is of great benefit to a team. The issue isn't teams that tank and relegate though - I don't have a problem with that, as they are still being punished by relegating. My issue is with teams that tank and then buy players at the end of the season to avoid relegation. This is what the BB's need to look at, as soon as possible.

What is the minimum wage in your league?

The chemistry idea has been thrown around plenty of times. The reason why it sucks is the fact that it favors older established/rostered teams. It would get even harder to close the cap.

This can be mitigated somewhat by giving everyone warning that such a feature will be implemented (and when it will begin) i.e. announce it two seasons before it actually takes effect.

If there's a maximum amount of time that it takes to reach the top level of 'loyalty' (e.g. three seasons), it doesn't significantly favour more established teams, as teams with the same roster for seven seasons will get the same loyalty bonus as teams that have been together for three seasons (or whatever the maximum is).

In any case, I would like to see the tanking issue addressed first. Features like this are no doubt much further down the line - the tanking issue is much more important.

What is the minimum wage in your league?

In my league it is 135k whereas a team with 330k of wage succeeded into being second in conf1 (low competition) and average wage of the division was about 420k (before the end of the season where a few teams recruited big players, half of teams already saved sold several players and the few ones still playing for not being relegated kept the same high wage).
In my opinion, minimum wage should be about 250k.

In French D1, I just asked to Megadez. He or I will let you know

Last edited by Dunker Joe at 5/29/2012 5:24:03 AM

In french first division: $ 262 658