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Now, you see that I have bolded a section. Please note that it's referring to a set of players (young, high potential, broader range of skills) as being forever lost in the old system.

So your reasoning would be like this:
1) some young players with sub 25k-25k-20k-30k-35k were actually TSP monsters despite their salary was too low and now they should be saved
2) some young, high potential players, far above those salary thresholds were saved in the previous system irrespective of skills
I thought it is crystal clear that the news post only talks about young players falling under 1), it does not say anything anywhere about players under 2). Unless you're telling me that "old" players describes also 21-25yo players. The post says that the change will save more young, high potential, skilled players compared to before, which is very welcome if true.

I believe what it said is:

The current system of Free Agency has been seriously overhauled. So far, only one criteria was used to determine whether a player will end up on the transfer market as a free agent or be retired: player salary. The result was that most free agents have turned out to be old and, in borderline cases, mono-skilled players. Young, high potential players, with a broader range of skills were forever lost. Therefore, we decided replace the current system with one that determines free agency eligibility based on a wider range of parameters like age, potential and a total skill point count, all the while making sure the cream of the crop doesn't end up retired, as the wouldn't in real life. Older players have a higher tendency to retire and enjoy their hard earned cash, which means that in order to be free transfered, they need to have a wide range of skills. However, young players compensate their lack of skills with high potential. This will surely change the range and flavor of free agents in the market, making them more spread out over the age spectrum, evening out some price discrepancies.

My interpretation is that when the message says "Young, high potential players, with a broader range of skills were forever lost. Therefore,..." that the intent of the changes is, primarily, to address that class of players specifically. My other interpretation, though I'm not as convinced of this, is that if they're talking about most free agents being old, that quite a large number of those players have been in the 23-28 range that falls outside the "old/young" discussion you're having.

You and Mike Franks are both reading a promise of "more" younger players or "more" free agents, when in fact that is never even stated, other than for the group that previously had a zero point zero zero zero chance of becoming free agents. Could it have been clearer? Absolutely. Is the fact that what happens isn't what you want the words to mean a sign of deception? Only if you really, really want it to be. The fact that the threads that were closed had the people who asked the questions disappointed but not foaming at the mouth while you, grullo and Mike Franks were convinced of a conspiracy to deceive the BB playerbase is unsurprising, and the vehemence of your positions combined with the utter lack of people chiming in to support these conspiracy theories is equally unsurprising.

I have no interest in playing your sentence parsing, rules lawyering game. I've said what I intend to say, not said quite a few more things, and wish you the best in enjoying a game other than who's got a bigger dictionary.

I agree with this, I didnt realize I may have overpay my starting center untill now. But now I realize that everything except for trainees is clearly overpaid. To some extent it is because I dont see how I would pay 200k for a mvp potential with less of a salary im exagerating here just a example.

Ive come to realize that its more about how you train than salary and or age. My team is under the age of 25 my first and second team are yet im 4th with my first team. Tie each game testing it out with bb for myself my 2nd game

Eh well played.

Could it have been clearer? Absolutely.

It's not a matter of being clearer, it's a matter of admitting you cut Free Agency across the board, while presenting it like you actually only have cut "old" players, which to any person playing this game does not mean "the near totality" of players, but rather 33yo+ or, at worst, 30yo+

You and Mike Franks are both reading a promise of "more" younger players or "more" free agents,

Well I certainly haven't read anything that suggested that as a whole fewer young players will go to the market until today...

Frankly, I'm also tired of semantics games. Any person with bare minimum knowledge of the English language is able to tell whether the news post means that change leads to a

reduction in the amount of players released by free agency

To be even clearer. I don't think we would be discussing here or elsewhere about the discrepancy between the news post and the implementation, if the announcement did say:

It functioned well before free agents were added. We had seasons where they were completely removed even after implementation. If they would have been removed again the BB world would adapt and survive, so there's no need to fear change. This total removal has also been considered but it was decided instead that they can stay in a smaller capacity and that they can be used as what they were originally intended for - as a market balancing tool.

Instead we need to push for this kind of confession and we have it on forums which get nowhere near as much audience as the New Season News Posts.

I specifically criticise that Announcement Post and I think it's been done in order to avoid people coming on the forums to complain. Mike Franks seems to be more concerned with the effects of the actual change. And he's not alone. After all it was not me who opened threads about prices and inflation being too high and it was not a single person who participated in them or suggested that a more expansive FA policy would help (did one of these). Give those people the correct story in the most visible piece of News in the game and we shall see if it's going to be the Unholy Trinity Lemonshine-Mike Franks-Grullo who is going to come after you criticising. I hope you do you realise that the secrecy from Marin mostly serves the purpose of avoiding discussions on the merit of the changes and avoiding people debating and complaining all the time.

You probably can't say, but I will ask anyway.

It seems to me that young players need very high potential and decent skills to finish up as a free agent, and older guys (23-28) have to be multiskilled to have a try at a free agency.

So going with this theory, 24y MVP center with 120k salary will retire beucase his guard skills are at a very low level and he doesn't match the multiskill criteria to become a free agent. I know BBs are pushing hard for managers to train multiskill players; elastic effect and cross training are the prime examples and I think multiskill now also affects free agents-to be.

I think the problem many users have with this is that it creates inflation. Based on your post, you seem to want this as it will encourage more managers to train. I can't argue with your logic that low prices lower a manager's incentive to train. I think, however, that not only are there more effective ways to promote training, but also, this low price low training problem could have sorted itself out without the rule change.

As you mentioned, these recent low prices were due to a mass exodus of users combined with low FA requirements. Basically there was the same amount of talent as when there were 60k teams, only now it was concentrated amongst 20k teams. Now, the user number has essentially stabilized, so even with the old FA rules there were fewer FAs than before and prices have seen a modest rebound. Think back to previous eras where the number of users was stable or even rising; FA requirements were even more lenient than before: players only needed a 10k salary to become a FA, yet prices were far higher than what they are now. This suggests that the root cause for low prices was not low FA criteria, but rather a sharply declining user count. With a stable number of users, there are fewer FAs on the market and they have a smaller impact on player prices, acting simply as you say "a market balancing tool."

If you had not changed the FA rules and these low prices are in fact discouraging managers from training, in the long term, this would only reward teams who continued to train, provided the user number remains stable. As players get older and their skills start dropping, managers would look for replacements. But since so few users choose to train during this time, the supply of skilled players would be much smaller and, thus, their value would skyrocket. Unless the user number is in steep decline, there would not be enough FAs to counteract this effect. With player values being so high, more managers would return to training.

In short, the fewer managers who train, the more valuable players will be. If every user focused on training, there would be such an abundant supply of players that most would be practically worthless. Only very salary efficient, highly skilled players would be of any significant worth.

If what you want is for more managers to train, there are more direct ways of going about it. For instance you could make out of position training 100% effective or give every team a "training game" each week.These changes would make training so easy that it would be foolish for managers not to train. As well, it would allow teams at all levels to put a heavy focus on training without sacrificing competitiveness.

But the thing is that this game is powered by training and there is no way around that fact.

Yes, that is the conclusion I have reached, too.

I think honesty here would have gone a long way. He should have just stated from the beginning that the rules for free agency are a lot stricter than they used to be and most players that used to go to free agency now will retire irrespective of age, potential and salary, although the effect is more severe for older and lower potential players. This would have been representing the situation and the change for what it is.

True, but that's water over the dam. Marin's most recent post seems genuine to me. I commend him for that. I think he has a different vision of the game than you or I do, and he is calling the shots. He wants high prices, we'll get high prices. Where there used to be balance in building a roster through drafting/training AND the transfer list, now we're going to have to build our rosters mainly through drafting/training.

(1)Training is a big and very important part of BB. ...

(2) Some managers will always lean more on training, some more on trading, there's no way around that, but the general idea of the game is that training is more important than trading. ...

(3)it was decided instead that they can stay in a smaller capacity and that they can be used as what they were originally intended for - as a market balancing tool.

Marin, thank you for your thoughts. I appreciate that you did that. I appreciate the way you address the matters on their merits as you see them. That is what I hoped for a few pages back when I invited a GM to contribute constructively (the one who beat his chest and threatened me -- not exactly constructive).

I have considered your whole post, and there are three points (above) that I would like to address. (1) I understand now that training is at the apex of this game. (2) Managers utilizing many different approaches, each with an equal chance of success if they do it equally skillfully, would seem ideal to me, rather than favoring one to the exclusion of others. (3) We'll see if the market is balanced. My perception as manager of a lower- and mid-level team was that the market already favored training over transfer by a wide margin, and the recent change has further imbalanced it. We'll see.

Again, thanks for your post.

People in this thread be like:



I trust in Marin, and think with productive discussion going on, things can get worked out to be liked by everyone. I personally think the current system is okay, but could still be modified a little bit, as other managers have suggested (although some not in a very positive manner) to get the ideal FA situation setup. Go team! I'll be following these threads and giving some more input when I have time.

I specifically criticise that Announcement Post and I think it's been done in order to avoid people coming on the forums to complain. Mike Franks seems to be more concerned with the effects of the actual change. And he's not alone. After all it was not me who opened threads about prices and inflation being too high and it was not a single person who participated in them or suggested that a more expansive FA policy would help (did one of these). Give those people the correct story in the most visible piece of News in the game and we shall see if it's going to be the Unholy Trinity Lemonshine-Mike Franks-Grullo who is going to come after you criticising. I hope you do you realise that the secrecy from Marin mostly serves the purpose of avoiding discussions on the merit of the changes and avoiding people debating and complaining all the time.

I agree that someone could reasonably read the news and interpret it in the way that you did. It's quite likely many people could. And if that was truly what you were looking to point out, I'm sure it would be appreciated by all. Indeed, even a "look, BB-Marin's communications are unclear again, the BB staff are not good at expressing themselves" would have been a reasonable response. I mean, I feel for Marin and I can still agree that the communications are often not clear, and perhaps that's something that might be worth him looking into.

But, of course, all of that requires a reasonable read of the news story. What you post instead is things like:

So he either thinks we're all stupid and illiterate or he doesn't know what's going on or he was lying. Since I don't think we are all incapable of understanding the news message and he also arrogantly confirmed multiple times that everything is working as he wants it to, then the logical conclusion is that the last option is true, don't you think?

I believe he thought he'd outsmart everyone claiming something he knew to be false or at least extremely misleading, but that was a more palatable change for the community, so that people would agree with the news and not pay attention. After all, who tracks free agency, really? I did my analysis on the players who retired only because he was extremely arrogant, otherwise I would have probably just let it go. This kind of behaviour and dishonesty is utterly disappointing coming from the person running the show.

It's patently obvious that you, for whatever reason, feel that the message is deliberately crafted to deceive. And if you have such a negative opinion toward the management of the game itself, it's not like there's anything I or anyone with a tainted staff hat could say that wouldn't be treated with the same skepticism of any of Sepp Blatter's cronies.

It certainly appears that you've passed a line that would have sent me from the game long ago. I can disagree with how things are implemented, how effective the staff is (I know how ineffective I am, for example!), how things are communicated, and even some fundamental aspects of the game simulation itself and still consider the game worth playing and even paying to support. If I ever felt that the people behind the game were out to actually deceive the player base, though, I would be gone. Your problem is not this news announcement, but that you fundamentally distrust Marin and this news post is just the latest vehicle for you to express it. I am afraid that there's nothing I can do to help you with that issue, other than hoping you can find something to actually enjoy, be it here or somewhere else.