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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.

Dumped...sometimes I wonder if they magically appeared on the TL.

Unfortunately, you are looking at the problem in a very limited way. The real problem is how many trained players on average each team can create at maximum efficiency before they lose enough skills to become fairly useless...

Last edited by Lemonshine at 3/23/2016 6:15:07 PM

Your points are definitely valid, especially on the lack of talent being produced but I don't think the answer is necessarily speeding up training.

I would end the restrictions on FAs and increase the no. of high level trainers. At least make people pay for their improved training.

Also you could be a bit less confrontational, you're starting to sound like some of the more erratic members of the community.

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

Ah the irony!

Yes, if we were dropping from 20k to 10k in the next season or two and dropped everyone into FA, yes, that would have a significant effect. Congratulations! You made me admit that something I have said isn't something I'd categorically say in every conceivable scenario. I apologize for daring to not consider the maintenance of an opinion that utterly disregards anything other than blind opinion.

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.

Theoretically, if every team were training at pretty much full tilt, there would likely be enough excess players trained for sale to make some portions of the market be fulfilled, and possibly some even saturated. Theoretically, you can spend seven seasons training three guards, seven seasons training three bigs, and you've got a season to train FT before skill drops on the first batch of guards and the cycle starts again -- of course, if you can shave a couple of seasons off of the training time and maybe overlap some (finish guards and start bigs at the same time with 1v1, etc), you can come closer.

But that's all theoretical - and frankly I think you are well aware that I've said some sort of boost in training speed would be beneficial. In terms of the 'people who quit were training more' - I don't have that stat, but I think it's a very good supposition that before the deflationary time, a much higher percentage of people were training than were, say, the season before Utopia started up.

I apologize for daring to not consider the maintenance of an opinion that utterly disregards anything other than blind opinion.

Nah you should apologise for the hypocrisy in your statements, mate. You can't have it both ways, I think you realise it too. So either FA has always been a minor part of the TL as you claimed on the back of what Marin said or it wasn't. It cannot be both at the same time and you (and Marin) will need to decide which narrative you prefer to carry forward.

But that's all theoretical

Nope, it quite isn't. You effectively acknowledge (obviously) that on average we can train 6 players each. That is with max efficiency, which is debatable anyway, because a lot of people don't train 3 players full speed, but let's assume that's correct.

You have ranted here and elsewhere that we should train more in order to build the players that are not there. Now you say we can train 6 players each at best. So exactly what are we going to do with 6 trained players each when we need 8-12?

Can't you see that there is a fundamental problem if irrespective of how many people train we can't all have fully trained teams? The system currently relies on tanking teams and teams in the lowest leagues training players without competing, as these teams employ a lot of untrained meatballs...

That is, unless you realise, as BB-Ryan already acknowledged, that the past and current average player skill level is going to drop when you go from a FA system where ONLY trained players were saved to a system where MOSTLY untrained players are saved.

time ago people not play training game shape all season like is happened to not long time ago, the % of user training now and before is been quite different... i think

Ok so you are saying that on average today each team trains more players than in the past (when a lot of people trained GS).

So I ask you, if this is true, how can we have a shortage of players today, 8 seasons after Utopia started and several seasons after the numbers fell below 25k? It makes no sense whatsoever, unless something is fundamentally flawed with the system and actually Free Agency had a significant impact in providing additional players for everyone when numbers were falling.

]Nah you should apologise for the hypocrisy in your statements, mate. You can't have it both ways, I think you realise it too. So either FA has always been a minor part of the TL as you claimed on the back of what Marin said or it wasn't. It cannot be both at the same time and you (and Marin) will need to decide which narrative you prefer to carry forward.

How big a factor would free agency be if we went from 20000 teams to 2000 teams overnight and every player on those bot teams was placed on the TL? How big would it be if we lost 10 teams per week? If your expectation is that I have to say that it has the exact same effect in those scenarios and not doing so is, as you put it, "hypocrisy", I'm doubtful anything I have to say in response to any of your other comments is worth my time or yours.

It feels like this rock has been flipped and looked at so many times in thiis and threads just like it so many times recently. Seems like by the same people to.

Yes and those people were Perpete and hrudey. As you can see before I chose to reply I took my sweet time. I was one click away to reply to the same complaint by Perpete in one of the initial posts, but I refrained to do so for that long.

So they introduced free agents with pretty much no limits to what player was listed at all.
As that had been going on for a while prices hit rock bottom as you basically could find what ever player you wanted as a free agent and didnt have to pay a lot of money for them. Training wasnt even close to being worth it unless you trained players that you had drafted on your own or players with specific builds.
So they changed the FA criteria so that less players came back, and after that prices went up some.
After that Utopia and further changes in FA happened and prices went up a lot again.

So we're all (including you and hrudey) finally on the same page that FA do indeed affect prices and they are not as marginal as some people (including hrudey and Marin) wanted everyone to believe until not long ago?

Do we all agree that FA without restrictions would actually bring the prices down or not?

None of the three times i have described are good for the game imo. But i think that the absurdly low prices that was between the both peaks surely hurt the game and its economy in the long run then what the high prices we see now do.We saw constant GS training from most top teams and no training at all.

And at the same time nothing has been done to increase training appeal! What happened is that some other options have been limited or reduced so that the 'logical' choice would be training. Too bad people not always follow the 'logical' way and sometimes they prefer to wait for a change or quit.

Also as I've shown you this is also sort of irrelevant when you consider how few players each of us can build for ourselves and how this would leave us in a perennial state of shortage if there was no Free Agency and people using untrained players. So yeah, the truth is that the FA effect on the market in the past has been so huge that it overshadowed an obvious shortcoming in the game design.

We saw constant GS training from most top teams and no training at all.
...
I kinda wish we could get rid of GS training once and for all. Wouldn't that be the best motivator for training more?

Well according to Brambauti more people train GS now, if I understood him correctly. That aside, yes removing GS would 'remove' another factor that stands in the way of 'logically' opting for training. It might make the situation better indirectly, however I'd rather do without 'removing' features, if the alternative is encouraging people to train by 'improving' features. I think more people train today than 10 seasons ago, but it's still not enough and it will never be enough to prevent a game-wide drop in skills under the current training and FA systems.

None of the three times i have described are good for the game imo. But i think that the absurdly low prices that was between the both peaks surely hurt the game and its economy in the long run then what the high prices we see now do.

See, we all agree on this. You, Perpete, Mike Franks, anyone really. Too low = bad. Too high = bad. The problem is finding the right balance. And you'd think the FA policy is the best way to make quick adjustments. In fact, I think the FA policy shouldn't even be openly discussed: it should be used by the staff to direct prices where they think they should be, in any segment of the market they deem necessary. If even that's not enough (and I think currently it isn't), then you need to look to longer term changes.

So we're all (including you and hrudey) finally on the same page that FA do indeed affect prices and they are not as marginal as some people (including hrudey and Marin) wanted everyone to believe until not long ago?

Do we all agree that FA without restrictions would actually bring the prices down or not?

Since you've decided to continue to involve me, I'd like to set the record straight about my 'hypocrisy' and correct your misrepresentation of my statements and positions regarding free agency.

To be explicit, I am saying that the effects of free agency *NOW* would be very limited. We have a stable userbase for the most part, and the number of players lost hardly would move the needle. I also, simultaneously hold the belief that unrestricted free agency in the time where we dropped more than half of the teams in the game did contribute significantly to the rampant deflation in effect at the time. And it's not some opinion I've just come to (or, what, "finally on the same page" was it?).

For example, here's an excerpt from a conversation we had about this literally a year and three days ago:
(268316.25)

For years there was a glut of players because of decreasing userbase flooding the market with FAs, and people deciding that there was no point in training since they could just go pick up a player at will from the TL. And this is the result - suddenly the player supply has dwindled, so unsurprisingly the prices have increased.

Or this: (268635.89)

Anyway, yes, the reason FAs were restricted initially was that the market was severely deflating, so much so that there was a perception that the value of training and players was too low to justify continuing to do that. Instead, the value of dollars on the TL was so high that it was commonly accepted that simply refusing to compete, carrying a salary-floor level salary, and accumulating a season of cash and then splurging on more wages was the smart play. And it probably was at that point, which unfortunately is a pretty sad situation for a game to find itself in. Kind of like WarGames, the only winning move was not to play.

Now, of course, a year ago we had a sudden influx of new teams and new dollars, and they were all hot and heavy for the kind of players that teams had been avoiding creating because there was no profit in it. So the prices on the players who were available (many of whom were the old players who would have initially trained before the deflation took off) went way up. The price of trainers shot way up too because there were suddenly over a thousand new teams who had level 1 trainers.

Or: (268635.96)

That's why the limits are where they are - because previously when they were lower there was exactly the problem where there was too much talent on the TL via free agency and prices were depressed. At the risk of wearing my pessimistic hat and ruining my BB mama bear image, I presume if there was any real hope that the number of new users was going to surpass the number of users lost, and thus the demand vs. supply situation accelerate towards undersupply, Marin would likely have made some acknowledgement of that when asked in the thread rather than mention that he liked the rising prices.

There is plenty of room for disagreement in our two viewpoints in this, so there's no need to distort what I have said to create some discussion points. I don't think I need to cite my posts discussing that Free Agency wasn't going to be a cure to inflation then or now, though, as I think that's pretty well common knowledge.

Last edited by GM-hrudey at 3/24/2016 3:35:41 PM