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Yes and I think most people were in favour of changing the fan survey to do that, but then people disagreed on what would constitute 'tanking'. More importantly changing the fan survey to cut into the tanking teams' earnings is not as easy as changing the values in the salary floor calculation.

That said, D1 in decently sized nations did indeed need a higher floor, irrespective of fan survey changes because the differences were simply too much. When you have 3-4 teams at 300k-350k or so and the rest at 600k or more it's not so much fun and you can understand how much difference it makes to earnings. To add insult to injury one of these teams, with the money from tanking, bought players before the playoffs and won a relegation series, imagine that...

In order to counter the reluctancy to mess(technically) with the fan survey, there were proposals that didn't have anything to do with it..
Once a week, during the economy update there could be a calculation run(like the overextension tax does) that would deal with tanking, by reducing (percent of)that week's TV income, based on the parameters calculated.
Pretty simple math required, provisions for all worries of injustice and levels of penalties can be included.

The answers were like "nice, but can't code it"...then Utopia was born...!!!!!

"Where there is will, there is a way"... and after so many different proposals and so many different denials,all these years, i tend to believe that the answer may just be that they simply don't want it changed.

Fundamentally very little was added with Utopia. Changing fan survey or finding a way to identify tankers, is more complex.

My point was that there were proposals that didn't have the workload of making Utopia, nor the complexity of tweaking with fan survey.
Needed just understanding of simple differential equations and will to make a change.

It is in Marin's drawer, i don't have the keys!

“The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be correct.”

Fundamentally very little was added with Utopia. Changing fan survey or finding a way to identify tankers, is more complex.

Agreed. Expanding existing processes to include one more nation, plus the second team processes are all pretty much straightforward technical changes. They still require planning and foresight and are still of course prone to have errors in development, but it's simply a technical issue. When it comes to something like rebalancing the fan survey, the technical portion of it is relatively simple - change parameters here, maybe another calculation there - but coming up with the actual design behind it, trying to find the right balance that targets people who are intentionally tanking and not those who simply are teams behind the talent curve because of team age or new promotions is a significant challenge. Finding some way to quantify "I know it when I see it" is pretty much the lot in life for technical folks. ;)

The OP, maddoghellas, sees it:

c) the horizontal salary floor raise, by definition, will also punish the teams that play the game and remain fully competitive while keeping the salaries and expenses low, hence maintaining financially healthy and long lasting teams.

Here’s how it affects Knecht:

I have two teams in my league that are fighting for promotion, ~2-3 treadmilling teams and ~12-14 bots/bottom feeders. Now I am forced to spend more, which changes absolutely nothing. I lose to the good teams by the same and beat the bots by an even bigger margin.

Here’s another manager’s experience:

Last season, I managed to make it to the finals with my payroll below the salary floor. With some players up and down in their salaries, my salary total remained same after the preseason update and I will be paying $30.000 each week basically for nothing

Phyr sees it:

If I have a super salary-efficient team that is able to compete in my league, the salary floor punishes those teams too.

There's a problem here. It’s part of the job of the authorities to defend the changes that have been made. So what is their defense? Let’s look at that in another post.

Their defense of raising the salary floor is … the new manager has 16 weeks to (1) build his arena, (2) acquire players, (3) train up players, and (4) get a promotion bonus. (5) Plus now each new team gets an all-star potential trainee. (6) They (the veterans) could do it so anyone can do it. (7) So it’s a “perceived problem.”

Point by point … (1) building his arena doesn’t add players or raise salaries, so it doesn’t help against the salary floor. (2) Effectively acquiring players in this hyper-inflated Transfer Market is nigh unto impossible, certainly an unrealistic expectation of a new manager when even so many veteran managers are voicing their complaints about the hyper-inflation. (3) Training up players takes several seasons at least to get significant results, and requires expenditure on staff. (4) ONE manager in a league gets a promotion bonus; no help for the rest. (5) The new all-star trainee doesn’t create a better competitive position against other teams with their own all-star trainee, and he cannot be trained up in just 16 weeks. (6) It is true that a new manager who does everything right can succeed, even with the increased salary floor – how many of them are that skilled right off the bat? (7) I won’t even dignify that with an answer.

Let’s not hear any more “...as my economy grew ... after another promotion ...” etc. The new manager isn’t given that amount of time to learn to do things right. Let’s look honestly at the pros and cons of this change.


Last edited by Mike Franks at 2/23/2016 9:49:20 PM