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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

I think the best way to go about it would be to actually study tankers' behavior right now, this season. Easier said than done I know, but that could actually provide a reasonable estimation of weekly negative PD.

I'm a "tanker" in the context of this discussion. I don't deliberately lose, just straddle the salary floor to maximize profit. This season is the first time I've been above the floor, and I've never missed a playoff. Last season, I was a certainty to promote, until I lost the semi final in overtime after losing a key player at the start of the second half.

I make $190k while being competitive (without trying) in div3. I shouldn't be allowed to, but I would fly under the radar in that scenario.