BuzzerBeater Forums

If you really want to learn something about this approach to BB, you need to get out of your mindset that everyone starts in D2 with D2 TV contracts, D2 attendance/pricing ability, and the ability to avoid relegation by playing against a bunch of bots. This is not what the vast majority of BB managers experience.

Furthermore, spare me your prattling about trainer costs and whether you made more money 2 years ago by day trading, or exactly what my transfer balance is. We are discussing here whether training high potential players gives significantly more return on investment than training lower potential guys (check the thread title). It's not a complete cost-benefit analysis, nor is it an analysis of how to maximize overall return on investment. Those are interesting and important questions for sure, but in some sense they are a separate issue. Stop conflating them, or start a new thread to discuss them.

In the example I gave above, there's no need to include trainer cost, because they are the same for both conditions..
But that example is pretty illuminating by itself. It shows that you must regularly sell a 5 season trained player for 1.3 million more than what you bought him for, to be even with a 3 season trained, lower potential guy. You can call it a false theory, or that I'm blowing smoke, but you really haven't argued with that outcome. You just ignore any all all examples of star guys who sell for decent prices (remember that TPEs are based on actual sales). Still, even assume the prices are 300K. That just slightly reduces what the high priced guy needs to sell for to get to break even point.

And as I have said many, many times, this analysis doesn't show that the best approach for all teams is to train star potential players and only star potential players. But it is certainly a far cry from "training star potential players is worthless."

Lolz.

You clearly missed the point where I said that my example was a limited case of circumstances of relative cost in training high versus low potential players. Whether there was any net profit in creating those players isn't relevant to that case. So one last time: it's not a complete cost-benefit analysis. Cause here you go bringing up other considerations, like how well the Horde did. Well, the Genghis and the Horde is a very good team, but he also has not invested what I have in the arena, where he's 5000 seats fewer than mine. A strategic choice that every manager has to make, And I'll admit that he plays the TL more effectively than I do. That's not a part of the game I enjoy enough to spend a lot of time on it. Still, really all of that is extraneous.

And I do agree that training better, higher potential players is something most teams would benefit from at a certain point in their life cycle. Or else why would my main trainees be 7,8,10 potential, with one of them a top prospect for USA U21 next season?

You've brought in 1.3 million over the life of your entire career on trainees and non-trainees alike. Even if that 1.3 million is ALL trainees... you subtract trainer cost and initial purchase, plus any scouting fees you paid....and you are no profiteer. You are a guy working at McDonald's lecturing his coworkers about the stockmarket. And I'm thinking to myself now, if you know so much about the stockmarket...why do you work at McDonald's?????

It's almost exclusively *NOT* trainees, actually. I know this is a difficult concept to grasp, but the name of this game is not TransferMarketBeater, or TeamRotationForProfitBeater. I am not saying that training low potential players is always the way to go -- when you can afford to train better players (and I'm talking salary too), that's going to be better. I'm not lecturing on how to be a profiteer. What I am saying is that for teams just starting out, who should be putting their money into the arena, that rather than spending 300k per trainee acceptable for YOUR level or trying to churn some small margin on stamina/ft training on guys under 10k, it's entirely possible to move up by INITIALLY training lower tier prospects, and that those prospects can actually help a team in IV and in III.

But your constant McDonalds references just show how out of your area of expertise you are here. In some countries, sure, you can roll over in money so quickly that you're essentially starting off with the ability for premium players. In countries where you start at 5, though, you may have to work McDonalds a few seasons to be able to afford to go to college and get a better job.

Sell a few players for 300k + (not 1 or 2, but a couple, in a few cycles) and get a total sales over 2 or 3 million, better yet try to actually have a positive number in your transfer history not -2 million.....

Util then you don'T belong in the conversation. I can'T stand people who talk themselves up as experts and push theories with no practical experience. ITs just ridiculous.

How many games have you won in V? In IV? In III? And yet you presume to lecture from on high that what has worked in multiple instances AT THOSE LEVELS is worthless?

Believe it or not, I don't measure my success by my transfer balance, nor by what happens to my players when they're gone, or whether they appear in the NT. I don't believe that one should be following the exact same strategy when in V as they should in I. And I don't believe that players who are still capable starters after two promotions are ever "worthless" trainees. Maybe they aren't the most "profitable" and maybe I'm not going to be able to say that my first four or five trainees in this game will ever be stars at the top levels of the game. But there's absolutely no reason to spend the extra money to train guys to a level that no team can reach in four or five seasons, and then just turn them over to guys like you and the guys in the NBBA, who do have need of those players.

I can't show you too many players that I moved recently with lower salaries, because I am in DI I have no use for them. I see your point, but I ahve Tsunami, in salary range, and you've been staffing guys with 30k+ and 20k+ salaries, I look at your roster, I look at players you sold recently, PF 30kish salary, you took a loss on that buy and sell didn't you????

So you can not exclude more recents moves I made, in that salary range
Solano
aleman
Falcon
Duchesne
Melon
Mammone
Vlimas
achladopoulos
Delahaye
Prasidis
Jungblut
Simone
Frassanito
Honda
Asano
Uchida
Koshin
Arza
Drescik
and
Krejci and Tsunami whom are still on my team
and whoever else I missed....

Yes, and you'll note that neither I nor Tangosz are currently training star potential guys, BECAUSE WE ARE NOW IN III and can now support players in the 20k+ range. Believe it or not, there are two levels lower than the one we are in now, even though it's lower than the one you started in.

AND if you are gonna train, putting in training that will sell for a profit AFTER considering how much you spent on the trainer.

So, you're the expert - what's an effective plan of turning a profit training stamina or FTs on players in the 6-8k salary range, or is that just daytrading?


Last edited by GM-hrudey at 4/27/2012 10:07:55 AM

I did see that you guys have a few higher pot. now. So I was seriously wondering why you keep arguing for trainer lower pot. when you clearly see the wisdom in and have moved on to the higher pot.

I have never said training stars is optimal. I think ideally you get as much potential as you can, of course, but when you're starting out and hope to progress a long way, it's better in my opinion to upgrade the arena as frequently as possible, and worry more about spending more money on better trainees later. If that means slumming with star potential players in training positions for several seasons, buying cheap old players to fill the other positions knowing that you won't recover most of that price but he'll be effective for two or three seasons, that's fine. The arena is an investment with fixed upgrade costs and no maintenance, and returns value the earlier the investments are made - so it's definitely better to a point to invest your earnings into it while profitability is easier.

#1 this is a manager game. You don7t coach the games, you don't train the players. You pay someone to train them, the GE coaches them.

you manage the BUSINESS. In business you buy and sell. It is, in fact, by design, a game where buying and selling the right players means winning or losing. Training is an aspect, which this thread is about. So for the sake of this thread, I needed to clear out the reality that low potentials is not profitable, at any level.

You buy and sell, yes. But not just players - seats in the arena. Week to week turnover is far more important than what's made on the TL. My model has been to go with lower salaries, high arena investments, and to hold on to players for the additional merchandise. And my weekly balance was roughly +90-100k/wk the two seasons in IV, and was at about +170k until I bought the two big men and decided to put some money in scouting points, now it's down to about +70k/week.

Depending on how you define profitability, there's no such thing as profitable training at lower levels. You can't increase value on 6-9k players by stamina/FT/gs training at anything even remotely reasonable. You can't make enough to offset the cost of a low level trainer. So if your idea of the team's balance sheet exists exclusively on the "sold - puchased" value, you're right on.

But winning is profitable. Keeping salaries down, keeping merchandise up, not having a lot of transfers and a lot of money eaten up by taxes - these are all things that are good too.

You like to beat your drum about where I play and what level I play at. Like i showed you I buy and sell players in that value range and profit, since I signed up, and recently as well. I use them for roleplayers and to beat bots in the cup. You might use them as starters in a lower division, and you might start slowly now to use higher salary players.

Not in V, unless of course the only economic balance you care about is transfer balance, not revenue - expenses.

Its not hard to win out of DIV and DV. IF you think it is...its cuz you been spending money on bumb trainees ;).... its really at around DIII that you hit the wall, some much older teams in the playoffs/top of league often that are yoyoing out of DII, and DII promotion, if it happens, can end in relegation for lots of people.....

Like your daytrading friend? ;)

I'm quite content. I'm still pulling in 70k/week in profit, I'm training my next set of guys into the actual quality big men that I desire, and were it not for only netting +25 points because the opposition forfeited, I would have already locked up a playoff spot instead of just being very likely to get in. I'll survive.

Anyway you'll figure it out. You didn'T do anything special and it don't take anything special to get where you are. Its gonna take something special thoug hto get into DII and stay there. Good luck.

Yeah, I'm aware of that. The consensus is always "train guards, buy big men" -- but of course, the big men on the TL almost exclusively suck because they're three skill donkeys. Of course, one can find good handling and passing on occasion on the lower-salary guys, but there are a lot more well-trained guards at higher salary levels than there are well-rounded bigs (at least, as I see well rounded). So knowing that, I know that I'm going to be more likely to purchase high salary guards and train my bigs.

But, hey, what do I know. Everybody makes it to III in four seasons and sticks around, after all. ;)

Thanks for the compliment. :) This discussion is quite robust, but we should all recognize that Wolph, Hrudey and Tangosz are all top line managers with very good teams and very good ideas about how to build them. I'm personally training a few good potential guys, but also have a starter and star in as six man rotation (at least for the remainder of the season). Four of them look like they have or are very close to soft capping, so I'll have to stop training them. This is quite a bummer and I wish they all had higher potential. Now, reading this thread, I realize that Wolph is likely right that I won't make much money from them if I sell them (taking into consideration opportunity costs of training higher potential players and the cost of my trainer over time). But, Hrudey and Tangosz are also right, in that my star and starter have a unique skill set that have helped me win games through DV, DIV and DIII. Though Wolph is correct that they won't be good enough for DII or DI.

But hopefully I can sell them for something reasonable and use the money to build out my arena or buy a seasoned veteran. I would not use the money for the next couple of seasons on trainees as I'll switch to single position training for my 20 year old Superstar and 19 year old PAS. Well maybe 1 trainee if I can't get one in the draft. :)