BuzzerBeater Forums

Finally, my answer to the hoarding tax questions and statements:

A: Hoarding tax, as it was up to now had little or no effect on discouraging tanking, a long term strategy that kills the competitiveness and is very obviously counter to the whole spirit of the sport, not to mention how it's ruining the fun for everyone else involved. This tax was way too low for way too long, and a sharp cut was needed: we will no longer tolerate such strategies within the game. You might disagree on the timeline, and I understand the sentiment, but what you are are mostly proposing is giving the teams that use a very unsportsmanlike strategy more time to spend their money on what we deem very undesirable. Why would we want to reward such behavior? It is better to try and force these teams back to regular competitiveness as fast as possible, and be done with such nonsense once and for all. Yes, this means that we will consider making the tax even stricter, since 15M is still a lot of money.

And yes, there are teams that dropped divisions to do this, but we never said we we're going to support this, on the contrary, it was counter to to what we were saying since hoarding tax was implemented. To say that this is a welcome, but to rash a decision is a very contradictory: do you want the game to be better or not? Do you want it to get better as fast as possible or not? Should we allow for unsportsmanlike behavior or not? In my view, it should have been implemented a long time ago, best second best time is now.

On the concerns on the effects on the transfer market, do not worry, there is lots of room for the prices to grow, we want them higher, they incentivize training and scouting. I'm more worried what happens if they go down after this season, but that could be fixed by a even stricter hoarding tax in the future. We will continue to monitor and adapt.

In the meantime, a full season is a lot of time for a small number (yes, we are talking about a small percentage) of teams to spend their extra money, so it will not balloon the market overnight nor will it upend the BB economy negatively. This is also lots of time for managers to switch out from what they thought was a painful, but necessary strategy, and to them I say this: No longer will you need to give up competitiveness for long periods of time, just for a chance at glory. You can adapt and you can return, and you will enjoy the game a lot more doing it!

Last edited by BB-Marin at 8/13/2026 10:22:49 AM

I think there is a fundamental contradiction here, and it has very little to do with BuzzerBeater specifically. This is basic economics.

You are trying to achieve two things at the same time:

Reduce the amount of cash managers are able to hold, potentially moving the effective ceiling from $25M to $15M and perhaps even lower in the future.
Keep transfer-market prices high, or even push them higher.

In the short term, both can happen at once. In the long term, however, they naturally work against each other.

The basic framework is the quantity equation:

M × V = P × Q

Where:

M = money supply
V = velocity of money
P = price level
Q = quantity of goods/transactions

When the hoarding threshold is suddenly reduced, you can temporarily increase V dramatically. Managers who were holding $20M, $25M or $30M now have a strong incentive to spend that money quickly before it is taxed.

That can absolutely create short-term inflation in the Transfer List.

In other words, money that was previously sitting inactive in bank accounts suddenly starts chasing players.

So I completely understand the argument that prices may rise this season.

But that is a transition effect. It is not the long-term equilibrium.

After the excess cash has been spent, if the system continuously prevents managers from rebuilding large cash reserves, and increasingly removes money through taxation, then M falls.

Once the one-time increase in velocity has played out, you cannot keep increasing V forever to compensate for a continuously smaller money supply.

All else being equal:

lower M → lower aggregate purchasing power → downward pressure on P.

This is not a BuzzerBeater theory. This is one of the most basic relationships in monetary economics.

If tomorrow a real-world economy doubled its money supply while producing the same amount of goods, we would expect upward pressure on prices.

If you remove a large part of the available money from the economy while keeping the supply of goods broadly similar, the opposite pressure exists.

Obviously the relationship is not perfectly mechanical because velocity, supply, expectations and other variables matter. But you cannot continuously reduce purchasing power and simultaneously assume asset prices will remain structurally higher without another variable compensating for it.

There is also an important distinction between spending money and destroying money.

If I buy a player for $8M, most of that $8M does not disappear from the BB economy. It moves from the buyer to the seller. The transaction increases circulation, but it does not meaningfully reduce the total money supply except for transaction taxes or other sinks.

A hoarding tax is different. Money removed by the tax is actually destroyed.

Therefore a harsher hoarding tax can create two opposite effects at different times:

Short term: managers rush to spend → velocity rises → player prices can rise.

Long term: cash reserves are smaller and money is continuously removed → purchasing power falls → player prices face downward pressure.

This is why I find the statement that, if prices fall later, an even harsher hoarding tax could be the solution very difficult to reconcile economically.

It may create another temporary spending rush. But once that adjustment is complete, you have removed even more purchasing power from the system.

You cannot repeatedly solve a shortage of demand by further reducing the amount of money available to demand.

If the objective is simultaneously to have:

smaller cash reserves,
less tanking,
shorter team-building cycles,
larger/more competitive rosters,
and higher player prices,

then something else has to compensate.

For example, the game would need some combination of higher recurring revenues, lower non-player expenses, greater demand for players, reduced supply of high-quality players, more roster spots that are economically viable, or some othe

, or some other mechanism that increases effective purchasing power or demand.

Otherwise there is a mathematical limit to what managers can pay.

Imagine that under the old system ten competitive teams can collectively bring $200M of available purchasing power into a market segment.

If, after several seasons of tighter taxation and lower cash ceilings, those same teams can collectively bring only $120M, you cannot simply expect the same group of assets to become permanently more expensive unless something else has changed.

The money to pay those prices has to come from somewhere.

And this is why I think the short-term market reaction is being confused with the long-term economic effect.

Yes, forcing managers to spend their accumulated money can inflate the TL right now.

But after that accumulated stock of money is gone, permanently restricting the amount managers can accumulate is fundamentally deflationary unless another part of the economy offsets it.

So if the long-term goal is genuinely to make players more valuable and encourage training because selling players should generate higher returns, then I think the entire money-flow model has to be considered together.

You cannot look only at the hoarding tax.

Income creation, salaries, training costs, infrastructure costs, transfer taxes, cash ceilings, roster requirements and the supply of trained players are all parts of the same economy.

Changing one of the biggest variables in that system while expecting the opposite long-term price effect is not really a BuzzerBeater question.

It is Economics 101.

Drop the axe.

The more I read the arguments for postponement, the less sympathy I have for teams sitting on $25M+ in their banks. There will, theoretically, be a massive influx of cash into the market from teams that currently have more than $25M. Nobody should be surprised if that creates some short-term inflation in player prices on the TL.

But the spending won’t stop there. That money will eventually end up in the banks of other managers, who will themselves have an incentive to spend it ---- > most likely on the TL again. Over time, prices will stabilize under the new system.

And if some teams don't spend their money because they are inactive or hibernating, and instead lose it through taxation, I don't see how that negatively affects transfer prices. After the change, those teams will eventually drop down to $15M, which is effectively just as relevant to the market as their $25M was before the change.

So I really don't see the need to postpone this any further. Let the system do what it's supposed to do.

Many of these issues could have been solved with some simple changes a long time ago.

1) The ability to train players past Legendary (20) should never have been allowed. Hard capping at 20 would have forced managers to focus on training other skills and avoided these unbalanced monsters that require farm teams focused only on training, which in turn leads to hording money and skill inflation all across the board.

2) The nature of the game with individual country pyramids created the pieces for the unbalance system we have now from the very start. When there were 50,00 users, sure it wasn't a problem. However, it is not a coincidence that the hording and financial issues started cropping up when the user base declined and reduced the jeopardy or relegation and financial pain in some pyramids to point of irrelevance. Frankly, there should have been more consolidation and far fewer league pyramids much, much earlier.

This also included the creation of Utopia by the way. Aside from being a way for the game owners to generate more cash flow for the game (not a bad thing), it was a big catalyst that put many of the games problems into overdrive.

3) The training system has been broken from the start. It's original design is far too limited, both in number of trainees and being limited to one primary skill at a time. This type of system was always going to be prone to failure under circumstances that eventually occurred. Again, when there were 40,000-50,000 users, it worked because there were more players being trained. However, as the user base fell, instead of fixing the training system accordingly, the powers that be resorted to cheap fixes that made thing worse.

Take your pick of extra staff (Youth Trainers in particular), new facilities (Gym, Training Court), or bumping starting skills on draftees, all of them have contributed to the standardized training patterns (1v1, OD, ID, etc.), unbalanced builds, the proliferation of 150+ TSP monsters, and far, far, far too many individual skills over 20.

Managers should have had the ability to train multiple players in different skills at the same time from the start. That would have encouraged creativity in training, allowed the ability to create more skilled players to use and sell, and, most crucially, allowed manager to rebuild without tanking. That would have shown who truly has skill instead of who can horde the most money or build the biggest trainer farm.

Hi Marin,

Since i want to believe we are still in some sort of democracy, I feel something needs to be regarding your post.

We all know the sinews of war is money. It always will be, whatever rules you will decide. Money buys you better rookies, better assistants, better players, bigger arenas, more investments. Because that is what ultimately makes you win games, titles and trophies. Explain to me, which part of this is unsportsmanlike? Are you not saving money in real life for your kids to go to college, for holidays, for a new car? Is this unfair too? Should we blame "such behaviour" too? Not that i compare any BB managers to these all-time greats, but should the Pogacars, the Federers, the Jordans, the Messis be penalised because they are "ruining the fun for everyone else involved"?

Those managers you are targeting did not steal a penny they saved. All of them started poor, all of them happen to have found a totally legal way to win. You sound like those managers are thugs to you. You could at least have some respect for their capacity to stick around, to analyse the game and play along with the slowness of building up, instead of taking a sudden U-turn to hastily erase 10 years of inaction. Some of them have been playing for 15 years, sometimes more. They have been playing along, sometimes through dark periods, while the game was slowly sinking. But they did stick around. Is this how they are rewarded? By being called unsportsmanlike? Let me tell you, managers should not be held responsible and penalised for whatever poor decisions from the past.

About "Do you want the game to be better or not? Do you want it to get better as fast as possible or not? Should we allow for unsportsmanlike behavior or not?" / "we will no longer tolerate such strategies."

I'm sorry Marin but that is populist rhetoric, it is too easy to talk like that. It is not because some might want the game to be better/faster that you should disrespect dozens/hundreds of managers who have been playing fair and square and have been patiently working their ass off to try and win it all. Before better and faster, i want the game owners to respect the managers and the time and effort they are putting in.

The whole point is not about refusing new rules. Everyone here knows and agrees that the game must evolve, and maybe this rule will improve the game. Or maybe not, it is not up to me to master that part. The point is, you could listen to the one request many managers suggest: a smooth transition, by thresholds, instead of screwing them over from one day to the next and treat them like mafiosi. They are guilty of nothing, they are no better or worse human beings than the others, and certainly not worse BB managers that the others.

A wise man changes his mind sometimes, a fool never.
Thank you for your time.

I started rebuilding my team back in Season 63. After that, I spent several seasons developing young players, accumulating finances, and planning for the long term. I deliberately built a strategy for around 10 seasons (more than two years) in order to eventually return to the top and compete for championships.

And now it turns out that all those 10 seasons of work, investment, and strategic planning are essentially going to be wiped out in just one season?

I agree that the current threshold may need to be reduced. But doing it so drastically and all at once is unfair to those who have spent years building their teams around the existing rules.

Changing the rules is understandable, but the interests of those who have already invested years in a long-term strategy should also be taken into account. It would be much more reasonable to lower the threshold gradually, giving managers time to adapt, rather than devaluing the results of years of work.

If the goal is to make the game more competitive and balanced, I believe a much better solution would be to introduce a salary cap.

This would encourage managers to focus on building a strong and well-balanced roster with quality players on reasonable salaries, rather than simply accumulating the highest-paid “steroid monsters.”

That way, competition would be determined more by the quality of players, smart roster management, and tactical decisions — not by which manager has the biggest budget and can simply afford to pay more.

It would make the game more strategic and rewarding for managers who plan ahead and build their teams wisely.