BuzzerBeater Forums

I thought several times about opening this thread and I am finally not to lazy this time.

With the game maturing more and more and therefore the leagues are getting more and more competitive most of the managers starting to work at their "Salary Cap". This means, that they wont make any money during the regular season, which is not a problem for me. However, as soon as the playoffs start you are having 2-4 very hard weeks, in which you dont have your any arena income (if you finish 5th or 8th) or just very few arena income (usually 3rd and 4th place). That makes in total 50% of all the teams who will have HUGE trouble during this time of the season. I will show you how it looked for me at the end of the last season.

I had my last regular season game on 12th June and my first game of the next season on 3rd July (I just ignore they playoff-game here). Luckily these two games both were at home. This makes exactly 21 days or 3 weeks without any arena income and it could have been 28 days or 4 weeks (if these games would have been away). A complete season has 14 weeks so 50% of the teams dont have any arena income in roughly 25% of the weeks, which is in my honest opinion way too much.

Lets assume I will finish in 3rd, 4th, 5th or 8th place this season. The difference between 3/4 and 5/8 is probably about 200k, since its very hard to win without HCA. Right now I manage almost even every week, which (again) I am fine with. My arena income fluctuate between 450k and 550k, so lets say 500k/home game. That means in the weeks after the regular season I would loose about 1,5 - 2 mio.

So how to solve this problem? You can sell a player each off-season in which this is happening to you. This would make your team stagnate in the long term assuming that training will cover this loss (but thats not the topic here). The other solution could be to manage your team different and try to earn these 1,5-2 miollion during the regular season, which would mean that you need to save OVER 100k per week. That on the other hand would lead to a less competitive team during the regular season. Of course all teams have to work with the same problem, but here is my question.

Is all this really like it is supposed to be and am I the only one thinking about this issue? If it is working as intended, I seriously have to think about changing my strategy to loosing more game in purpose or change something else.

Feel free to post you opinion and maybe (if neccessary) solutions to this problem...

thanks Yogi

edit: English is not my first language, but i hope it is clear what I want to address.

Last edited by Yoginger at 08/22/2010 16:05:27

There are 14 weeks in a season, there are 11 home games. 11 home games + weekly merc and tv contracts are your guaranteed income. If you plan your season according to those incomes you are fine. Making ends meet is the managers assignement. Usually you should count the extra cup and playoff money as a bonus. If you are spending over your seasonal cap then you should be in dept when the next season starts.

the problem is every manager in each div is trying to win now and over exerting there team and as a chain reaction there whole div.

people need to plan to win over seasons not try to win each season otherwise there whole div will hit the salary cap and half the teams will have alot of trouble come playoff time , person who finishes 5th will be in more trouble then most.

And what about the 5th?why he will not have a "bonus" and the people at 6th and 7th position get?

I think there should be some calculations regarding a "bonus" for the ones that finishes in 5th,even making a 5th vs 8th against relegation is better than it is now

Solution. No team has to pay salaries between the last league game and the first league game of the next season.
What do you think?

Well, I'm less convinced that people can't avoid trouble. As a computer programmer myself, I'm consistently surprised by how "creatively ignorant" users can be. I think the Manage My Team page's "Typical Weekly Net Income", while a nice convenience for me and other power-users, is the sort of thing that will mislead the users that otherwise wouldn't be clever enough to calculate it on their own. They'll see that number at +$2000 / wk or so and shortsightedly assume they're fine, when really over the course of a full season, they're deeply in the red if they're an average US D.III or D.IV team finishing 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th or 8th with a short cup run. It's a newbie trap. Team bankruptcy isn't a prominent issue -- every team I've seen bankrupt is toting around some $300k monster C in a low league -- but I can't speak to how often people have to experience the unpleasantness of cutting roster just because they finished 5th.

As a serious suggestion for a very simple fix, why not have players unpaid during the offseason? Then the Weekly Income isn't potentially misleading, and Coco wouldn't feel compelled to churn his roster. I don't think offseason pay adds anything GOOD to the game. The main choice it gives to the player is between angrily writing paychecks for nothing for weeks, or selling guys off into a market that would become oversaturated as soon as more people realize they can and probably should do the same thing. Everybody loses?

After this point I went on a huge tangent about other economic aspects of the game, so I deleted that to focus on the issue at hand

Edit: I see Naker stole my idea!! kidding, kidding

haha beat you to it ;)

I agree that there is a problem with the seedings off-season time income.
Let's take a look:
1-st seed makes the most money usually as he get's 3 hc games (sometimes 4) 2 1/3 (+2,3) arena income so this gives you a 14 arena income season.
2-nd seed makes roughly 1 arena income 12 arena income season.
3-rd and 4-th seed make 1/3 arena income (note 4-th seed usually makes more as the nr1 team usually has the biggest arena income)
5-th seed zip
6-th seed 1 (+2/3) arena income
7-th seed 1 (+1/3) arena income
8-th zip
Now we can argue what is the best considering competition. Giving the lower end teams more money so they could compete or give champions more money because they have deserved it? I will leave it open for BB's to decide.
I think we can agree that the biggest losers are 3-rd, 4-th and 5-th seed. No good chance to win and crappy income. This has been countered by BB's with relegation threat. I know that many just promoted teams, would love that 5-th spot. As we all know relegating is the biggest income cut that can actually happen.
I agree there is no great solution here. I don't think giving everyone one time income based on their position and then playing playoffs with no attendance income would be the way to go.
Perhaps we should change the income distribution to 1/2 per team, the only advantage being the HC.
This takes us to 2,5 arena income to teams that get into the finals and play a Tiebreaker.
2-nd seed still get's his 1 arena income. 3-rd and 4th get 1/2 + no relegation bonus :) 5-th get's no relegation bonus.
6-th and 7-th seeds arena attendance should be minimized (none really want to see their team relegate) so that 3 games would give them roughly 1/2 arena income (teams battleing there usually have smaller arenas so this evens it up with 3-rd and 4-th) or play relegation games with no arena income. I believe relegation threat is still there even if you get the 6-th spot. Different sides of one league might be stronger + you can add players just before playoffs (I have seen both 6-th placed teams relegate in one season in my league, so it's not actually a foolproof plan to go fishing for 6-th instead of 5-th in a high competition league). 8-th should get relegated and no income for being weak.
Still the point remains. There are 14 weeks in a season and 11 guaranteed arena incomes. We can't really evenly spread it out to 14 weeks for players to make it easyer to calculate (the income also fluctuates so that's another problem). So it all comes down to who can and who can't manage.

First of all, thanks for all of your answers. I am happy to see, that its not only me who see a problem here. I just want to add another thing that came to my mind just a few minutes ago.

If I undertand the BBs right the economy is self tuning and based on the profit of the teams. Now lets assume, everybody would save the money, he needs to get through the off-season, during the regular season. What would be the result? I guess that this will lead to higher salarys of all players, since the teams are making profit each week...I dont really think that we want this to happen, do we?


edit: I just talked with some friends of mine in Skype about this problem and we came up with the following idea:

As long as a team has any competitive game (playoff or relegation) during a week he has to pay the full salarys for his player. The manager who havent got any of these games have to pay half the salary. This would lead to the following scenario.... for the best teams there wouldnt be a change at all... the 3rd and 4th placed teams have to pay at least one week of full salarys but also have the chance to advance in the playoffs. The 5th placed team wouldnt have to sell any of his players to survive (same for 8th team, but he has to sell players anyway because of relegation).

For me this scenario would change my priority on how to finish a season to 1-->2-->3-->4-->5-->6-->7-->8 and thats how it should be in my opinion. Right now me priority list looks like this: 1-->2-->6-->7-->3-->4-->5-->8 ....

On top of all this you can change the income from 1/3 <-> 2/3 to 50/50 (this has been suggested before in this thread)

So waht you think of this idea?



Last edited by Yoginger at 08/23/2010 07:27:32