the game is in a limbo state, and people would rather care making 500M on faulty logic in the game rather than play the game as it was supposed to be played?

Do you even remember what it was like playing such games?

Sure some of it was winning titles and competing with friends and some rivalry was interesting aspect of playing together. I would like to also think that some of the playing itself was being a good guy/friend/player/manager that would help a newbie and the community around the game play was as fun as playing the game itself. It used to be fun to talk about the game, no matter what the game was.

When I see all the fantasy transactions, people refusing to sell a player because they believe they can never find an equal replacement, I think this thing is doomed.

There are several major flaws in the game, other than that the game is amazing.
My suggestions would be:
- fix the economics or die, as simple as that, the game will lose it’s users if economics is not fixed. Period.

- get rid of all the thousands of the superstars, it’s not realistic/good for anything

- get rid of all the cheaters, allow logging in with facebook only or a validation routine validating that the player is a real one. If need be – get a payment for the validation routine.

You guys are thinking that all the fake and fictive millions in your club will make you great or give you some kind of edge in whatever you are pursuing but it will result in only one thing – killing the game.

Just my 2 cents..

Berhan

Portuguese?

=P

I have to agree with BK. It’s been nice that the CPU team starting buying players again but all it really did was drive up the market for players that aren’t all that great.
It’s still pretty tough to find that 90average player BK and consider this; prior to the changes made by the admins, there were a lot of 91+ average players. Now it seems to be less and less and generally speaking, players won’t develop past an average rating of perhaps 91 or 92? Back in teh day it was silly to see guys with 100average or 96 or 97 averages. So in that aspect, i think the admins have done a good job of trying to balance out top end talent. I also like the fact that there seems to be more of a random factor when it comes to player progression. Previously, the best players always came from the top 2-3 countries in the world based on their UEFA rankings. But as the admins have pointed out, there is a chance that a great player can be developed from one of the lower countries.

Personally, i think that the transfer market is back to becoming what it was… stale. And although i still appreciate being able to sell some young guys for a few million, it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy a good player at a good price. As of now, i think spending 100mil on an 87 average player is too much, but unfortunately that is the state the game is in right now. smaller teams don’t really have a chance to compete with that. I’m lucky enough that i’ve always been able to find a way of making money but only because i’ve stayed in higher ranked countries. If i were to take over a country with low ranking and low stadium, it would become a much tougher task to accomplish.

As BK said, the game does have its flaws, but it also has its strong points. I still enjoy finding players and developing them (even better if they come from my youth squad) but generally speaking, the game is still definitely linear.

Whats so tough to accomplish for the admins is finding a balance between maknig the transfer market enticing and fun, balanced with having a non linear player progression while making sure that small teams don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Definitely a tough task at and.

charles

I agree with Charles. There are only a few 90+ avr players left. In the old days you had 95 primary skill players with 95+ secondary skills. Now you it’s very tough to find such a player. The 100 primary skill players are also more scarce then before. It makes the game more realistic.

I think the stale marked is a result of this new skill balance. People don’t want to sell there good players because they can’t find a replacement. When you are able to convince them, you have to play way too much money. A problem created by the cpu transfers i think. They give unrealistic high amount of money for average players.

I think the admins must find a way to create a flow in players moving from one team to another. Contract clauses could be a start. Players who want to play games in stead of sitting on the bench; Players who want to play in another competition;… Managers would be forced to sell and buy players.

:(

Well, I too have no problems making money in the club and last season I had something around there, and spent some of it, probably around 200M but it’s a bit silly. It is not about being able to make money, as all the seasoned managers know how to do that, but a new manager would have some problems entering the game and having a nice game experience. Now if you want to make a great team, your only chance is having 20 000 M or build your own team from free transferred youths, it would take 10 seasons but it can be done. The problem is you do not have that kind of money and while building your own team you have to take risks of getting bad results and getting fired on the process, and there you hand over a few seasons labor to someone else, and that for me is a game killer.

I think all the money would be just fine if every price/amount lost one 0. Mind that it costs still same amount of money to build stadiums, hire coaches, scouting etc. Is that right?

I don’t know about you guys but for me it has become a new type of game, just bank as much as possible while avoiding getting fired over the bad results. A new type of simulation, I stopped looking at the match results, or caring should I say.

BK

If CPU teams don’t pay more than the estimated value for players, would that make the market better?

Dimitri, in my opinion, No, the player value attribute kills the game, it would be interesting to see how people would rate/value players if it was to be removed. I agree there should be some kind of value to represent the “value” of the player but it could be one of two things:
a) the transfer price of the players last transfer OR when missing (as the player could be a “home grown” player)
b) a valuation of your board/club/assistant manager or something like that. Something like:
“Noé Delage is valued somewhere between 3-5M.” in stead of “$44,073,674”

It’s too late with just stopping the cpu teams from spending the money, as many clubs now have several hundreds of millions.
I think most fair thing would be to remove the last 0 from each value in the game.
Meaning if you had 300M in the club account it should now hold 30M and if a player was worth 150M, it will now be 15M. That would temporarily “help” but a more aggressive approach is needed. Logic has to prevent this from happening and a suggestion of players having attitude would help. Also in most management games you have a max skill for each skill. That has to be redone. And I would “lose” about 250M myself but it’s worth it, as this is beta-testing, no?!

In reality we have many great players but that is known from a SET of 265M people playing football/soccer. It’s not too difficult to find 100 great players for several countries, but percentage of great players in the game from the number of available players is WAY TOO BIG. Not good. It creates an unnatural balance of talent, and when the cpu teams can afford a promising player they will make a move to get him. That is a great feature.

Developers (and/or anyone interested in data statistics of football, read this:
http://www.fifa.com/mm/document/fifafacts/bcoffsurv/emaga_9384_10704.pdf

When you have a good talent model you will see how great and enjoyable the game is, and I can not stress this enough about how important this is. You REALLY have to be paranoid about your data when making such games. Period.

BK

Some suggestions:
a)I agree with the idea of putting contract clauses (example: relegation release clause; minimun mumber of official games).
b)The estimated value of the players should not be so inflated. There was a recent inflation in the estimated value of the players in Medium Ticker. In my opinion, before this the estimated value was acceptable.
c)The board of the club that is buying should block transfers amounts above 2 or 3 times the estimated value.
d)CPU teams: should not spend more then half (or 1/3) of their bank balance in one single transfer.
e)I don’t agree with the “reset” in the finance of the clubs (remove the last 0)

DE

contract clauses is a really good idea but there will be some good players on the free market and managers will offer incredible wages to have these players…

one more idea: for now when you sign a player this is for ever. Imagine if you sign a player for x years and after these years, he has the choice to resign and get free to sign for a better team. If a player do not want a new contract the manager will have to sell him at a “good” price. The market will be more liquid. And some excelent players will not be playing in Columbian 2nd division…

The player value is based on actual transfers, right? But the cpu teams are paying twice or more the player value. Which means player values go up. Which means cpu teams will pay even higher prices, etc.

I still don’t understand why it isn’t possible to have a middle way between cpu teams hardly buying players, and cpu teams spending too much money…

Dimitri, as I have been saying for years, player value is an evil thing to attach to a player. At least, it should be calculated in a different way.
When you base offers/transfer price on “player value” you make a way open for crazy things like you see happen in the game, crazy amounts of money paid by CPU teams, no “decent players” to buy unless offered crazy amounts of money. Cheaters will have easier to do “legit” transfers, pointing to the player value.

Some players have a value of 200-500 M, perfect for cheating and shuffling money around and very crazy at the same time.

All the logic that has been based on any calculation of the player value is very hard to do or dismiss. It’s not an easy task but if this is a real beta testing of the game then we should be open to changes really. I would have no problems dealing with players without any value attribute attached. I wouldn’t mind losing 90% of the money in the club, no use of having 300M anyway when no one is selling.

BK

Ok, let’s suppose we remove player value. A cpu team needs a MR. There is one on the market for 80M. Should the cpu team buy the player?

Dimitri, we can have a chat/voice session and discuss, but it’s really alarming that there is not much more voices in here throwing theories and opinions.

To answer you quickly, all cpu team’s actions should be scripted and pre-calculated. “They” have an advantage over us, knowing the potential of a player and, if the transfer amounts are around 80M for a great player and they can afford it, and know that guy will become a greater and more valuable for the team than a 8M player, then they can go for him, else try to meet the requirements from the board, such as, stay in the division, title challenge, etc. On the other hand they could offer only what they think player is supposed to be worth, and that kind of levels can be added to a table in the database saying:
player with average 85 is 10-15M worth of value, 90 average is 15-25M, 95 is 25-40M, depending on:
- number of games at the highest level (country (where the player played) ranking in effect here)
- number of national games
- age (actually how many more productive years normally left, if player is not forced to quit/retire)
- stardom, like in Soccersim, silver stars and gold stars added value to player, added effect to merchandise

now, the money in the clubs have to be balanced and the formulas for generating money/costs have to be really closely monitored.

Now, if we had many human managers you wouldn’t need to script the actions of the CPU teams, the actions/transactions/fun would happen anyway. We have many cpu teams and we need to balance things or not at all, depends on what kind of game you want.

I guess there is not a quick and easy answer Dimitri.

/BK

The CPU crazy buyers was a mistake, it was easy to see this would happen and I believe the only reason this was done was because the pressure some managers putted on the developers, bad managers that continue to perform badly… In the end money worth less, you can’t find as good players in the transfer market, its harder to build a new team unless you can be online every 3 turns (because CPU are).

As I said before the only real solution for the game’s health is having more human managers playing, all the investment in the game should be for that purpose…

Cheers

Yepp, when developing a game you have to ignore some of the “advice” and take some or simply do some trial and error, and most importantly learn what works and what not.

That’s why I mean if we (others than the developers) really want to help developing the best game after SoccerSim leaving a void in that category, we need to find out what works and what not. That’s why we do not need to pay attention to who moans about result and transfers by cpu teams but adapt and change code, test and change, test and change some more.

In real world you have a development team and you have the test team, they both work by the requirements someone made.
Never can a testing team make change requests. You need to set a requirement team to make sure you do not have insane requirements, developers sticking to that requirements and then testers testing if the implementations mirror the required features.

Why is THIS different here? Reset the game already..

BK

Listen, I’m new here, but I think people are being really pessimistic here. The game looks fine to me! In many aspects it is very realistic actually. For instance, the slow development of players. Starting at 16 and reaching their peak at around 25 is really good. Then dropping after 31.. I think that feature is very good!

I understand many people are questioning the transfer market. The economics of the game can get complicated indeed, but I couldn’t comment much without knowing how much money in the bank the CPU teams have at the moment. One thing that seems wrong to me is that CPU teams appear to be spending too much money buying old players. They can pay high prices for 34yo players, which doesn’t look right. But I imagine it must be quite hard to program the CPU teams to actually play the game as a human. We can’t really demand perfect AI. I think the fact that the game has been going on for so many seasons without huge problems is quite an accomplishment.

yes you are new, let’s see if you are as happy as now in a few more seasons. :)

The task of implementing better logics for the cpu teams should not be really that hard, as the cpu teams “know” who the potential great players are and then they could make bids on those players first before trying to buy the 34 old guys.

/BK

I don’t think removing the player value will have much effect until we see more human managers. Even if you remove player value, the CPU will still know the players hidden value (assuming you just “hide” the player value not removing it) so the CPU teams will continue spending the money they are currently spending. In the end, the market is inflated, but unfortunately, unless you reset the game world there isn’t much to be done with it. Changes have been made over the years which still might be affecting the games current economy, however, unless we reset the game worlds, or create a 3rd world so we can start testing and implementing new features, it’ll be tough to see the exact results…

as i said before, the game is still enjoyable, but further tweaking is needed to advance the game. Suggestions already posted here such as adding more clauses to contracts and such can definitely help make the game more dynamic.

I think that if the game is reset, you will probably end up seeing less human players. I imagine many people would be very frustrated about that and just quit. Many seasons building up their teams, and suddenly they have no team anymore..

you are correct, thats why i think perhaps creating a 3rd world would help. But again, it all depends on what admins have in mind for the game…

Charles, I am not talking about hiding the player value, player value can still exist but it would be calculated differently, also all the extra money have to be removed to, I am guessing but I think there are many clubs with more than couple of hundred millions, it’s very strange thing.

About managers leaving the game, I can not speak for Danilo and Gabriel but if it was my game and if I had to make a decision about quitting now or in a year, I’d say now, as there is no point of prolonging the “pain”.
A new dimension to implement things maybe is the answer but it all depends on where the game is going. There are far more worse games out there who charge you for money in some way, so manager leaving or coming is a marketing thing really. You can not keep making implementations to keep managers happy. At the same time, since I’ve been in in their (the developers) place I know it’s not easy to say no as the game grows it becomes “everyone” somehow. Still someone makes the decisions about what to be done or not.
Some say the managers would quit if the game is reset, and I could say that some will quit if the current situation continues but what do I know, right?

Just look at how many views this thread has and how many people wrote here, it is really sad to see.

/BK

ya, it definitely looks like interest is waning for this game… its a shame really, but without anyone working full time on it, it’s tough to get any traction on implementing new ideas and such.

Let me add my two cents to the discussion.

First of all, I must say that I agree with most of what has been said by BK and Charles. But, mainly with Filipe. More human players is the only solution – and probably the only objective for this game. I am quite sure that if anyone wants to play against a lot of computers, there are lots of better offline options out there.

However, bringing more human managers to the game is not an easy task – which gets even harder as it seems already difficult to keep the current managers interested in the game.

So, if you can’t make the number of human managers increase in absolute value, maybe increasing the relative number of human managers is an easier task. Personally I believe that the game has just too many countries, leagues and teams for too few managers. It would be much nicer to have only two or three leagues full of human players than having this huge amount of teams managed by CPU. If the same 147 managers that are currently active in fast ticker were playing among only 160 or 200 teams, I am sure that we would have a much more interesting market and consequently much more fun…

The way it is now (84% of the team are managed by CPU), the market rely almost completely in CPU behavior and AI. I have never programmed in my life, but I believe that developing a good AI is something quite difficult and which demands an amount of time that probably Gabriel and Danilo do not have right now. If they could just forget that for a while, considering that in an ideal world computer decisions would be responsible for a minimal movement of the market, they would be able to spend the little time that they have available in other important things, such as the game engine.

Unfortunately, right now the developers seem to have too little time to dedicate to the game and IMHO they are wasting their efforts in the wrong issues (if I am not mistaken the last “improvements” of the game were related to the creation of more and more teams to be managed by CPU and proportional performance for human managers – not really the critical issues for the future of the game…).

Paulo, that was never a problem in ManagerSim, having too many computer managed clubs. Some countries were locked from getting human managers but still the mechanics behind the economy were better.

When reading your and Filipe’s comments I get the feeling of “Catch-22” over that kind of suggestions/logic, because in order to get more managers you need to have a “better game” and in order to make the game better you need to get more managers.

Make no mistake, if you have a great game, people will hear about it and get there. Of course you can aid by marketing, sometimes quite costly thing but on the other hand when the product is great, people will tell others about it.

To FIX the wrong logic all you need is correcting the formulas, code and so on, with or without more managers you need to handle the logic behind. Now the situation is perfect to learn from. We now know what to expect when there are not so many managers and many (80%+) CPU teams, ie how the economy works. What we can do is learn and adapt. When the scenario is reversed, and most of the clubs are managed by real managers then I am sure we’ll have other problems and the world will not be as perfect as you mean. Then we need to adapt again. It’s a learning and adapting process. Get that.

BK

BK,
I don’t completely agree with you about it never being a problem in ManagerSim, but let’s move on so we don’t miss the point of this discussion.
I agree with you that “To FIX the wrong logic all you need is correcting the formulas, code and so on”. The big question is: does the developers intend to spend the time that this “formulas and code corrections” demand? We haven’t listen Gabriel or Danilo’s opinion on this topic so far…
Considering that they probably won’t have the time availability to work on this properly, I can see two simple suggestions:
1) Remove all this CPU-only countries, whose only purpose in the current game engine is to buy some decent players or good prospects and never selling them again until the end of their careers (simply removing them from the market..).
2) Reset the CPU behavior to the one that used to be in place before the change that messed with the game’s economy and market. Ok, I know that it wasn’t a perfect game them, but certainly it was funnier than it is right now. Back them it was possible to build a competitive team from zero, as I did with Bristol after 10 seasons, and as others managed to make in much less time (e.g. Dhimiter’s Cardiff). The way it is now, it is almost impossible to attract new players, and almost certain that we will keep loosing traditional good managers such as Dhimiter, Phillip, Ulisses, among others….

Not really on topic as you have discussed everything already but if this game was turned into a phone app the managers wud greatly increase and it would generate money..

I’m not sure going back to the old system or getting rid of some countries a good thing now, both of them have positive aspects and were made with much effort from the developers, I just think any adjustment to be made must take consideration on how they will afect new managers in the game, the more we make harder for new managers so succeed the less people we’ll have in the game…

Ok guys, can we be objective here? What do YOU think we should be investing our time in? I would like to see 2-3 bullet points from each, if possible. No more than that. Just the top priorities. At the moment I have some incomplete code with the intent of changing the youth development model – which I intend to complete once I get in the mood to do it (hopefully very soon).

After that, I was thinking about maybe fixing other things that have been neglected for a long time, such as the newspaper. I was also planning to add a small mobile-version of our website, just with the very basics for you to admin your team on-the-go (something that would fit well on an iphone screen, for example).

It would be nice to see players leaving clubs, at the moment you can just keep players on your books the whole time. It would make the game more interesting if players left due to not having enough game time or wanting to move to a different or bigger club or if the team got relegated. This would then force managers to sell players at a more realistic price knowing that the player could leave for nothing if a sale doesn’t go though.