BuzzerBeater Forums

thanks for the replies,

I wouldn't have gone much higher but it did put some doubt in my mind, so more wanted to be sure for next time...so guess his psychology worked!

JB

My opinion is that I would name the GM on forums asking for a clarification and then report him privately for both Spam and suspicious behaviour, even though you could end up like Moomins. There is no rule against naming a User on forums as far as I know (or Perpete should have banned himself hundreds of times already), as this is not a direct cheating accusation, but a clarification request, nor a discussion about GM behaviour, since he surely didn't send the message in his GM capacity, but in a private capacity. Perpete, since you edited the OP, please correct me if any of the above is wrong, but please explain why.

Seriously, sending an ingame message because you don't want someone to bid before an auction is over should be a bannable offense and in the examples of Spam listed in the Game Manual. In fact that GM has affected the way the bidding was conducted for his own personal reasons (facilitate a "trade" between Spanish managers or an exact money transfer maybe?). I would leave it to his colleagues to not do anything (as usual) about his suspicious and unacceptable behaviour, which is even more unacceptable because his position as GM leads people to:
• trust in him and believe he's telling you the rules of the game
• be intimidated

No matter how much Perpete swears by it, cases very far from irreproachable behaviour by GMs keep coming up. On the other hand, I think that if I were to send an email every time a DIV or DV Spanish or Italian team overbid on good English prospects I was also interested in, I would have been banned 50 times by now, probably by the very same GM who sent the message.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 03/18/2015 10:24:45

Ok I think that's the dude in my Utopia league who's going to have to win his tiebreaker then and I apologise for unfounded accusations (in this case).

Same reasoning applies except for the extra "gravity" part.


Last edited by Lemonshine at 03/18/2015 11:13:17

I know I have in the past (well before becoming a GM) sent messages to owners of teams bidding on guys with salaries that they almost certainly couldn't afford asking if they were aware how much the salary was. Usually other than that I don't think there's much of a point of sending a message to ask someone not to bid on a player, though.

First, because cheating allegations (like the sentence in bold above), are not allowed in the forums, for which I ask GMs to delete or edit your message.

You're kind of missing the part where I use a question mark. Would you say that a Spanish manager stating in a ingame email that others should give up because they are not Spanish isn't suspicious? So I'm not accusing him of cheating, I'm saying that he affected the way the game is supposed to work and you specifically, since you claim you had nothing to do with him, should be furious since you lost money from his behaviour. Yet far from being upset or condemning your fellow countryman, you're reproaching jbl and me for pointing out the obvious (which is to say that this kind of behaviour, if legal, should be reviewed and prohibited in the future).

Nevertheless, although you're just suggesting the above allegations (and may not be raising a proper "cheat" report) what you're doing in fact is leading other players to think about my team in the way you propose.

I can't report him since I don't have the original message to base my report on. I would do so if it was me. I'm just again going to state the obvious that if you had attacked the other spanish manager for robbing you of some money you would definitely have a higher moral ground in this discussion, but you did quite the opposite.

There are various reasons why he might have sent that mail. The most likely is to pay you less money (and you seem to be quite happy with your loss) by influencing/intimidating another bidder. The other options all involve some kind of agreement behind the scenes to keep the player among Spanish managers. Here's what could happen: set a high enough starting price, knowing how much the designated purchaser can spend be online at the time of auction, if he can't kill the other bids with his bidding style of direct ingame messages and the bidding war which ends out of his range, the seller buys back the player with the 3% penalty. Despite the selling taxes, managers dedicated to their U21/NT could do this to prevent players from falling in the wrong (in their opinion) hands. I'm not saying this is what happened, but that it could happen. And this would be most definitely against the rules.

In any case I would like a definitive answer on the issue of whether it's legal or not to send emails to competing bidders during a bidding war. If it's legal, I'd like to know if there are limits in terms of how many such messages you can send to each competing bidder and in total. If it becomes clear all of this is legal and the limits are loose, I would probably take advantage of this option, even though I completely disagree that this is in the spirit of the game.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 03/18/2015 17:25:09

Well I agree with most of what you wrote this time except for this:

Well, sorry but I cannot condemen something which is not illegal per se....So until someone with the authority to do so speaks (hint. it's not you either!)

I'm not claiming that it must be as I say, but certainly I don't think this is as clear cut legal as you think. In fact the kind of action that emerged is against the spirit of other rules and against having a free and transparent market. I asked for a definitive answer on the point in my previous post and I hope someone clarifies sooner or later, because it can only be legal, legal with limits or illegal. It has never happened to me personally, but I'd use mind games with other manager bidding against me if it gave me an advantage and it was legal.

Heck someone could even message others saying: I'm prepared to bid 3 millions on this English player because I hate all of you Spanish managers and I would never let one of you win this bid, so you're just wasting your time. And then when the Spanish guy skips half a million to bid 2.5 million he lets him win. And maybe he also reports him for overbidding. Sounds fun, doesn't it?