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