BuzzerBeater Forums

I returned to BB back in January in the dead of winter out of boredom, I began back in season 4 and played until the somewhere around season 23-25 if memory serves.

I really enjoy this game, but looking at the player market and how insanely overpriced it is, I can't help but think how a new player would be completely turned off by it.

Here me out, and remember we are talking about DIV teams, so some of you old dogs might not consider what I am about to say truth, but I am a small fish now, and trust me, everything I am about to say feels accurate.

If you have 100k to spend on your roster, you have no chance at buying an IMPACT player or two to help you compete within your first two seasons. I feel like there has to be a better balance if we want new players to actually stay.

I am staying, but that's only because I already know EXACTLY what I am doing. A new player my spend some of their money foolishly and the market is not as forgiving as it once was.

Now, I understand the market fluctuates throughout the seasons themselves, but you can't even buy a 30-33 year old vet with a 12k-17k salary for under 50k. There are SEVEN total players currently for that range. That is weak. And even over the past two seasons, the market wasn't this dry. I am highly active on the bottom-feeder market (also where new players shop). So I don't want to hear about how it's okay at the top for DII teams etc.

This is specifically about new players and keeping them engaged in the game. One of my theories is that vet teams with large stadiums simply have a lot of cash, and nothing to spend it on, which drives player prices up.

These are just thoughts and I would like some rational feedback, especially from lower tier teams without big cash reserves. Because if BB is to survive, newer teams have to at least "feel" like they are making progress over their first few weeks playing.



Last edited by Coach Plotts at 8/3/2017 5:58:23 PM

I think you said it pretty well. The market is very dysfunctional. Let me give you a different perspective from a guy in a micronation:

I'm playing in div. 2 where I started when I created my team. The salary floor in my league is 185k. So far my number 1 priority has been to finish my arena, which I did last week. This means I have put all my money into it, and therefore I have not had the resources to buy new players. My team's salary is at 85k. The next step for me is to reach the salary floor. To do that I can either buy one very good player or a few decent ones. Either way, it will cost me at least about 3 mil to do so, because I don't want to spend my money on a 33+ year old player who will only contribute for a couple of seasons. That is 3 million at least JUST to reach the salary floor. Needless to say, I don't have nearly that amount in the bank.

Furthermore I might very well promote to d1 this season or in the seasons to come. The salary floor in d1 in Denmark is 440K. My best guess is that it would cost around an additional 8 million to reach that. A hell of a lot more than the 1.5 million promotion bonus. And again this is JUST to reach the salary floor.
Because I'm developing players myself I might be able to cut a couple of millions off of this, but it is still a huge amount of money needed just to reach the minimum salaries.

So the problems with the market apply to managers in big as well as in small nations. In my opinion, the only solutions to this is to increase training speed and increase the amount of talent in the draft. These things would bring more talent to the TL and that way prices would be driven down.

And Marin, it took you, what, 6 seasons?, to admit you completely messed up with Free Agency.

He has? I have a 26 year old $90k guard and a 29 year old $145k centre on a bot team in my league. Seems counterintuitive to admit a fault and not correct it.

a) Give new team MUCH better players to start with, so the gap to the old teams and also the money they need to spend just to reach the salary floor is reduced.
More detailed suggestion about this is here: (286547.1)
b) Put randomly generated players with 25+ years and salary around 20-50k on the market. This helps much quicker than better draftees.

I might have been a little narrow-minded when I wrote it was the only solution. I like your suggestions (and I read the suggestion you refer to and strongly support it) and they would be nice additions to a number of changes this game is in need of. I still think better draftees and better training options is a must though:

Better training: I'm not saying that an over radical change is needed. The maximum speed we have through 1-position training right now is fine in my opinion. The thing we need to look at is alternatives to 1-position training. Because at the moment you don't really have a choice if you want valuable results. Why not increase the speed of 2- and 3-position training? It would give users the possibility to actually make a choice about how they want to develop their players: you could choose to develop 2 or 3 great players, or you can make the choice of developing a few more players at a time and they would actually be useable but not superstars.

Better draftees: This goes hand in hand with the above. If we have an option to actually develop quality players through 2-position training then we would need more quality draftees to do so.

This is exactly my point. Say you lower the penalty to 15%. You would actually be able to make pretty good players. They won't be as good as if they were trained with 1-position training, but they would be good enough to contribute, especially at lower levels.

- you get 6 players which look the same instead of 3

I don't see this as an issue. If you only have use for 2 of them, then you just sell the other 4. This would mean more players on the transferlist, and the manager would have money to buy players for the positions he hasn't trained.

- it takes longer to get to the same skillset because the training is slower
- you need to sacrifice 2 positions for training instead of 1 (2 guards for OD or PA, 2 big men for ID or IS or SB), making it harder to compete, because you need to hide 2 players on defense instead of 1 and you need to play a big man at a guard position or play with no flow
- you won't be able to cap higher potential players (i.e. the ones that will help you in higher divisions)

Well since this thread originally was about new users, this might not be that big of a problem. You don't need to cap high potential players at the lower levels. Capped starter/star/allstar potential players will do the trick. When you then need the higher potential guys you can switch to 2-position training, but that is a managerial choice which, in essence, is what this game is all about.

Increasing 2-position training speed would be a way to make new managers see progress faster and it would increase the number of mid-level players on the transferlist, which is what the OP is asking for.