So I've been browsing the player market for a few days now, trying to find a decent jungler and it's impossible. Not only because of the insane prices, but also because there is no player market. Right now there are only 22 players available and the number is decreasing.
PLAYER MARKET: The solution should look like something GPRO (Formula One manager game) uses. First of all, the player market should be filled with players. Not only with players people put up for bidding, but random unemployed players to choose from. A lot of them.
Another thing is training. In GPRO, even though you can swap drivers mid-season, it's more rewarding to train the driver instead of buying a better one. Why? Because in certain leagues, the driver's overall rating you can sign with is limited. Once you signed him, you can train him and increase the ratings. After only 1-2 races and training sessions, the driver will be better than anyone you can sign with, so it only makes sense to stick to him and train him.
FINANCES: Another reason it's impossible to get a player is because of money stackers. This is why sponsor income was decreased, but they still have that insane amount of money, plus they have all the sponsor slots and already filled those up. Nothing changed, they can still outbid smaller/newer players.
So another notable GPRO feature: first of all, money and sponsors resets after each season. Also, sponsor stacking shouldn't be a thing. In GPRO, there are 5 slots, but you have to negotiate with sponsors. Negotiation takes time. You can negotiate with multiple sponsors at once, but it'll slow both negotiations down a lot.
And on top of all this, sponsor income is still insanely high. It's so high, that giving players infinite amount of money wouldn't make a difference. It's basically impossible to go bankrupt. I think the economy should give a challenge. It'd make the game more enjoyable and get rid of unhealthy money stacking. In GPRO (once again), you can stack money, but you'll fall behind in car development. You can rush car development, but you'll fall behind in money. There needs to be a balance, either with decreased income, or increase spendings.
I hope that with or without my ideas the game will outgrow these problems. Keep up the good work!
In general it will probably take time for this game to develop a stable economy until we can start seeing more of how things work. We will keep adding features which will affect economy as well, but this game is still in it's early stages.
Compared to GPRO I wanted to make this game easier for a casual player interested in manager games. GPRO has a lot of 'FOBY - find out by yourself' attitude which can often be demotivating for a lot of newcomers. But of course I also want to have a high skillcap where the top players will probably have to gather a lot of data, do excel sheets etc to figure out what is the best way to go.
What also was my idea originally was to keep the economy depending on what the players are doing - not based on fixed numbers or auto regulation coming from fixed values.
I do not know if it's a good approach really, but I thought it was fun to do it in such manner - this is basically why scouts are not injected with computer generated players (they come from real user created teams), why market is completely open for trades between players and why sponsors change up their requirements depending on how desired they are. All the team rankeds and solo queue games are also between real players of the game. Also the youth academy is set up in a way that one team can not create a whole team (as they have to specialize) and at certain moment this will boom the transfer markets as players will have to start to trade to get a proper team.
I wanted so that the players could create the economy and balance it with their own actions with as little regulation as possible (so that part of the game would become predicting what masses are going to do and adjusting your strategy according to that) - although I haven't really seen much of that approach in other games and I'm not sure if it offers the best user's experience, but we will see in the future and can adapt within reason.
About the money and bankruptcy right now. I think the facilities balance it pretty well. You can simply spend all your money on facilities as they limit quite quickly due to each level being a lot more expensive, so even right now there should be enough to do with your money - now you can spend whatever you want on a scout as well.
Thanks for your ideas and once again it's great to see someone from GPRO!
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Are there any ides to add a feature so we can easily see the players we have bid on in the market?
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Hey Henri, thanks for the answer.
I can see you're trying to approach things differently. I only have experience with GPRO and I liked that system a lot, so I thought some features might do some good for this game. You guys are obviously more experienced with manager games, I'm sure one way or another the game will reach the desired state.
Right now what I can see is that when I woke up this morning, the player market had 119 players and it's increasing. I don't know what happened overnight, but I've never seen more than 32 players before. Whatever the reason behind this, things are heading the right way and I'm glad to see that.
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It's because of the inactive team's player's contracts dropping so everyone is getting decent players from scouts now and selling what they don't need.
