With how coaches and PR managers are currently generated, demand far outstrips supply. This leads to a situation where to get a decent to top quality staff member, one would have to bid really high wages, which far too often can be worth more than all of one's players' wages combined. I feel that this hurts the realism of the game, and, moreover, further widens the gap between new and experienced players by making it more difficult for new players to get the staff members they need to catch up in terms of training and sponsorships.
Some suggestions to solve this: 1) Increase number of staff generated so that supply can meet demand 2) Decrease the negative impact of not having an amazing coach/PR manager so that it isn't necessary to have a top tier one to keep up with other players 3) Increase player wages (although this could make it even more difficult for new players to catch up to older players unless new revenue sources are created or existing ones are buffed)
2
In addition, the fact that all coaches make their decisions during the daily update means that players who are not on right before the update are at sometimes a severe disadvantage.
1
Please could you remove this 10/10/10/10 PR Manager that cost 469k per day ?
1
^You have that?
4
Tl; Dr I disagree with the idea that available staff outstrips demand and disagree with your assessment of the lack of realism. I provide my detailed explanation on what alternative realism options there could be and give a wall of text.
To explain my perspective, I have an education background in game design, I met my fiance through league and am an avid follower of it's professional scene, and am also a hockey fan who loves to play the NHL series of games for General Manager mode, simming through all my games so that I could do the manager stuff.
I started playing this game about two weeks ago. I have a 8/9/9/8 PR manager whose salary is 15k. I have a coach whose salary is 8k. And three coaches whose salaries are 100 - 115. Those three coaches were more than sufficient in the early going, with good (but not great) stats. Only I bid on them. Same deal with my first PR manager. 8/9/1/3, 100 salary. He got the job done. You start out this game as a new team, 1200 elo, in division 7. 1200 elo represents Tr average skill level of every player in a game. You are literally just starting out. How realistic would it be to be able to get a high end staff member as you just start the game? Completely unrealistic. However, there are plenty of middling staff members available on whom nobody at all is bidding on. You may fire them when their services are no longer required (my new PR manager got my team rep from 1500-1600 to around 3300 in less than a week... My elo is hovering around 1500....)
Now, you mention player wages. Staff wages are determined in a blind bid format that encourages you to bid what that member's contributions are worth to you. That is realistic. Getting the right staff should take time, and you should have to compete for the best in the business. Player wages, however, are system determined rather than player determined. They are not arbitrary, but the tiny sums they represent next to facility upkeep and staff wages makes them inconsequential. Why is this? NO FREEDOM AGENT MARKET.
Right now, the only concept of a free agent that exists is your scout. Your players don't have the ability to choose to not resign with you, they just do so automatically at a predetermined rate. So the only player movement that exists is through player transfers, where players are simply traded for cash. If you are looking for an unrealistic system to provide feedback for, this is it. Free agency - whether with a transfer market or without - is a feature I feel must be implemented for this game to have any sense of realism. This is a not an easy implementation though as I suspect that it will take a pretty decent overhaul to the game system to make it work.
The state of realism in the game is prettyacceptable to me. My biggest gripe early on has been the limiting of how much you can offer staff members - or upgrades you can purchase - based on a pretty arbitrary cash holdings amount. In my early days, I twice sold a level of gaming equipment to upgrade my housing situation, then re purchased the gaming gear. Even if wage or maintenance type transactions were limited by your sponsor income plus say half of your streaming income from Tr day before... That makes sense. But businesses run on assets, not cash holdings. So being limited on having a massive amount of funds I don't need for my transaction is... Severely limiting (especially early) and incredibly frustrating.
1
The last PR coach I had was a 9 9 9 10 for 25k, it all depends on how much you look.
2
People are currently bidding 50-75k for those coaches, with the filter function it's not about looking anymore.
I agree with Hat's post for the most part, it's a nice writeup.
2
Hi Hat!
I understand where you're coming from, but I still stand by what I said. I raised two main points in my post: realism of staff wages vis-a-vis player wages, and the widening of the gap between new and experienced players. In terms of realism, a free agent market might help, but as you mentioned, it would be difficult to implement, and I still feel it doesn't address the gap between new and old players, and may actually work towards widening this gap, as, without any safeguards, it would be easier for established teams to brute force their way into securing good players, or poaching them from smaller teams. This, I feel, leaves the suggestions I outlined as more viable options.
Two weeks into the game, it might not be apparent yet, but as you go on, you'll notice that it becomes increasingly difficult to keep up with the massive economic advantage that older players have. While having an 8/9/1/3 PR manager might cut it for a team that has just started out, and having an 8/9/9/8 PR manager for 15k/day might be fortunate, that might not always be the case. There will be days when there just won't be enough PR managers in the same range as your current one to go around, and a bid of 15k will get you nowhere close to landing any of them. Case in point, a couple of days ago, I got outbid on PR managers similar to the one that you currently have (and perhaps even slightly worse) that eventually went for 40-60k per day. Such amounts may well be beyond the means of a team a few weeks older than yours, but be chump change for the top teams. Considering the importance of reputation in securing good sponsorships and improving streaming revenue, and how having a subpar PR manager can absolutely wreck your team's income, it only leaves newer players in a more difficult position in terms of catching up, and, as I said, further widens the existing gap. Moreover, going back to my point about realism, even at 15k, it just doesn't make any sense for a single PR manager to be paid more than a team's entire starting lineup put together.
4
Part of the issue might be the quality of the staff to choose from rather than the number.
Today there are 7 pages worth of PR managers, meaning ~350 choices. On paper that seems like enough but when you filter out those who have any zero's, those who are perhaps below 7 in your particularly desired stat and whatever other things you're looking for, the viable pool of candidates shrinks dramatically. I'm not convinced the game should be generating PR managers that are so undesirable. https://gyazo.com/9e45c04d9fe5e429575df1400f908e0f - these for example, have presumably been generated for today. If we're talking about realism how would either of these two have a job?
Perhaps changing it so that the majority of the staff members have at least more agreeable numbers could help.
1
Its perfectly realistic. at least for coaches. I have not checked in on PR management.
but you cant expect to start a league team tomorrow and immediately pick up one of the best coaches around. That guy is gonna get payed a zillion dollars by an actual competitive professional team. Instead, if you start your team tomorrow, odds are you are looking for a washed up ex pro player looking for a little extra cash on the side.
Honestly, odds are the same is true for PR. if you start your league team tomorrow, you aren't getting a pr wizard. you are getting a college grad that knows how facebook works.
once you start to perform and get your name out there, then you get the better skill stuff
1
I think right now its fine, although yes prices are inflating from what they were before, where you could get a really good PR for like 1000 a day, it still is fairly realistic and people will just have to adapt to the market. You can get decent/good PR's for <10k for sure, ive never paid more than 10k for a PR and ive always had an above average one Right now i have a 8/9/9/9 for 7k a day. It's partly getting lucky and its also partly bidding at smart times and on smart Pr's.
I do think that an issue is that there are just very little "good" Pr's, i think coaches right now quality wise are fine but i do think on the PR side of things, there usually are like 3/4 good ones per day, and maybe 6/7 average ones, which is honestly not a lot. All other PR's are either really bad or way too expensive (469k). I think if we have more good midrange Pr's (say like 6/6/7/6) It would help the market more
1
"Right now i have a 8/9/9/9 for 7k a day. It's partly getting lucky and its also partly bidding at smart times and on smart Pr's."
Exactly this, if you are patient and use some time to search you will find good ones for lower prices, but it IS realistic to have good coaches for higher prices.
I do agree we should have more mid range like Weed said though
3
InSec, don't filters mean it's not about patience anymore, though? I actually loved it when we didn't have filters, since I could use patience and dig through pages and pages of the market to find a good coach or PR manager. With the filter system though, everything's more convenient, but it also becomes close to impossible to get anyone for a good price, since someone who has 20 or 30 million in the bank can just swoop in and overbid everyone.
Also, cerin, my comment on realism wasn't about having good coaches for higher prices, but more of how staff wages compare to player wages. It's simply unrealistic for me to have one or two staff members earning more than my entire team combined. Sure, top coaches/PR managers should definitely go for more money than average ones, but I think the even bigger problem is that there are so few top ones, which means prices get jacked up to such extremes that, soon, only people who've had substantial head starts can ever dream of obtaining them.
While one might say that it's only fair since new players don't really need the best staff members, the problem is that these players will reach a point when they will need top quality staff to be competitive, and the way things are going now, there's no way they'll be able to compete in the market with all of the players who've been able to save up massive amounts of wealth, and who already have really good revenue sources.
This trickles down into so many aspects of the game that it's eventually not going to be just a market problem anymore. For example, players who started later and aren't as rich won't have access to the best quality coaches, which means they'll never get their teams optimally trained, and will struggle to compete in ranked and league games. The same players could also struggle setting up good economies for their teams because, on top of not being able to compete, 1) their streamers won't improve as fast and they won't have access to good sponsorships, and 2) they'll be paying much more for staff members from the get go, both of which can substantially hamper their progress. Meanwhile, everyone who started when coaches and PR managers were super cheap will continue to enjoy the strong economies they've already set up for themselves and rake in the dough, as well as reap the benefits of top tier coaches and PR managers that other players can't afford.
In a way, new players' chances are being gimped even before they've started to play.
0
Where insec refers to patience, you refer to determination. The filters merely removed the time sink required to find the coaches you wanted, they did not change te patience required. To get my very good PR manager at the price I paid, I spent four days bidding before firing my old manager. That is patience. You are more looking for instant (or same-day) gratification, feeling that if you sinka large amount of time into scouring the database, you should be rewarded with a more cost efficient solution. That is poor game design though, particularly for a game like this one with daily updates causing most things to take place. That paradigm pushes more casual players away from the game; It has the opposite effect on new players.
As for new players being gimped, you're wrong. Again using myself as an example, but my last 7 days income dramatically outstrips my elo and how long my the am has been around. A game like the am his is designed such that you need to use business savvy to rise; If you around re struggling to compete, try thinking about your other options to progress. Work and earn your benefits.
2
He isn't wrong. There is clear potential for new and future teams to be disadvantaged in comparison to current top teams, whether you realise it or not.
If it takes place it will be long term and it's also entirely possible we don't see the significance of it with how team strength goes in cycles. If the current wage trends continue however, and at this point I imagine they will for a while though not quite as severely, future teams will not have peaks as strong as current ones.
A simple example is if a new player begins training a 13 year old youth on their roster from 3 stats. If they have to make concessions with respect to staff quality early on and continuously with their coaching of that player, it could be realistic to expect that they average 0.03 less per day in stat gains than the current top teams have managed. By the time this 13 year old player is 20, 175 days have passed. Averaging 0.03 less per day over that time means they are 5.25 worse off than a current top team achieved.
Obviously those numbers aren't exact and there's a lot of factors to consider. As far as I can tell though, newer teams will have to make concessions (either on staff quality or economy) that older teams have not and it inevitably lands them in a disadvantaged position. That stat difference is not an insurmountable one, but it is there through no fault of the new player. It could be decided that this is a worthwhile change to make for the overall health of the game, I would estimate that it would take at least over 6 months for the old team advantages to become negligible (more in extreme economic cases like Ed's).
1
Hey Hat!
So you mean you left one staff slot open just so you could secure a better PR manager before firing your old one? That's exactly my point. You just spent 4 days giving your players suboptimal training minus one coach. Players who've been around longer haven't made and won't ever have to make that sacrifice. While you were waiting to land your new PR manager, their players have been getting the best training they could've gotten, while yours have lost the same opportunity. You can use whatever amount of patience you deem necessary and arrive at a cost-efficient solution to your PR needs, but you will never get those 4 days of optimal training back, and just like that, you've been put at a disadvantage that can't be reasonably corrected.
I agree, the game does reward business savvy, and I feel I have exhibited that, or I wouldn't have been able to build my team as I've done. No matter what amount of business savvy you display, however, you will come to a point where your 200k/day income won't be able to compete with staff bids from players who make twice or thrice that a day. You might not feel that there is a widening gap right now, but I'll wager it'll become more apparent as you progress.
To further illustrate, here are a few hypothetical scenarios. Think your players aren't cutting it right now? That's too bad, because it'll take you much longer to save up to buy good upgrades to your players on the market, since high staff wages and suboptimal reputation growth have substantially limited your daily earnings. Want to rebuild your team with academy prospects so you can compete against top players in a few years? Again, that's too bad since it'll take you much longer than people who came before you who had access to better staff members when they were at the same point in their careers as you are now, putting them in a better position earlier in their careers. The stage in their careers that they just breezed through, you have to struggle in. Feel like you've built a strong economy and now need top quality staff to get the most out of your team? Unfortunately, while you've been trying to catch up, other players have further built upon their already strong economies, so they can afford to bid 80k more than you can on that PR manager because the two extra sponsors they have over you cover that without a problem, leaving you with considerably worse options.
As savvy as you may have been with your finances, others have simply been given better opportunities than you have. Through no fault of your own, you've been gimped.
