Hey guys, I am kinda worried about the long-term plan of the game. We are getting sim updates and ecco changes (thanks for that, I rly appreciate it!!), but imo the biggest problem lies somewhere else. Soon the current line ups of the players from the first reddit wave will get too old and a new rebuild will be needed. I am afraid that this could lead to an appreciable shrink of the player base. The rebuild-phase is very important and determines your rank for like 10 seasons. You got pretty much 2 options.
Option 1: The step by step rebuild Swapping 1 player every 2-3seasons.
Option 2: The full rebuild Getting 5 new players at once and putting all trainings sessions on them.
The Pros and Cons are pretty obvious, while in option 1 you have permanently a competitive team that can keep you relevant you will never be able to get to the top. The 2nd option gives you the possibility to fight for rank1 at some point but therefore you have to invest all your trainingssessions and you have a useless/crap team for 5+ seasons before they kick in. And there is the problem, no matter how good you are you won´t be able to be at the top permanently while imo someone that has the best macro skills AND the best strategy/micro game should be able to achieve this. (Practically kinda impossible but it should be theoretically possible.) Atm it is not even needed to have a good macro play to get to the top, the rebuild timing alone will give even mediocre players the chance to reach the very top.
So what are the negative aspects of the current system? -) rebuild determines your rank for 10+ seasons, which is too long and if you make a mistake you are fked for like half a year (= people quitting after they fail) -) rebuild (and therefor also rank) is mostly about timing (relative to other players) and not about macro skills (-> rank doesn´t represent skill) -) players drop hard in ranks without doing anything wrong (when they need new line up) -) The chance that people that do the full rebuild lose interest in the game is very high (= shrinking player base) -) no chance of catching up. If someone else does a rebuild half a season earlier than you, you will always be behind without any chance of catching up to him.
Solution I was also thinking about possible solutions. But I am not sure what would be the best way. Either the player duration has to be lowered (e.g. starting at age 18 not 13), so that the rebuild doesn´t determine your rank for so long, or the cap could be lower so that new players (ingame players) can catch up faster. If players reach the max stats after 2seaons it isn´t that bad to rebuilt half a season after someone else because you can compete with him pretty soon. If someone else has a better solution in mind pls write it down below.
I know the step to a new system would be rly difficult, but I think it is highly required.
(Sry for my bad English, if you don´t get my points, feel free to ask :D)
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I'm not experienced enough with MM.gg to talk about it, but the problems you describe sound very similar to the problems that plague CSManager. The game is super stale because of the fact that you remain uncompetitive for very, very long (added to the fact that their Match Engine needs a major overhaul to remove the many exploits that are abused by the more experienced users and hidden from the rest) which makes almost every newbie give up.
My only suggestion to mildly solve the issue is lower how much player stats matter, but with the lack of other distinctive factors between teams makes that hard to do, having in mind that other than stats, only pick/ban and builds matter.
Another way to do it, would be to give a hard cap to the overall of the player stats and updating the training so you can practice specific atributes. That way, players would have to customize how they want their points to be distributed and if the hardcap is achievable by any <19 player (with appropriate training) it would give long time rebuilds a lot less power. If this was done, it should probably be wise to lower the 13yo prices, as their only advantage would be longevity.
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We should expand past the league comunity and into dota and other moba manager games
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Instead of hardcapping you can also just make training and aging much faster
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Is there any plans to create a singleplayer version of this game, along the same vein as Football manager? I'd pay good money for that. Sorry to kind of go down a different track, I just felt it also pertained to the future of mm.gg
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@chezz: they are already trying, the game was called lolmanager before. But it´s kinda hard since they started everything based on LoL and going away from this will require hard work and could lead to confusion. But I think for instance when they add new champs they won´t be based on LoL champs anymore and also the planned game simulator will have some non-LoL features. @rmfg, amc: Ye the long time period of a rebuild is my main fear, not sure if ppl are ok with having a worse team for month than they were used to. - in worst case they will quit @Kaido: they did a first step with the journey, not sure how they plan to go on with this.
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To be fair there are some valid points in this but as you are aware there is some things that need time to be tweeked, I would not say that the players should train quicker but i would say maybe have the retirement age at 30 and the point of when the player starts loosing points because of age to around 27, about the changing age's for training why would you change from 13 years old? the avarage lol player is from the age of 12-30 there are some players that are in there 40's though, if it takes so long to train then why didn't you plan before hand i had to change my team as of age issues and made some fresh talent but i had plans for that since before hand, if you know that a player will be out of its prime then why not during the training start training another player/s players stats dont start actully decreasing whilst being trained till they reach around 21, By having players that are of the age of 13 means that those players will be finished training by the age of 17-18 meaning you have 3-4 years on there age left leaving you with about 3-4 seasons, preplaning will cost a bit but it is worth every penny. Time wise the seasons are the right lengh because if you make them shorter then you would have to make the money quicker meaning you would have to rebalance the money system, If they rebalanced that then they would have to make each season every half a year for the players age other wise you would have to get new players every 2 months meaning that the training would then have to be increased in values to, changes in a game like this would change so much and would create a spiral of issues with each thing, if you want players to stay with the game then your best bet is to create a mini league before the league allowing players to test there team and also gives them a short amount of time to alter there team to also i think that you would have to make one simple change and that is make the game more player friendly, An idea for this is what im trying to think of but the best i can think of right now is make a reward system for new players that at the end of it would reward the player with a player for there team with better stats then there team so that they can use that player to ever sell of to buy new ones or use in there team to help them win more often.
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Nah, fam, hear me out. The primary issue with the system to fight for top is that there are 2 strategies 1. Get upgraded players one at a time, replacing in your current team. - this makes you competitive forever, but never really #1 viable. 2. Fully reset your team now and again. - makes you viable for #1 on occasion, but is long term investment, and is easy to fuck up.
The 2 main ways you can mitigate this issue is reduce the value of player stats and making #1 position more dependent on strategy, or by reducing the time it takes to get new players (making resets take less time/investment)
The only other thing I can think of is adjusting the entire system (and this would have to be a long term goal) to create better synergy between player stats and strategies such that you want specific types of players for specific types of strats. From there, set academy so it can train only x stats at a time, and increase how well players are trained in the academy to compete with coaches.
this way your academy trains your players emphasized on specific stats for specific strats. your coaches are for maintaining those stats, and if you were to invest more, train other stats to give more flexibility in strategy.
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This is a difficult problem to solve.
There's always a point where a team could push for temporary advantage while dismissing any long term advantage. By nature teams at the top would start to rotate to some extent. Because ateam who has been building himself up for a while then decides to go for a push for one season this team will always have the advantage over those who did not push. By building long term I mean investing in the youth as well instead of investing in the current team and it's capabilities.
And yes timing is key for coming out as a winner for the longest duration possible. I can't think of a good solution right now either.
I hope the discussion will proceed and perhaps someone will be able to come to something good. I will keep it in my mind however and see if anything good comes up.
