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English >> General discussion
Retirement of older players (426)
I'm more on the side of the risk argument than the ethical one. It's a little unlucky for those worst affected that after so many years without development, this change comes in now. The risk didn't pay off.
@ipfreely - very eruditely put
@Draveur, everyone looks different at things. For me I don't do everything to win if I think it is ridiculous. But what for me seems ridiculous, is part of the game for you. The same things can be seen differently and both true.
In this particular case your risk did not pay off, for me the other reason not to do it.
Let's examine each of the points in turn.
Firstly, the so-called 'ethical' argument, where you refuse to use features of a game because in your opinion they are 'unrealistic' and 'ridiculous'. I really have no problem if people wish to take that view and apply it personally.
But if you attempt to take the moral high ground and make it public then you must accept that you need to do exactly the same with all the other unrealistic and ridiculous features of the game. You can't just take the one that you don't like and claim that it's not ethical when you personally exploit other parts of the game that are equally or even less realistic.
If you simply turn a blind eye to all the other features that are unrealistic then at best you're cherry picking. Although I would call it out as hypocrisy.
Approaching a new game
Every game has features that are unrealistic, unusual or silly. These are often what make the game unique, interesting and playable. Games are not real life and the general agreement is that people play by the rules and accept any strange features as simply part of the game. This is normal for most games.
When I start playing any new game then I learn the rules and examine how the game works, including all the silly and unrealistic features. Only then can I decide on the best strategy to play the game. When it comes to the sillier features of the game then I have a choice. Either I don't play the game because it's 'unrealistic' or potentially use them all as part of my strategy.
What I don't do is decide on an inferior strategy because there is something wrong with the game and then tell others to do the same. If I don't like it then I don't play.
Chess
Let's consider chess as an example since most people would be familiar with it. The queen is the strongest piece on the board. In particular it is stronger than a knight, a castle and the king. (Less valuable than the king but still stronger.) Clearly this is not plausible and if someone used the 'unrealistic' argument then they can't exploit the superior movement of the queen and would perhaps choose to move it like the king instead. Good luck with that but they would almost certainly lose against any decent club player. Telling others to do the same would probably be met with polite refusal by some and derision by others.
The point it is generally accepted that it's sensible to use all the features of a game regardless of the credibility factor. That's simply the nature of playing any game.
Rocking Soccer
I have pointed out previously that RS has loads of other unrealistic features that are far sillier than a 52 year old keeper. Maybe not so many are sillier than a 90 year old although some are. You can find them in all parts of the game and it would take an age to go through all of them.
But here are a few example to show that people are cherry-picking.
1. Stadium size
In real life there are a few soccer stadiums with a capacity a little over 100,000 and as far as I know none over 100,000 are in regular use for league football. The vast majority are a lot smaller.
But in the game we now have hundreds with a 200,000 capacity and even more with 120,000. Even little San Marino boasts 4 with 200,000 and 6 with 120,000. They could get 6 times their entire population into one stadium.
Realistic? If you only want to play a realistic game then feel free to downgrade your stadium to at most 70,000. Anything less is cherry picking.
2. Match engine mechanics
Just picking one from many. As explained in the Help: "If two players pass the ball between each other, the highest passing skill of both players determines the chance on success."
So this means that if the player receiving the ball has very strong passing he automatically causes the player making the pass to have the same level of skill. With this feature it's perfectly possible to have only 1 player on the field who has any skill at passing the ball and still outplay the opponent and win the match. I have done so.
How extraordinarliy ridiculous. Bizarre even. If you only want to play a realistic game then please train a good level of Passing on all your players so you don't feel guilty about exploiting this feature. Good luck with that.
3. Bots giving away free cash
Bots with loads of cash will pay silly money for players which is massively above their realistic in-game value. This happens fairly regularly. Unfortunately bot bids are not reviewed and scrutinised by admin.
Most selling managers know that is completely unrealistic but are happy to exploit this feature and take the cash. Random free money.
Here are a few recent examples:
https://rockingsoccer.com/en/soccer/info/player-2430929
$505 million Midfielder Value 17.35 Age 30
https://rockingsoccer.com/en/soccer/info/player-2683956
$279 million Defender Value 11.90 Age 22 Talent 5.55
https://rockingsoccer.com/en/soccer/info/player-2319622
$500 million Defender Value 16.70 Age 34
https://rockingsoccer.com/en/soccer/info/player-2701558
$510 million Defender Value 11.15-13.25 Age 20-21 Talent 6.15
Realistic? Unethical? If you only want to play a realistic game then feel free to refuse these transfers and return all the money that you've stolen. Anything less is cherry picking. Or worse.
4. Museums
From the Help: "The museum is a building to show off how awesome your team is. The museum also gives a small weekly income."
Wrong. Once you've built a massive museum you can get an income that eventually rivals and even surpasses the stadium. Yes, the massive 200,000 ones.
The 'largest' museum at present is on level 266 and growing. With 2x level 10 staff this would have a daily income of c. $6.4 million and a seasonal income of c. $330 million. There are currently 23 museums with level 200 or greater. Level 200 with double staff would give a daily income of c. $3.7 million.
Realistic? From a museum with a 'small income'? If you only want to play a realistic game then I look forward to you demolishing your museums. Any takers?
5. Clubs going into massive debt and owing $billions
There has been some discussion about teams doing this while winning all the major titles. It's debatable whether it's within the rules but hasn't been penalised.
In real life clubs would go into administration, players would either leave or be sold, points would be deducted and/or clubs relegated.
Realistic? Unfair? Unethical? Managers spend a lot of time and money competing for the top titles only to see it wasted and get beaten by others doing this. A major flaw in the game. But instead the development focus has been on retiring 50 year old keepers. The priorities are all wrong.
These are just a few examples - and just to be clear that I don't have a problem with any of them, apart from the ones that are inherently unfair or unethical, such as the bots giving away free cash. But if you want realism and ethics then you need to change the way you play.
The second point about risk is an interesting point.
Everything we do in life is a risk. Going to work, crossing the road, exercising. Even doing nothing is a risk.
So the point is really more about quantifying the risk, and that can be split into 2 separate parts.
1. What was the chance of a future change that altered the way that the older players worked or eventually removed them?
2. In the event of a future change, what was the chance of it being implemented in a way that was rushed in, gave the managers little time to adapt and treated those who had made long term plans in a way which would be grossly unfair?
On both counts I considered the risk was extremely low. The chance of both was very slim indeed.
1. There's been no development since before I started playing, and even if there was some new effort from the developers there were far more pressing and more important things to sort out. Although possible this really wasn't very likely at all in the forseeable future.
2. The history of other changes to the players showed a cautious approach moving forward and existing players were previously allowed to continue 'unharmed'.
Two examples. 1. A new version of players was brought in that worked differently, known as 'Player 2.0'. The first generation just carried on as normal. 2. There was an issue with 30+ ageing supertalents being retrained as keepers with position training. A change was made to limit this to 10 trainings per player, but despite the unrealistic retraining of a superstar outfield player the existing players who had already been retrained were allowed to carry on. Some are still playing many years later.
Here's one player who is still with us. He started out as a forward and then got retrained as a keeper around season 32-33.
https://rockingsoccer.com/en/soccer/info/player-811964
So I had every reason to believe that even with the slim chance of there being some sort of fix we would still keep the existing players because that's how it had always worked in the past and it was the only fair and reasonable way to do things.
There's absolutely no need to remove them because in time all their wages would become too expensive. And then they would get fired or go to the bank.
Ultimately you shouldn't get penalised for playing by the rules and playing the game as it's been designed. In a long running game then any change has to be managed carefully with fairness a major objective.
It makes me laugh when managers in this forum are harping on about how ridiculous it is to have an older GK in the team. I wonder how many of them have selected a 13 or 14yo in a friendly match?
Maybe the game has secretly introduced 5 a side goal posts for the younger goalkeepers that are playing in these matches?
if I understand correctly, for this specific problem letting players rotate out would keep this issue around for literally > 5 years. It also seems that during most of that time these 'old style' keepers would continue to skew the game, specifically with new keepers starting to retire even before the old ones rotate out.
@Numpty The risk was in exploiting an unintended feature of the game. If development happens (big if here, generally), it can be rectified and those exploiting it lose out. Other unrealistic features, like 200k attendances, museums, player 2.0 or selling to the bank, were fully intended and are therefore a false equivalency, as there's nothing to fix as such. Retrained keepers (barring those now affected by this change) disappeared from the game in about 10 seasons anyway, not the 50+ seasons it would take for this to be fixed if it only applied to new youth pulls.
Unintended features (I would assume) like bots paying too much for players and the debt problem could be fixed too, but the existence of these does not give a reasonable argument for not fixing this one. Maybe they're due next?
At best we are all hypocrites. Some a little more than others, some a little less than others.
@ipfreely - your post pretty much reflects my thoughts.
in terms of bots paying too much for average or not very good players, it was always intended that bot teams would bid for players. And when they have lots of money, they look to get rid of that money fast. That brings in a lottery element where you can benefit from a lucky sale. When this was first introduced, bot teams tended to buy better players for money. It was less contentious as a feature, but now they probably can't tell the difference because of market values so they buy anyone they can.
A user can't choose whether a bot team bids or not and there's no mechanism for refusing it. In addition admins can't block or revert them. Bots don't 'cheat' so I suppose this wasn't seen as a necessary feature when it was designed.
I'm not wild about the implication that anyone who has benefited from these sales has somehow cheated, mainly because it's patently untrue. The insinuation that anyone with old GKs is somehow a master of the dark arts and needs to be burned at the stake probably also needs to stop. Pursuing it was not cheating, but the unintended game design has been changed and a solution put in place.
I have no idea whether this or anything else will be changed in future. I suppose this change to old GKs makes it feel more likely some other stuff might change too. But similarly, this could be a one-off. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
@ebitimi - we are all humans, except for the bots :)
@Stephen yes the market value problem is the underlying problem leading to excessive bot bids. It has been suggested these could be reviewed by admins and refused, but then bots with money wouldn't be able to buy anyone as it stands - not sure how much this matters. And the market value problem is hard to fix without heavily impacting those who rely on selling players to the bank.
@ipfreely - Vincent always said it was near impossible to come up with a decent market value formula. In the end, he decided to leave the latest iteration in place. And any change would, as you say, have to be carefully thought through. I'd rather new teams/users got the benefit of any money sloshing about so they can get their facilities upgraded. We can but dream of more changes to the game...
To be clear my post was aimed at those who reject the old keepers on the basis of realism because of their self-proclaimed ethics while they continue to exploit other far less realistic features of the game.
Selling players to bots at massively inflated prices is one of the more egregious examples.
No different to the old keepers you might say. Both are within the rules and part of the design of the game. Both are probably an unintentional consequence of poor design and all we can do is play the game as we find it. Well, in a way, that supports my whole point. You can't cherry pick.
But there is a difference. The old keepers is/was available to anyone who wanted to buy one, so that is entirely fair. But If a bot buys a player with a likely game value of, say, $50 million for $500 million I simply can't accept that as "getting lucky". That's a massively unfair advantage and a real problem with the game that needs fixing.
Although I have absolutely no problem with bots buying players at normal prices. In fact, I think it's a good idea.
So let's look at bot transfers in a bit more detail.
This is all from the Help:
- Bot teams have only minimal finances. They do have a transfer budget. If a bot team sells a player, this money is added to their transfer budget. It can then buy another one, or multiple players for the same value on the transfer market.
- Bot players can also buy or loan one of the players you put on the transfer-list, but they only do so if no human manager wants to buy this player. They will often bid below the asking price so you have to confirm selling the player to them.
- Bot teams will always bid 40-60% of the market value of a player. They don't care about the actual asking price of the player and aren't limited by the restrictions of human managers.
- Fair play. We find it important that the transfer market is used for fair sales and purchases of players for realistic prices.
The Help is wrong. Presumably because the code changed at some point but the Help didn't get updated. My experience is that bots bid 90-105% of the market value of the player. It's always an exact percentage, such as 95% or 102%.
The Help is clear that both player sales and purchases should be for fair values. It makes no exception for bot purchases. In point of fact the "40-60% of the market value" in the Help strongly suggests that the original intention was that bots would normally only buy at around 50% of the real value, which seems entirely reasonable. The complete opposite of what we see now.
The problem of the massively excessive bids is a result of 2 things that were not part of the original game design. Firstly, the bot team has to generate a huge transfer budget by selling some very expensive players, mostly to the bank at market value. Secondly, as others have already pointed out, the market value of the players bears no resemblance to their real value on the transfer market.
Both of these are a direct consequence of the new high facilities that came in 2017 without significantly changing the market value. Before then most of the normal players were YC10/TC10 players and even the best ones were YC10 supertalents trained in a TC10. The market value of these players would have been very different to what we see today, so the problem didn't exist. Or if it did it was very rare indeed.
As things stand the massive advantage gained by a few managers from these excessive bids makes a complete mockery of the game. And is very unfair to everyone else who works hard to run their finances well.
This problem need to be fixed urgently. Taking on board the previous comments regarding the market value there are various ways of fixing it. Although not the best solution the easiest and quickest fix would be to simply limit bot bids to the max bank value of $25 million. Alternatively you could simply remove bot bids entirely. You can still sell to the bank at 80% - and at least that would be a lot fairer than what we have now.
Edit - Sell to Bank option
After a bit of research on the forum, I discovered that this was introduced in Season 11 (2014).
- The bank bids 25% of the market value, to a maximum of 1 million USD (so if you have a player worth 100 million, the bank still bids only 1 million)
It was later changed to 80% at some point and then to $25 million in 2018. So that's consistent with bots originally bidding at 40-60%.
@numpty, all I can say to you that there is a difference between exploiting and using something. In this case it was unintended and it is about this. You try to start a discussion about things which are not realistic in the game. There is a big difference between them and I react different on them.
You did try an old mechanic in discussion but it does not work. You put a statement (which is not said or really true) and then arguing that statement of yourself. It looks You are right, but it is just a trick of changing the argument of the other first before continuing the discussion.
I will try to explain what the difference is between intended and not. In this game the only long term strategy is 5-3-2, is this realistic no because in real life every lineup can win the world cup. However, it is intended. In your reasoning I am not allowed to play 532 because it is not realistic. However, this is intended and already existing since the beginning of the game (also when development was still strong). The developers did not want to change it, so it becomes intended and part of the game.
It is of course possible they will do something about it and they did by making attack stronger not by making 532 weaker.
So it is for me totally fine to use the line up 532 in this game.