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English >> Suggestions

Problem with promotion and unfair team strengths in higher division (45)


pl Katian >> monday november 25 - 06:18

It is not a secret that after they added extra buildings, the game crushed.

pl Katian
User
Registered2013-06-16
pl Biały Legion
hu Zsone >> monday november 25 - 11:31

Similar storys are being told over and over again a lot of times.First comes the "how unfair the game is" story,than some managers try to explain to the manager what are their experience and what should have been done differently but the he still says it's not his fault,than we need to tell him a bit harsher our view.

Well my friend it is your fault,it really seems like your not understanding the game as it should if you want to catch the better teams in canada or anywhere.The game it self is not perfect,far from it.Is there a big difference between the old teams which are great compare to the like of yours,yes it.Is there a chance for a small new team to catch them? Very small,just like in real life Hartlepool catching Man City...and there's no problem with that,it should be tough,very tough.It should take you years(in real life)to just have a chance to think you have a chance. 

For me it's just enough to look at your players how you trained them and how weak they are.If you didn't trained them this way but were like this when you brought them,than again mistake to buy players like that,either way it was your bad decisions. 

I started from the 4th division in season 25,worked my way up to the 1st league and won it at season 35&40,so it is doable.

You shoudn't even think with the team and facilities what you had to have a chance to catch them anytime soon. After winning my 2.title i decided not to buy anymore new players for the club but just focus on buildings.I have Youth academy 3,training complex 2 is on the way,after that im saving money for the 200k stadium and training complex 3. When these buldings are finished than i might have again a chance to close the gap between my team and top teams in europe,until than im not even having thoughts about it. 

If you decide to continue the game and doesn't learn from the mistakes you did and keep on thinking that you are good but the game is done badly than you will have similar results in sweden also...or you learn from it and progress.

hu Zsone
User
Registered2016-07-14
il Numpty >> monday november 25 - 11:33, Edited monday november 25 - 12:00

I think @onuelver's assessment was quite fair and intended to be constructive advice.

@Maniaque was making reasonable progress, so calling them mistakes was perhaps a poor choice of words.

The problem is that almost all of us resent unsolicited advice because it's often seen as a criticism and/or can seem a bit patronising. The natural instinct is to defend our position rather than to take on board any good points that have been made. 

The truth is we all make mistakes and can usually do things a bit better, but we don't much like having them pointed out by others. We generally prefer to learn by our own experiences rather than listening to other people especially when it's not always correct.   

In relation to the points raised. 

1. Yes, TC10 can be achieved during the starter's bonus. But only if the manager makes good decisions right from the start. But new starters generally won't make the best decisions as they are still learning the game. Somewhat slower progress than is potentially achievable is not really a mistake. Most people probably do a lot worse.

The fact that you were working on infrastructure all the time suggests to me that perhaps you weren't using Construction Managers? Full time use of a good CM for a whole year would get you to around level 8/9 on most facilities. 

As @onuelver points out the most important buildings are the TC and Stadium/Fanshop and it's not worth prioritising anything else until these are developed as much as possible. This is why it's not worth spending time building the Youth Centre until you get the Training Centre to level 10 - and after 13 months it was on level 8.

It's true that the players you get from YC 7 or less can be sold for money. The problem is not being able to make money from it per se, but rather that the players sell for peanuts. It's a matter of degree. The profit from YC 7 is insignificant and hardly worth the effort.  

You would earn far more from developing your Training Centre and training all your players faster.  You can then buy/train/sell players from YC 9-10 and make much more money that way.

2. As for the 'high expectations'; it could have been reasonably forseen that getting promoted to the top level was likely to see the team losing most of their matches and this was going to be bad news for club development. The main problem is not the loss of TV revenue but the resultant decline in the popularity growth rate. Popularity along with the buildings mentioned earlier is crucial to club development. 

But the alternative is to deliberately avoid promotion to the top level in order to continue club development and just play a "waiting game" - potentially for a couple of years while the building work continues.

It's perfectly understandable why people don't want to play the game that way and exposes the very flaw that's under discussion in this thread.  

il Numpty
User
Registered2018-10-19
eng Heath Hornets
ua Kalle >> monday november 25 - 12:04, Edited monday november 25 - 12:05

Im playing this game since half 2013 (season 5) it took me 21 seasons, thats 1092 days or almost 3 years to get to DIV 1 and close that 4 season gap i had with the first players.

I made mistakes, learned from them, tryed new things and had my ups and downs in the DIV 1.

To bad that there is only room for so many teams in each country's DIV1, not everybody can get there and stay there. Try keeping that in mind when you play a long term game. Choose your battle's and try having as much fun as you can by setting small goals and reaching them, making new and more ambitious plans/goals every step of the way

There isn't one default way of making it to the top, like others stated before me (much better and much more extensive).

Only two things are necessary for each way you like to play:

1) A good plan, make a plan and stick to it for the long term

2) a lot of Patience

ua Kalle
User
Registered2013-06-19
nl PEC Zwolle
nl Losing >> monday november 25 - 13:36

Personally I started my TC 10 on the last day of the starter's bonus to get as much profit from it as I could, and I've made some mistakes during those first seasons. At that point I had YC 8 and only this season I sold my last bench player that came from it. I only upgraded that after I built stadium 9. I started way too late with keeping a maximum amount of players in my squad and training them until I could get the max bank value for it, and lots more tiny mistakes are littered all around my career. Still I'm competing to promote to one of the strongest leagues in the game at the moment with a team that would've been decent for the European League about 10 seasons ago (helped a lot by falling transfer prices and an influx of better players since the new upgrades of course). Atm I'm almost building TA1, then YA1, and then it'll take some waiting but I'll get stadium 11 allowing me to catch up to the top. I started just before the start of season 31, so I've reached this point in 18 seasons.

It's not that reasonable to ask for much more imo, apparently to reach the top div in the Netherlands it still takes about as much time as it did for people starting in season 5. The main thing I would change for starters is getting some attendence from bot teams in those lower leagues, because only when I got to div 3 (from div 5) I could start to really increase my stadium and you need the income from that to keep up with the starter's bonus. And obviously the wages need to be restructured imo at both the top and the lower range; you need a far better team to compete in div 3 now and even though the players of that level are basically free now you still have a significant wage expense compared to before the extra building levels, and that might hamper growth a bit since you really do need to be good enough to get out of the bot divisions if you want to grow further. At the top, the formulas of exponential growth used to work quite well but we seem to be reaching the upper end of what they were created for. It costs >100 million to speed up healing for the best players. Some are getting to the point where the transfer price of the best will soon fall dramatically because nobody is willing to pay their wage. This, combined with the enormous weekly costs of academy levels 3 and 4 (going above that just isn't doable I think) is currently a sudden hard limit on how good a team can become. Flying too high (by taking the wrong decisions) now means a top team with a bad strategy will eventually fall and be taken over by newer teams, and we'll probably get a few teams that only compete at the very top for a few seasons before they go bankrupt. Overall, this is way better than it used to be (though I just missed the chance of getting the money for stadium 11 by supertalent lottery due to it :P).

We definitely need some tweaks to the game but if you say the new buildings broke the game or made the gap unbridgeable, especially in the weaker leagues where the top is significantly weaker than the top of div 2 in the stronger leagues, just means you don't really know what the levels are doing to the best teams. Yes, their players increase way faster for a while and some of the best of them are only now nearing the end of that period, but it's at a significant cost that doesn't allow them to just buy all the best players in the game for unbelievable prices and just shut the competition out anymore, at least in the long run. The game is still rebalancing and there's a few unforseen consequences that need to be dealt with. Nothing broke beyond fixing.

nl Losing
User
Registered2017-05-06
ee onuelver >> monday november 25 - 17:09

@Maniaque

Yep some teams may have better players and lower facilities. They invested probably all money to some oldies who will die after 2 seasons and then he will need new load of geronts too keep team on that level. Those teams will stuck at some level (they may reach to there quicker) and finally start to fall back. 

I had after bonus period ended TC10 in progress and YC probably level 4 or 5. Then i was able to buy in some decent youngsters who were soon core of my team. YC upgrades i did when there was no more important things to upgrade and still got first academies in Albania. Every window i buyed couple of young players in and selled some other who were faling out from first team earning bigger money from them than payed. Buying oldies you will never earn back that money you invested as their values only fall. On earlier seasons i remember that 10* oldie wanted more wages than 10* young player who had hope to reach higher.
As i see you are quite ambitious and want to compete with top teams. That need more long-term oriented buildup but you seem to have too few patience (and you deny it). There is few room in top and nobody want to give up their place close to there.

Ofcourse another thing is tactical side. That team with more stars you beated in D2 was probably worse tactically  or forgot to set lineups or didn't train special attributes/players correctly. Other teams close to that team but in D1 do those things better and so you don't have such tactical advantage against them. That's why they are there and your former opponent not- those "little details" matter damn a lot. But maybe some older teams you passed are building their team patiently and would pass you again one day and then permanently?

Yep people watch your matches and your stadium attendances are not zero. Fans still come to stadium. Just TV stations don't prefer to show matches of team who lose almost every match. They want matches between big names. 

If you want to say that my messages are arrogant then yes they probably are - just like me. I'll not be upset from that at all. English is not also my first language so i may say something little bit different as i think. But some of your actions here showed you as quite childish so maybe that may cause such style too although from other points you look over average manager. You really like psychology as i am not first one you tried to diagnoze here :D maybe it's time to analyse yourself?

ee onuelver
User
Registered2014-09-02
ee Puka City Strikes Back
eng Dragontao >> monday november 25 - 18:41

I really don't care too much if some people thought what I wrote is "uncool" or arrogant. I cannot stand the self-entitled mentality that seems to pervade society. I'll leave it to others to put it more politely, which some have done.

eng Dragontao
User
Registered2013-09-07
eng Old People's Home
eng Stephen >> monday november 25 - 22:18

I think this is a hugely difficult issue to get right: how do you attract and retain new managers while making sure oldies have somewhere to go?

I don’t think the balance is quite right just now. Perhaps the starters’ guide should be more explicit about how to make the most of the construction bonus and perhaps it should be easier for these new managers to get the money necessary to take advantage of it too. Maybe something that rewarded active managers rather than just an automatic thing would be better.

I also believe the game could be a lot better at showing how managers are doing relative to their peers. Celebrating lower level league titles properly and displaying ranking information clearly might help too. Being the top manager who started in Summer 2017 might keep some people motivated. I think this was how missions were supposed to work, but I don’t know if they help.

eng Stephen
Head Admin
Registered2013-08-28
eng Seaburn Beach
il Numpty >> tuesday november 26 - 00:48, Edited tuesday november 26 - 01:09

Good points Stephen. I pretty much agree. 

For what it's worth I used 2 CMs during most of the starter's bonus and the building rate at the end was around 30% of the normal construction rate. (Something like 0.5 * 0.76 * 0.82) 

This allowed me to build, and finish, TC 10 and Stadium 8, with most other facilities around level 7. I also made some poor decisions so I'm sure others could probably do a little better. But it's a useful guide nevertheless. 

For me the biggest obstacle was always lack of funds. Building at around 3 times the normal rate also meant the construction costs came much faster than normal. Part of the reason was being a newbie I was still learning how best to make money from farming players, but also because you do need some working capital for player investment and I had none. 

However, I finished the bonus back in May and have now had nearly 4 further seasons and progress has seemed rather slow since then. Stadium 9 was completed last season and I'm hoping to start Stadium 10 midway through next season if I can get the finances together. All my efforts have gone on buildings, farming players for cash and gaining popularity. But despite the fact that perhaps some may consider that I have made reasonable progress in 13 months it feels like I am still a long way behind.  

The biggest obstacle to date has always been finding the finances to keep building. 

I do have plenty of patience, but there is always a limit - and with the timescales involved it's beginning to feel more like a prison sentence ...

I don't much enjoy staying at the bottom level but for the time being it's the best place to keep building - and especially for gaining popularity. With a decent stadium the extra popularity should pay dividends when the club is at a much higher level. 

It's rather a shame that the game is designed in such a way that I - and others - prefer not to promote because I believe it's in the long term interest of the club. 

There needs to be a much greater incentive to climb the league structure than there is at present. If that were the case then you wouldn't see bigger clubs remaining at the bottom or even deliberately getting relegated. 

As for the missions, I don't think they provide anything useful at all. They may even be a hindrance as some of them encourage poor game play such as club-hopping. In my view Missions are like putting lipstick on a pig. And I say that as someone who is consistently ranked first in my group. Missions are not an incentive for me in the slightest. 

Whichever way I look at it I can only return to the same conclusion. Something needs to be done to attract and retain the new managers. For every manager who sticks with it there are probably 100 who just give up when they see how difficult the game is for a new manager. Simply saying that it can be done eventually won't stop those 100 managers leaving. 

The game doesn't necessarily need to be made any easier but it does need to offer competitions where similar clubs can compete with each other on a relatively fair footing.  

il Numpty
User
Registered2018-10-19
eng Heath Hornets
lv Namejs >> tuesday november 26 - 09:45

Numpty: You have hold Yourself back really bad. With Your current squad You could easily hold place in 4. division with couple additions even in 3. So You loose out on big sponsor and match day income money.

Little secret to those who say old players eat up wages. Somewhere around 28 or 29 wages start to decrease. Those players are still good for couple seasons, defenders even for 4 or or 5 seasons.

Also it is important to use loans for developing teams. Loan in 3 players, all in attacking positions (midfield and forward) with necessary trained skills. Loan player biggest plus is no wage as far as I understand RS loan system: You pay fee to parent club and then that is all as far as Your payment for that player goes.

I don't agree that wage increase was bad thing: where that catches developers is healing fee which is connected to wage. If the connecting formula is tweaked I don't see problem paying good players adequate wage.

Transfer market slowed down not because of wage increase but because of new facilities. 1. they eated up finances; 2. they decreased need to buy players in.

lv Namejs
Community admin
Registered2014-07-06
lv Taurupes Dusmīgie Bebri
il Numpty >> tuesday november 26 - 10:51, Edited tuesday november 26 - 11:13

Thanks for the input @Namejs. 

I understand your point about promoting and I agree that we could easily survive in Level 3. But I'm aiming for level 1 and we won't get there any quicker by being promoted now and then getting stuck in Level 2 or 3.

I've had this discussion before and until I have a much bigger stadium the extra match day income is really a pipe dream. I know you mean well but you have just made an assumption without bothering to analyse the situation correctly.  

Almost without exception all the clubs in level 4 would not increase the match attendance. It would take another season to reach level 3 and by the time I got there the stadium would be more or less full in any event. 

At best any extra match day income would be quite small and would come at the expense of a lower rate of popularity gain, which would give a much lower income going forward. That's the main reason I've stayed in level 5. And if there is any doubt about that then feel free to compare the current popularity with any other club that started around the same time.  

So, in summary, popularity seems to be a much undervalued fixed asset. It's much like a pension fund which cannot be sold but produces a significant long-term income. So investing in the club popularity now is worth far more than any insignificant loss in match day income and sponsorship.

There are also other benefits to staying down, such as easier squad rotation, potentially longer cup runs and it's also easier to farm more players for profit. These extra benefits probably outweigh any small loss in stadium income and sponsorship just by themselves.

I do understand that the perceived wisdom of the game is that most people benefit from climbing the leagues.  This may be correct for some, but for the reasons I have mentioned I believe it's not the best advice.  It's better to stay down and build as long as you use the time efficiently.  

I have no disagreement with your other remarks. 

il Numpty
User
Registered2018-10-19
eng Heath Hornets
nl Losing >> tuesday november 26 - 13:33

It doesn't cost that much to make your team a little bit better than it is now, and in 3rd you get a lot more stadium income and sponsor money making up for the expenses. This means you can build a stadium way quicker, both in terms of financial means and getting the attendence threshold to build it (and thus your fanshop, growing popularity and attendence even more).

That being said, you're developing pretty fast considering you're only in 5th. Faster than some that do climb a bit faster. I personally promoted to 3rd from 5th in The Netherlands with only stadium level 4 after 2 seasons on 28-30yo's with loan players, and the financial bonus from that kept me building while being able to replace them despite even doubled attendence being peanuts at those levels. Apart from that you seem to be pretty efficient, more so than practically all starting teams I've seen. It's pretty impressive you managed to build to stadium 9 in a little over a year in these circumstances.

nl Losing
User
Registered2017-05-06
il Numpty >> tuesday november 26 - 20:35

Thank you so much for your kind words @Losing. It's appreciated. 

Regarding the match income and sponsorship etc. I would refer the gentleman to the previous answer I gave to @Namejs. 

il Numpty
User
Registered2018-10-19
eng Heath Hornets
br Ronaldo César >> tuesday november 26 - 22:13

I had bad choices at the beginning, leaving this club twice and deciding to come back because the problem was never the players. My starter bonus was pretty much thrown in the trash. I decided to devote myself to understanding how the game works, I'm still far from my rivals, but my goals are being gradually achieved. We will never be better at everything, but we are always ready for improvement.

br Ronaldo César
User
Registered2016-07-11
ca Alex Seymour >> wednesday november 27 - 02:56

When Numpty unleashes his completed side in a few years and takes on the Premier big boys, it will be well worth the wait!

I'm going to 'do a Numpty' with my English satellite team. I am tired of bobbing about in the top division and I'm going to drop down a bit and build the big stadium. That's what I told the shareholders anyway.

ca Alex Seymour
User
Registered2013-12-02
ca Hamilton FC