Monday 7 July 2008

Change the Wage Auctions!

I normally get Mondays off so in between the looking after kids I can snatch the odd hour of FM Live. Today however the server looks terminal combine this with the fact that the forums have gone down as well (for a move) and I thought I just as well do another blog post.

I do feel sorry for SI as they now have 10,000 beta testers many of whom know exactly what game they want to play and are quite happy to tell them in detail about it.

Having seen a mass influx come into GW6 and seeing the best of them have been able to put competitive squads together very quickly you can tell that SI have some cunning design at work.

The biggest complaint of the game is wage auctions and only being able to lock five players. It’s clear that the system allows new users to do exactly that, put together a competitive squad together. However it immensely frustrating for established users who’ve effectively got to trade their top players.

Jordan from Get Sacked (awesome podcast about FM) had lively debate with Tam on the SI forums about a potential new system which worked the same way but instead of bidding on the players wage you bid on his Acquisition Fee or Signing On Fee.

The issue that comes up is that players get to be lemons not because their bad players but because their wages are ridiculous. You can have a debate about maybe a young player on £5k wages as he might quickly become worth that or exceed that wage demand but a 30 Year Old on £100k wages with a wage demand of £20k is quite clearly a lemon.

As time pass’s more and more lemons are created and it can get frustrating looking at players who are great and just what your after but have been ruined by their wage.

What happens is this you start the game and you build a cheap squad, you have £100k coming in and wages at £20k the team plays well your ranked say 400. You tell yourself ‘I’m one player away from greatness if only I had a quality striker’. The wage auctions start say a good striker comes up like Michael Owen, ohh I sign him and I’m done! Bang in goes the bid for £80k.

This appears to work for a while you go from rank 400 to rank 200 and your incomings rise a little. However then you get stuck you haven’t any significant disposable income to strengthen the side further or bring in any more players in wage auction.

You have fallen into the trap interest in the game fades and you leave. If you were bidding on his signing on fee although you couldn’t afford Michael Owen straight off you could at least be saving for him, with a cash surplus of £80k it’s going to be vastly superior to anyone else in the top 100 so be the end of season one you’ll have more money than anyone else.

Even if you drop a clanger and say bid £300k signing on fee for a player that’s only worth £100k you’re not going to suffer this mistake long.

It’s curious that they never went for this model in the first place as it’s a trap that so many teams have fallen for. Literally I’ve seen players with a wage demand of £2.5k on wages of £45k, I mean he may be undervalued but not by that much!

It’s a bit late in the day to change it all know and would need a lot of testing over several seasons to understand if it would work well. Still a good idea though?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think a great deal of the dissent about wage auctions comes from what I call the "sky is falling" syndrome. These people look at immediate cause/effect relationships and base their conclusion on only this set of facts. Once you look past this and see the scenario over a longer period of time, these conclusions become less and less on point.

I'm in GW2, the oldest in the beta (10th season now) and it's been very apparent that this freak-out about wage inflation is pretty much unfounded. While there are some extreme ebbs & flows, we have witnessed a proper adjustment in the market that it has become noticeable. (typically these things gradually even out but are very hard to detect for some time)

Although I believe the current system works extremely well, I am willing to accept that it doesn't as long as the arguments made are done with due dilligence. A period of 3-6 months is practically neccessary in this game to properly judge anything in the financial dynamics and that's being liberal (12-24 would likely be ideal).

Just wanted to let you know that someone's reading your blog... and thanks for the podcast plug!