EHM The Blue Line

A lot of money indeed!

But then consider some top level amounts of money:
- facility from level 14 to level 15: nearly 150M
- going from level 1 to level 15: over 350M
- best possible stand: over 80M

Which means:
- all facilities from level 14 to level 15: over 1 billion (+ approx 200M of maintenance per year)
- the whole arena with the best possible stands: over 650M (+ approx 150M of maintenance per year)

Then relate that to a top notch prospect or a top notch player, and the 300 to 500M looks to be a relatively fair price... In fact, it sounds rather cheap...

Don't loose sight that a 90+ AvQ prospect with perfect career length and perfect practice and regeneration facilities (+ the appropriate staff) will reach something around OR 2.000. That's a pure monster! And a team who had enough money to build top facilities, pay the maintenance costs, and pay the salaries of top employees certainly has the financial power to throw thousands of millions on such player. But who'd be stupid enough to put such player on the market? Especially now, when noone will throw out more than 10-15M, which is not even 5% of its value.

People are just crazy on the market

This player: GOA 33 (44) PAS 14 (1) TEC 10 (27)

just sold for 694,575 (granted the quality may not be exact)

Just a couple hours ago I purchased this player:

GOA 34 (80) PAS 22 (32) TEC 23 (48)

for a whopping 20,000

Granted the player i got isn't great, but as my backup goalie is injured and my third stringers contract is about to expire (I'm not renewing) I needed a serviceable backup. I was going to wait till after the pull next week, but when i saw this player that cheap I went ahead and grabbed him.

Is there any "management efficiency" value that indicates the management quality of your team.. just like the "scouting efficiency" value does for the quality of your scouts?

(I'm asking because managers have two attributes, one for scouting an the other for management and i've seen the scouting efficiency on the scouting section, but there is no similar management efficiency value).

Managers attributes are scouting and marketing. The 'marketing' attributes impacts on the sponsor deals. On the "Arena / Staff" page, you can see how strong you are in every staff attribute.

The calculation for the impact of each staff on the final note is pretty easy to determine:
60% of head staff attribute + 40% of assistant attribute.

The "scouting efficiency" is a whole different stuff, and it's available only for the scouting attribute.

The best overall ranked team is some Penguins from Hungary, and the team is rated something around 120. Now my question is why is that guy so good? Looking at the facilities he's already done much more than all of us! And the players on that team are really good, too (150 avarage).

He's done some massive trading in season 1, including a sale worth a bit more than 5M. And since the start of season 2, he bought 2 players at 200+ OR and approx 70% QtM (estimated) for 5M each.

Then, as the top ranked team in his country (and in the PPM world), he probably get strong sponsors for this season. To give you an idea, the top French guy in terms of evaluation (Seb; actually 4th in the PPM world) get something around 65M of sponsors for this season, while most of us are between 30M and 40M. So this Hungarian guy probably get something similar, or maybe around 70M. He's off to a perfect start so far... But it doesn't mean that he'll stay perfect eternally.

Shadd666 wrote:.. He's off to a perfect start so far... But it doesn't mean that he'll stay perfect eternally.

But what can he do wrong now? He's got all the facilities to produce talent and money and staff. Now that he's got so much money he will be building even better facilities, and with those good players he can't loose and his rating will go up.. and there will be more money...

selne wrote:

Shadd666 wrote:.. He's off to a perfect start so far... But it doesn't mean that he'll stay perfect eternally.

But what can he do wrong now? He's got all the facilities to produce talent and money and staff. Now that he's got so much money he will be building even better facilities, and with those good players he can't loose and his rating will go up.. and there will be more money...

That's the problem with all sports. The smaller clubs have trouble surviving as they don't get the same sponsorship money that the bigger clubs have. But the smaller clubs can't get the results as they don't have the money to invest! It's a vicious cycle.

getzlaf15 wrote:..That's the problem with all sports. The smaller clubs have trouble surviving as they don't get the same sponsorship money that the bigger clubs have. But the smaller clubs can't get the results as they don't have the money to invest! It's a vicious cycle.

I hope it's not like that on ppm. Is there any salary cap or something similar? What about a drafting system where only the lower seeded teams can pick up some real good players once every year?:-k

selne wrote:

getzlaf15 wrote:..That's the problem with all sports. The smaller clubs have trouble surviving as they don't get the same sponsorship money that the bigger clubs have. But the smaller clubs can't get the results as they don't have the money to invest! It's a vicious cycle.

I hope it's not like that on ppm. Is there any salary cap or something similar? What about a drafting system where only the lower seeded teams can pick up some real good players once every year?:-k

Well there is kind of a system in place. Its easier to raise your team rating in the lower leagues than the higher leagues. Higher team rating equals more money. Teams at the top that can't compete will eventually cycle down, then have a chance to build back up. Plus the team rating is lowered in the off season which helps level the playing field.

It's not an eternal "vicious" circle. As players and staff progress, their salaries grow up exponentially. Same goes for the maintenance costs of the installations and the arena. So the stronger you get, the harder it is to keep progressing.

Of course, with such a solid start, a manager will face no difficulty for a few seasons, unless he makes mistakes. But sooner than later, he'll face so much expanses that he won't be able to cover it all. Or he will, but just barely, and will have an extremly hard time to progress anymore. Once this peak is reached, there is some stagnation, and other teams can come back, and maybe even overpass this team. It will maybe take several seasons before reaching this point, but it's just a matter of time, really. Reaching the top is one thing. Staying at the top is way more difficult.

In the first 3-4 seasons, the expanses are extremly low, and the sponsor deals go up fast, so people can spend money without looking at expanses. From season 5 and beyhond, expanses grow faster and faster, contrary to sponsor deals. And more often than not, people will make mistakes, spend too much money, and have a backfire around season 5-6. I know that pretty well, as i was one of those who were trapped by that in beta I've made a bad decision in season 3, and it hurted me badly in season 5. By the end of season 8 (end of the beta), i had yet to rebalance things in the right direction. 3 seasons "lost" in terms of progression and development. During those 3 seasons, many other teams progressed. And if i was regularly in the playoffs of my league in seasons 3 and 4, i had to face relegation in seasons 6, 7 and 8, and was most likely to be relegated in season 9 if there had been one.

And this is just with one mistake made in season 3, which had yet to have a too big impact on a team. Now let's imagine a team making a big time costly mistake in season 20... They won't need 4-5 seasons to get back on track, but most likely 10-15 seasons...

Shadd666 wrote:It's not an eternal "vicious" circle. As players and staff progress, their salaries grow up exponentially. Same goes for the maintenance costs of the installations and the arena. So the stronger you get, the harder it is to keep progressing.

Of course, with such a solid start, a manager will face no difficulty for a few seasons, unless he makes mistakes. But sooner than later, he'll face so much expanses that he won't be able to cover it all. Or he will, but just barely, and will have an extremly hard time to progress anymore. Once this peak is reached, there is some stagnation, and other teams can come back, and maybe even overpass this team. It will maybe take several seasons before reaching this point, but it's just a matter of time, really. Reaching the top is one thing. Staying at the top is way more difficult.

In the first 3-4 seasons, the expanses are extremly low, and the sponsor deals go up fast, so people can spend money without looking at expanses. From season 5 and beyhond, expanses grow faster and faster, contrary to sponsor deals. And more often than not, people will make mistakes, spend too much money, and have a backfire around season 5-6. I know that pretty well, as i was one of those who were trapped by that in beta I've made a bad decision in season 3, and it hurted me badly in season 5. By the end of season 8 (end of the beta), i had yet to rebalance things in the right direction. 3 seasons "lost" in terms of progression and development. During those 3 seasons, many other teams progressed. And if i was regularly in the playoffs of my league in seasons 3 and 4, i had to face relegation in seasons 6, 7 and 8, and was most likely to be relegated in season 9 if there had been one.

And this is just with one mistake made in season 3, which had yet to have a too big impact on a team. Now let's imagine a team making a big time costly mistake in season 20... They won't need 4-5 seasons to get back on track, but most likely 10-15 seasons...

Sounds a bit scary. Ok, now if we want to avoid mistakes, what will be the choice in season 5-6? Either win your games or sell your players, because you would loose money then?

Not exactly. This becomes true only if you make mistakes. If you don't, you might have progressed slightly less than the others, but just slightly. So when they make the mistakes, and easily beat them thanks to smarter development.

Because if you make mistakes, the choices to undo things are pretty limited: win it all (pretty hard), sell players (with the lottery of the market, that's risky), or downgrade some of your facilities (which is most likely to effectively correct the mistake). And that's what i didn't do in beta, because it took me too long to understand that i've made a mistake. And once i've identified the mistake, beta was about to end, so there was no reason to make any move. Else i would have corrected things way faster by downgrading.

So that's it: no mistakes = maybe a slightly weaker improvement compared to some others... but others that will be forced to downgrade if they want to avoid bigger problems. So they go down to the same level as you. But... they've spent the facility... and downgrading refunds only half the money... and they'll have to rebuild the facility someday... So this particular level will cost them 150% of what it costs to you if you don't make mistakes. And of course, those extra 50% can be used to your advantage to take some advance on your opponents Others also loose time in the process. Especially with bigger facilities, that are pretty long to develop. So downgrading it + re-upgrading it later on = twice the time. And when going from level 10 to 11, you need 65 days for the construction works. If you have to do it twice, it takes you over a season, and in the end takes more time than going from level 14 to level 15 (65 days x 2 = 130 days, versus 119 to reach lvl 15).

Anyway, it's always the same: the higher you get, the harder it is to stay were you are, and even harder to improve. And after just 3-4 seasons, it will be usual for everyone to have installations at level 10+, which is already 2/3 of the max.

And what's the difference between a level 1 and a level 10 installation? Well, outside of the fact that you already spent 34.5M to go from lvl 1 to lvl 10, the maintenance costs is the real deal here, as it is nearly multiplied by 100. Level 1 costs around 30K of maintenance per season, while level 10 costs slightly under 3M. Then it's multiplied by 10 between level 10 and 15. Now let's say you've got all your installations at level 10, and that's already over 20M of expanses just for the maintenance of the installations!

Of course, if you've got all installations level 10, players and staff progress relatively fast... and so does their salary! So you reach a point when you have more to consider than just the construction costs.

Let's say you're level 10 and want to move on to level 11. The cost is 21.6M, which is not easy to get, but perfectly possible. But the other thing to take into account is that the maintenance cost of the facility will make a jump of nearly 2M more per season, going from 2.9 to 4.8M. 2M is not a lot, really, but if you don't pay attention and build several facilities like this, you can easily reach 10-15M of extra costs, which can hurt badly. And when it comes to practice facility, you have to consider the extra progression pace for the players, which means extra OR when contract renewal comes. And this will affect your whole team, obviously. And knowing that salary improve on an exponantial curve, it makes a big difference. So improving the practice facility from level 10 to level 11 (for example) will not cost you just 21.6M, but more likely around 25-26M in the first season, plus 3-5M every following season. So in 3 seasons, it may cost you over 30M combined, nearly 50% more than just the construction costs! So if you look only at the construction cost before building, you end up in troubles a few seasons later.

Of course, if you think that you can handle the whole cost and that this new level will help you getting better enough results to get better revenues (from gate receipts, sponsor deals, money awards, etc), then it's obviously a good decision to improve. But if you're not so sure, the best bet is to stay cautious and let the others make the mistakes This is true for every level, but becomes critical around level 10 facilities. And for many guys, reaching level 10 somewhere will be done either by the end of season 3 or the first half of season 4, so it's really not that far away...

Just realized that the cost to build a facility to level x, is exactly the amount of the costs of level (x-1) plus the cost of level (x-2).

Example -

Level 2 cost 300k,
Level 3 cost 450k.
-> Level 4 would cost 300k + 450k = 750k

The same goes for the maintenance costs.


It took me only 5 months to find out this complex system. Good rhytm Teemu, keep going!

I see lots of people buying players really cheaply, training them up and turning a HUGE profit. They don't play these players, just build em and sell em - these guys have facilites way way over most.

I am deffinitly going to shift pace and start playing my local buys from my youth system and not use the foreigners as anything other than fodder. Lots of them show up as huge AQ on the market even though theyre really only in the 60's - my gain to sell and some poor saps loss to buy.

Also - if you can manage it, play everything you possibly can on LOW - all friendlies should be on low, otherwise you'll be burned out very quickly.

selne wrote:It took me only 5 months to find out this complex system. Good rhytm Teemu, keep going!

Lol

At least you've seen it Some people have yet to see this... "Curiously", they are the same who are asking questions already answered in the guide...

opivy wrote:I see lots of people buying players really cheaply, training them up and turning a HUGE profit. They don't play these players, just build em and sell em - these guys have facilites way way over most.

Yeah, that's pathetic. It's purely abusing the lack of knowledge of the noobs (when selling), because most of the time they sell naff players. But noobs don't scout and have very poor approximation, and barely no idea of what a player really worthes.

Good thing is, this strategy isn't viable on the long term for the sellers. Sure, they can get extra cash to build bigger facilities, which provides them a short term advantage. But at least 99% of them don't look any further than short term benefits. So they build, build, build, and never care about the maintenance costs, impacts on salaries, and all the stuff i've mentionned a few days ago. It will strike back on them. And darn hard. They'll see this as a winning strategy so they won't stop it. And by the time they'll understand their mistake (which will take a lot of time), the damages will be done.

And they'll need a lot of time to see there's something wrong, because for a while, the sales will cover the real losses, so they won't see anything. And being confident in a strategy that worked so well for them in the past, they'll be more than happy to stay blind. Once the sales won't cover the losses anymore, then they'll (hopefully for them) realize. Then they'll need time to understand what's going wrong. And in case they can see it (which isn't guaranteed), they'll see they'll have to take a major step down to avoid short term bankruptcy. This major step down will bring them down in terms of results, and therefore of sponsorship deals, which will most likely force them to make a second (smaller) step down. Which means another loss in results and sponsors, and at least one relegation in the whole process. And then the need to rebuild and get back on track, while the others will have progressed by a lot and will be far away.

So it might be an intersting strategy to use on the very short term, maybe until season 3-4, but then it has to be either stopped, or done extremly carefully. Anyway, it's not that much of a winning strategy on the long run, and you have to think on the long term if you want to reach success.

So well, i wouldn't worry about those "traders" (buy, sell, buy, sell... looks like a stock exchange!). They'll burn their wings sooner or later. What i'm really worried about is all the newbies who get abused from this and get handicaped in their development because of it. Well, it's their role to be smart and avoid traps, so i won't cry for them too much. But on the principle, that strategy is really not respectful at all of the least experienced players.

opivy wrote:Also - if you can manage it, play everything you possibly can on LOW - all friendlies should be on low, otherwise you'll be burned out very quickly.

Indeed. Friendlies somehow MUST be played on low. Any other choice is a mistake, no matter what. Some people still play it on normal though... And there are even a few playing on high intensity. They'll understand... someday... But it will probably be too late for the season they'll finally get it.

Shad- I'm curious as to what your philosophy is on the ratio of primary to secondary attributes?

wildiowafan wrote:Shad- I'm curious as to what your philosophy is on the ratio of primary to secondary attributes?

I use a modified version of the 4-2-1, or 100-50-25 if we use percentages.

Means that when the top attribute is at 100, both of the secondary attributes are at 50, while the others are at 25. Let's take the example of a Dman, it would be something like:
goaltending: 0
defense: 100
attack: 25
shooting: (special)
passing: 50
technic: (special)
aggressivity: 50

As you can see, i've got 2 "special" attributes, which are shooting and technic. Here's why:
- shooting: i see no point of developing the shot of a player who has a weak shooting quality, no matter what his position is. So players with a high shooting quality will have a high shooting ratio (which will be different according to the position, i've got a relatively complex system for that), and players with a low shooting quality will have a low shooting ratio, ie they won't be effective in terms of goalscoring but will progress more in the other areas as a result, since they won't loose time to develop their shooting skill.
- technic: It is a tertiary attribute for Dmen, so it should be at 25 in my example. But... considering the impact on penalties that the tech/agr ratio has, i set a minimum ratio for technic linked with aggressivity. In stance, i use a 85% ratio (so technic = 85% of aggressivity at min), which would translate into a value of 42.5 in the example, rounded up to 43.

That aside, i don't use a strict 100-50-25 ratio. In our example, let's say the Dman has a passing quality of 50, and an aggressivity quality of 90. Both are secondary attributes, so under the 100-50-25 system, both should be at 50. But aggressivity will obviously progress way faster than passing. So passing will limitate/slow down the development pace. So instead of having 50 pas & 50 agr, i'll maybe have 45 pas & 55 agr, which will be done faster, and will therefore allow the player to progress more and faster in the other attributes without harming his performances (well, hopefully ). It also personnalizes the players a bit more, which is funnier, although it's not the main point.

In fact, for the secondary and tertiary attributes, i have a range of potential ratios, with a min and a max. So instead of 50, the secondary attributes will be somewhere between 35 and 65, depending on the quality of the player in the given attributes (note: those are not the true values i use for min/max... this range is way too wide). When i say "depending on the quality of the player in the given attributes", i'm not talking about his absolute quality there, but about the ratio between the quality of the given attribute and the quality of the main attribute (ie goal, def, att). So a Dman with qualities of 40 def & 20 pas will have the same passing ratio than a Dman with qualities of 80 def & 40 pas. Which makes sense, as the disparity of their qualities is in the same proportions (1/2), so the ratio has to be the same to optimize the development pace in the same way. But obviously, the second player will progress way faster than the first one. (and in fact, the first one will be fired sooner than later, but that's another topic)

Well, this is a relatively complex system, i know The sheet i use to determine my ratios has 70 columns of formulas, and that's just the ratios' sheet. But globaly, it's based on a 100-50-25 ratio. I use a more complex system because i try to optimize things as much as possible (keep in mind that nothing guarantees that i have a correct optimization...), but the basis is extremly simple: 100-50-25.

I hope i've been clear enough in my explanations...

Shadd666 wrote:If we look at the team strengths of the TBLers, there's actually a solid competition:
1. Shadd 16.63
2. Taloncarde 14.45
3. JoeHelmer 12.36
4. Getzlaf15 12.27
5. Selne 8.34

I guess you've all seen the news of last week mentioning that PPM now has Peter Stasny has its godfather! Getting his attention is a very nice reward for all the hard work that has been done on PPM. I hope we'll have an interview of him soon in the PPM mag...

How far i have come here. My team's rating is now 198.71.

Is anyone else still playing this or is it just me?

I'm still playing. I think we had a friendly recently. I'm not as active on these boards though. Pulled off a huge upset in II.3 semi-finals to advance to the finals today. I think I'll get beat as well as losing the promotion round. but still cool to get this far my first season on level 2.

I'm back again, but the team is new, created just some minutes ago so it will be hard for me to play against you guys.

I'm still in it, still struggling in div III.5. My players are some of the best in the division but can't seem to pull it together against other human-managed teams.

I'm also still around on ppm. .. dealing with a huge penalty problem in recent games.

joehelmer wrote:I'm back again, but the team is new, created just some minutes ago so it will be hard for me to play against you guys.

Are you the hedgehogs?

selne wrote:

joehelmer wrote:I'm back again, but the team is new, created just some minutes ago so it will be hard for me to play against you guys.

Are you the hedgehogs?

Yep. the mighty hedgehogs from the forest, was watching at a handbook for a game with Sonic the Hedgehog for PS2.