BuzzerBeater Forums

What it basically means is that BuzzerBeater can't really afford to have a substantial group of players making, say, $2M/week, unless we just decide to inflate everything to cover their salaries (a bad idea for a number of reasons).

This is actually one of the side effects a problem that we created around season 3 (and have been trying to find the best solution for ever since around season 5) when we left the introduction of potential off a season in order to try and get the economy into equilibrium as quickly as possible.

The point is, these players like Cardenas are going to keep training in many cases until they reach their potential cap, and while players who are trained in a small set of skills to very high levels should have painfully high salaries, the salaries can't be so high as to make it impossible for any team to consider picking them up. While I suspect the best teams will choose depth over superstars, it should also be possible for a top division team to afford one superstar if they're willing to really skimp on depth (e.g., a superstar at $400k as part of a total $450-500k wage budget).

We're going to try to make this possible by rescaling the wages each season so that the most skilled players (as a large group) end up in a range that makes this possible; we're going to fit the entire distribution of skills to a salary scale. In the short-term, this means that for the next few seasons (until players like Cardenas have reached their potential cap) you will be getting progressively slightly more skill for your dollar. In market terms, you can think of this as a guy like Cardenas simply deciding that he's worth as much as anybody can afford to pay, but no more than that.

I suspect there will still be a few nomads out there who have a combination of very high skills which means they're just not worth building a team around, but that's really a separate question and one that's for managers rather than BBs to deal with. I think I've been quite outspoken as is on the subject of whether managers are giving players optimal training.

Cool - so for those owning mid range players from $50-150k, we have to hope that there are many more Cardenas' being trained so that our guys in comparision get pushed further down the scale and therefore get a slight downward revision on their salaries?

Generally speaking that's right; we really look at the bulk distribution though, so if it's really only a handful of players like Cardenas, that handful of players might end up making a fortune each week. While the game can't handle 1000 players like Cardenas without creating havoc, it can handle a few. For example, this season the fourth highest salary is only $301k/week, the 10th highest is under $250k, and the 50th best player (around the median best player on a national team) is at $165k/week. We're not going to skew the wage scale to protect one or two players out of what by next season will probably be verging on 1M, and if Cardenas continues to train in the same set of skills he's been training, I'd expect his salary to end up at, well, of order twice what seems like a reasonable amount for a superstar in a top division superstar-based team. You may have a better feel for this than I do, but I predict the market will survive just fine with a very small number of such players out there, as their scarcity helps to protect their value against the large wage.

Only players under contract during the salary update will be considered, since those are the ones competing for the money.