I agree with italyprof's agreement with contrarian223's agreement with mattedesa. Disagree with whoever cited widespread opposition to the change. Seems most welcome the change if it is less frequent and the Open/Theme dichotomy is addressed.

Agreed with joshkvt's agreement with italyprof's agreement with contrarian23's agreement with mattedesa.

...and that's how the cookies crumble.

I also certainly approve of the change to dynamic pricing.  Myself and others just want to be sure it doesn't negatively impact other aspects of SLB in unforeseen ways.  By voicing those concerns, they can be addressed, if necessary, before changes go live.

I hope that the people that simply want change for change sake don't affect the process of getting it right. Why is the goal variety instead of getting the salaries right. It will be maddening to see the 2000 Segui with 634 pa's costing almost twice as much as the 2000 Segui with 389 pa's. Simply because partial seasons are used at a rate almost 20 times! less than that of full time players even though they perform at the same rate. People don't and won't plattoon at the rate they will use full time players. I already plattoon more than most and will probably do it exclusively now. But for most It will be a distortion, and unrealistic.

Midge, as to your very first point if theme league creators could choose which to do (volatile or fixed) it would take care of the problem. ItalyProf is so correct, that freedom is paramount, rather than the coercive, extortive, and authoritarian nature of collectivists' misplaced altruism....

I just hope dynamic pricing doesn't turn Sim baseball into the stock market. Could you buy low on a player and sell high to the WW to get a superior player?

I imagine the WIS creators have thought through all this and the change will make for a fun new challenge. But I guess I favor smaller changes like the ones I suggested. I don't think the dynamic pricing will increase business for WIS. I think it mostly appeases those players who have been playing for 10 or more years and need the new challenge. I'm mostly fine with the way the game is now. I think the one area where there is a lot of complaints is the Open Leagues. That's where I would focus some minor tweaks with the examples I gave previously. I think WIS adding a few alternative OLs to experiment and see what people like to play would be a good start...perhaps taking a page from some of the existing theme leagues. WIS created leagues will almost always fill more quickly than theme leagues because new players tend to join those.

I don't see how dynamic pricing helps theme leagues at all. If anyone wants to educate me on that, I'm always willing to learn.

Posted by hersheybear on 11/19/2015 2:27:00 PM (view original):
...and that's how the cookies crumble.

hersheybear wins the comments contest.

By the way, since this is a good change and it is good BECAUSE it applies market forces as ArlenWilliams and others have pointed out, let's remember WHY market forces work in this case: 

Because it is NOT the economy. 

Huh?

In the economy, by analogy, players not used frequently would be out of business. that is completely eliminated so would NEVER be available again, like KMart, Blockbuster, Borders and Kaiser Automobiles. 

Teams in baseball if it worked like the economy would be eliminated after too many losing seasons. The Boston Red Sox would not have survived to make it to 2004, or even 1986 probably. There would be about 5 teams in MLB by this point, like the number of large oil companies or investment houses. 

Free competition always leads to winners and losers. It is ideal for sports - because the defeated today continues to compete - the Royals and Mets don't get to be 10 games ahead because they won least year, but start next season at the same starting point as all the other teams. 

We don't do that every quarter with businesses. If the stock price of a company goes too low it goes out of business, though it can hope that the low price will attract bargain seekers. For a while. But the higher the stock price the more successful the company and the more it takes over the market, like Amazon, or Walmart, or Alibaba, or Windows. 

Free competition is NOT suited to the economy, because it by definition inevitable leads to monopoly. Winners win, get to KEEP the advantage of having won the last pennant so to speak, use that advantage to enhance stock price, while gives them more capital and more advantage over competition, and only in rare and structural transformations in economic life are they dislodged. 

But even if the Yankees analogously used market advantages, they still had to play games against competitors. Big companies eat or eliminate competitors. An article in the NY Times about Amazon noted that it has NO competitors for online retail nor as the largest retail company in the world outside of Alibaba which exists mainly in China (where therefore Amazon is frozen out). No government favors did this for Amazon, it is the natural workings of "freedom" - that is, monopolistic oligarchy. 


But in sports it works fine, because you start over again every season or every match etc. I would be in favor of having companies compete, make gains, win awards, have their management win awards, get better pay in negotiations, etc. And then start the next year again at the same point as all other companies entering their industry to see if they can do it again. The excess profits could be distributed to other companies and startups and used for social needs like health care. 

Otherwise, keep the freedom of the market and competition where they belong - not at work, industry, commerce, finance, education, health care, government, etc. but only in sports where they belong and work well. 


Finally, let's also remember that we are here to play the game, not to game the game, which has been the cookies etc. strategy for a long time here. Gaming opponents is okay if opponents are at the same relative starting point more or less, but we know that many here game newbies, which is f.....up. So this will not be impossible but a little more difficult to do with this reform, as gaming opponents is analogous to the cozy big business-government relationship Adam Smith wanted to break up with market reforms in the first place. 

Instead, in a week Addie Joss under the new system will cost more than anyone else, as will Gary Carter. But Babe Ruth might be available for 3 months at a time sometimes, and Johnny Bench too. 


Should be fun. Thanks Adam Smith. 

Kudos.  I'm with Schwarze.  More frequent salary updates are long overdue.  My thoughts:  The frequency of salary updates doesn't much matter as long as the salaries can be locked in for every league # created.  If they cannot be locked in then I'd suggest a much less frequent update (once every 2 to 6 months).  I agree that having to redo a team once chosen is a major dissatisfier.  There is a sense of accomplishment when finishing a team, but like painting a room, it's not something you want to revisit.

I also think the maximum salary change per period should be no more than 2 to 3%.  My reasoning:  For the most part, I've found that the advantage most cookies give you over comparable players in the same salary range is relatively slight.  It's the cumulative effect of multiple cookies over 162 games that gives experienced owners a 10 to 15 game advantage.  Possible solution:  Do a one time increase of only the top XXX most frequently used players to date (Joss, Bip Roberts, etc.). Over 1000 teams (5% increase), 500 to 1000 (4%), 100 to 499 (2%) and don't touch the others.  That will set a new baseline salary pool and will significantly level the playing field without doing anything else.  After that, minor salary changes, both up and down to keep the baseline will continuously weed out the "new" cookies.

Why do I say "new" cookies?  Because new players will move to the top of the searches that experienced owners use.  Those players will be chosen most often and will likely perform slightly better than comparable players at the same salary.  That said, the experienced owners will actually have to work instead of plugging in a cookie cutter OL team with zero thought.
 

One may note:

1. A baseball league is not meant to operate thoroughly by the natural economy. It is a league formed in the interest of game competition over financial competition.

2. Monopoly is almost always the result of special favors given to big business by government (e.g., GE, IBM for just two of very many) and government's corrupt mega-financiers (very, very many examples, maybe the most famous, J.D. Rockefeller). collectivism does this worse

3. It is the place of government to be detached from the business world, and not in league with the interests of the super-wealthy (1% of 1% of 1%... who invest to stay off the "wealthiest persons" lists) but to set sensible, minimalist regulations to prevent monopoly and undue oligopoly, and to allow opportunity in an otherwise very lightly touched or untouched free market. collectivism does the opposite

Marxists wield their term "capitalism" like a hammer and sickle, implying that free enterprise is never free but dictated by financiers, then they take advantage of any such corruption in order to gain power -- most often working closely with it. That kind of (crony) capitalism is not America's founders', nor for that matter, Adam Smith's version of free enterprise and the market guarded at the edges to be free. (See what Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson tried to preserve and OTOH, what Lincoln called his greater enemy; also the work of Coolidge, our last great president so far. For more of an ideological villain on this key matter among our founders, see Hamilton.)

I am a newbie and only play OLs (I'd love to see OLs at multiple salary levels), so I don't have the time invested in the current game or in the variety of leagues that many others do.  But from just a few OL leagues I do have some observations.

By reading the Forums it is not difficult to figure out what/who generally wins games. My preference would be to build a team by choosing players based on their real life stats and compete with teams built in a similar way. In a very small sample, I have not seen that work consistently.  Instead it appears that unless you heavily rely on Performance History (i.e. cookies), it is extremely difficult to be successful. This puts a pretty confined box around what you can choose to do and still win consistently. I believe this is the central flaw and makes this game feel stale.

Unfortunately, Dynamic Salaries rather than resolving this problem are dependent on maintaining it and will move the game further away from what I had hoped to find when I started.

Based on the level of performance that get's put into each league, it makes sense that players will not usually perform to their real life numbers.  But there should be a consistent norm for the average deviation from those numbers that everyone has over time.  If that were true, it would allow a team owner to use real life performance to build a team rather than Performance History within the simulation.

The change I would prefer to see is to adjust the players that perform above or below the norm over some period of time (60 days?) back to the norm.  There are clearly already adjustments built into the simulation, switch hitters perform better (probably because they get an advantage both ways rather than being treated as neutral with no advantage to the hitter or the pitcher) and batters before 1919 average 1.5 times their real-life home run totals (no idea why). 

Let's have a simpler game that makes the simulation more accurate and reliable, Then we can leave the results up to the dice.

Posted by kelly1 on 11/20/2015 8:42:00 PM (view original):

I am a newbie and only play OLs (I'd love to see OLs at multiple salary levels), so I don't have the time invested in the current game or in the variety of leagues that many others do.  But from just a few OL leagues I do have some observations.

By reading the Forums it is not difficult to figure out what/who generally wins games. My preference would be to build a team by choosing players based on their real life stats and compete with teams built in a similar way. In a very small sample, I have not seen that work consistently.  Instead it appears that unless you heavily rely on Performance History (i.e. cookies), it is extremely difficult to be successful. This puts a pretty confined box around what you can choose to do and still win consistently. I believe this is the central flaw and makes this game feel stale.

Unfortunately, Dynamic Salaries rather than resolving this problem are dependent on maintaining it and will move the game further away from what I had hoped to find when I started.

Based on the level of performance that get's put into each league, it makes sense that players will not usually perform to their real life numbers.  But there should be a consistent norm for the average deviation from those numbers that everyone has over time.  If that were true, it would allow a team owner to use real life performance to build a team rather than Performance History within the simulation.

The change I would prefer to see is to adjust the players that perform above or below the norm over some period of time (60 days?) back to the norm.  There are clearly already adjustments built into the simulation, switch hitters perform better (probably because they get an advantage both ways rather than being treated as neutral with no advantage to the hitter or the pitcher) and batters before 1919 average 1.5 times their real-life home run totals (no idea why). 

Let's have a simpler game that makes the simulation more accurate and reliable, Then we can leave the results up to the dice.

In full context, this more sounds like you don't understand how normalization works.

Normalization is a necessary process for the SIM to work correctly. When you are going across vast eras, you need to do this or you can get very undesirable results especially in leagues that contain players in high-offense years or players in low-offense years.

I would recommend you read up on how the process works in the forums and start using + and # stats more than raw stats.