I believe that at the end of the cycle they return to their original salary...

Posted by Midge on 3/6/2016 8:32:00 PM (view original):
A lot of the players I regularly use just had their prices raised by 10%. I would rather just make the salary cap of the league higher and keep using the good players than use an inferior player. Following that line of thinking, it's possible that in a few cycles Babe Ruth will cost $30 million and Greg Maddux will cost $22 million.
Can you imagine your local grocery store raising the price of milk and bread because too many people are buying milk and bread? I'm not talking about supply and demand economics, I'm talking about the store raising the price in order to make the consumer quit buying a product.
I just want all of the players to be fairly priced in comparison to the other players. This new dynamic pricing makes me want to either play in draft leagues without salary limits or in $255 million leagues in which the salary doesn't matter a whole lot. The dynamic pricing is making the game less enjoyable for me.
I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with me, so let the arrows fly if you must.

Um, a player is worth what people will pay for him. If a player's price gets too high, people will stop paying for him, and he'll get used less, and he'll go back down.

I'm not talking about supply and demand economics, I'm talking about the store raising the price in order to make the consumer quit buying a product.

This does happen. Some products are differentiated on price.

My understanding was that price hikes are capped at 10% total, not 10% per cycle. So those guys will never get more expensive than they are now, at least unless the base salaries are revisited.

From the original post announcing the dynamic salaries: "The process to generate new salaries will occur every two weeks. During that period, the most a player's salary will ever increase or decrease is 10%."

The timeframe was adjusted to 4 months instead of two weeks, but that sentence implies a player's salary can rise by up to 10% for each "period", which we're mostly referring to as "cycle" now. So in June, when the next update occurs, all players can rise up to an additional 10% again.

That's what concerns me. Does anyone know if these 10% guys are being used any less?

Posted by Midge on 3/7/2016 6:44:00 PM (view original):
That's what concerns me. Does anyone know if these 10% guys are being used any less?

If they're not, they're clearly not overpriced. That's how a market works.

This isn't a market, it's a game. We are not selling products at a price that the market will bear. We are choosing players for a simulated baseball league. You choose the players who you think will help you win.

Posted by Midge on 3/8/2016 6:53:00 PM (view original):
This isn't a market, it's a game. We are not selling products at a price that the market will bear. We are choosing players for a simulated baseball league. You choose the players who you think will help you win.

But because we have a salary cap, we have limited resources to use on the players we think help will win. Eventually, someone else is going to be a better choice, because we need to invest our resources more wisely.

Obviously if we just picked "the best players" with no thought... well, we do, in 255M no restrictions leagues. And all the teams are pretty much the same. That's not normal.

This "game" ceases to be a game when there isn't any more variation between the rosters. This update is to promote more variation and to keep the game fresh by forcing you to adapt by drafting new players and trying new strategies. Not sure how much fun it is to play a game where you simply trot out the same roster league after league, just trying to rack up wins, with very little thought or creativity. But to each his own I guess.

That's why you play theme leagues that force you to use different people.

Any strategy that anyone has had here was not based on some eternal "natural" situation, but on a previous update or change in pricing. So any "good players" were always good relative to cost and that is still the case. Which players are most cost-effective has changed many times over the years. There is no reason to think that the previous situation was in any way sacred. There is now a new environment, it is the only one there is.

Imagine being in real baseball - in the 1960s if you hit 15 home runs you batted clean up. If you have an ERA near 4.00 you pitched in Canton, Ohio, or Binghamton,NY, or in Pawtucket etc. not in the majors for any length of time.

In the 1990s if you didn't get on base a lot, hit for power you were not worth much compared to a lot of players who did. If you were a starting pitcher you were unlikely to pitch many complete games, or to win 20 except in rare cases. If you pitched in the 60s and were good you may have been expected to pitch 280, even 300+ innings. If you were a reliever in the 1970s you were expected to pitch a lot of innings and a lot of games. In the 1990s through today, instead, you were expected to be unhittable for one inning only.

If you managed in the 1950s, you have a bench of 16 players of all types, with 9 pitchers. Today, maybe you have 12-13 pitchers and almost no bench of position players. In the 70s suddenly there are all kinds of artificial turf parks, big outfields, ideal for base stealing and hitting triples or slapping the ball through the infield. In the 1990s you play on grass, small ballparks, that previous kind of hitter can't break in, even as a middle infielder.

The game changes. So does this one. Find some good players that are cost-effective and play ball. I am experimenting with weird stuff these days - pitching and defense teams in Coors, a running team in Fenway, finding all kinds of players that I haven't seen before, so are many others here. There is nothing unfair about the fact that things have changed. They have, old strategies need to be adjusted, old rosters need tweaking over overhauling or just plain replacing. play ball.