Vollernomics: Introducing Vollernomics

Over the course of the next week I will be publishing a series of pieces on the economy in my gameworld, GW Voller. I'm doing this for two reasons: firstly that economics is actually something I know a little bit about so I may be able to contribute more than my usual rambles; and secondly that I believe the economy is actually the single most important thing to a smoothly functioning game that retains players over the long term. Basically everything that people discuss on the official forums that isn't moderation or the match engine comes down to economics. The problems of FML v1 were almost exclusively economic - unofficial money comps, the sudden introduction of stadiums and of course inflation. This series of articles will focus largely on inflation, because - for reasons that will become clear over the week - I believe it is the greatest threat to the otherwise excellent FML v2 succeeding.

"Numbers Mrs Landingham, if you want to convince me, show me numbers." - President Bartlet, The West Wing

Lots of threads on the forums have discussed various aspects of money in the abstract, I hope to add to the debate by showing you some numbers. They won't be perfect, I don't have access to the same kind of data that SI (I hope!) do. And of course they only apply to one gameworld - others may be different, although I suspect they won't be.

The rest of this post will set out the methodologies I've used so that those of you who are more numerically focussed can pick over it and decide if what I've found is going to be worth anything. My own view is that this method is far from perfect, but it's a good start and enough to give us a reasonably accurate impression.

Over the period 30 April - 2 May I looked at a sample of over 600 players across the gameworld. To select the sample I first looked at 11 of the common player roles (Goalkeeper, Full Back, Wing Back, Ball Playing Defender, Stopper, Ball Winning Midfielder, Advanced Midfielder, Wide Midfielder, Winger, Target Man, Poacher) and picked out five key attributes for each, using largely those selected in game but tweaked somewhat to reflect what I think many managers look for - for example only one of the roles above lists pace as a key att in game but it's something that I know a lot of people look at so I added it to several other roles as well. Then for each role I looked at three types of players:
(1) the senior (aged 22-31) superstars who have 15+ in each of the 5 key attributes
(2) the senior (aged 22-31) core squad players who have 12-14 in each of the 5 key attributes
(3) the youth (aged 16-21) players who have 10-13 in each of the 5 key attributes. I deliberately capped this at 13 to avoid a few wonderkids distorting all the figures.
So 11 roles and 3 types of player gave me 33 categories. In each of the senior categories I then picked a sample of 20 players, drawing 2 players from each "year group" where possible. For each of the sampled players I looked at their AF and their MV. On occasion to get a proper sample for the superstar category I had to drop the attribute requirements slightly. Where I did this I then multiplied up the AF and MV proportionally to reflect how much more better quality players might cost if there was a linear progression (I'm sure there's not, but this was the best I could do). For youth the sample size was 18, with 3 players from each "year group" from 16 up to 21.

I worry that the sample may be a bit small, but frankly I didn't have the time or inclination to do a bigger one (have you any idea how tedious it is?!) and where in a couple of categories I experimented by taking several samples I found the results came out pretty similarly. So I hope the results I have found are fairly accurate.

Comments on this methodology are very welcome. I will try to repeat this process every season as the series of data could be quite interesting. However, it is a pretty time consuming task, so any volunteers to help would also be much appreciated.

In the meantime, I hope you are interested by the results, which I will start posting tomorrow.