Here's a question to start with. How much was the financial difference between finishing top of your first season qualifying league and bottom?
If you answered "£1.65m" go and stand in the dunce's corner. If you said "we can't be sure exactly, but it could be as high as £3.21m" then congratulations - have a gold star. Huh, says the dunce, that doesn't make sense. The top prize money for season 1 was £2.2m, the bottom was 550k, the difference is £1.65m. But the truth is that figure can be almost doubled by what I term the success gap - the difference that inflation has made to the squad values of someone who at the end of last season was able to put together a top rate squad, versus the person who couldn't.
Let me explain, using my data (read more about this sample here and feel free to disagree if you like). As Season 1 drew to a close, MVs were almost exactly equal to AFs. A quick off the mark manager at the bottom of a division could in theory have pulled together a team of 11 players with 12-14 in key attributes of their positions for a total of £373k. Today that squad would be worth £957k, an increase of 584k. Meanwhile, a quick off the mark manager who finished higher up their qualifying league could have in theory have nabbed a team of 11 players with 15+ on key attributes in their positions for a total of £1.48m. Today that squad would be worth £3.63m. An increase of £2.15m. This second manager has experienced a rise in their squad value by £1.56m more than the first manager, purely as a result of inflation.
The £1.65m extra prize money the league winner earned was exactly that - earned. We can argue on the forums until the cows come home about whether that is a fair amount. Personally I think it's fine, in line with "give us something to play for" it's awarded to those managers who managed to perform well in season 1. But they have not done anything to earn the extra £1.56m - all they've done is sat and watch the MV go up and up and up, sometimes every few hours.
This - in a nutshell - is why inflation is bad for a gameworld.
Showing posts with label vollernomics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vollernomics. Show all posts
Monday, 10 May 2010
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Vollernomics: Inflation estimated at 313%, youths over 450%
In the second of this series on the economy in GW Voller (if you missed the first, find it here or just scroll down!) I look at the headline figures on inflation.
And they're pretty shocking. 313% over last season means a player is now worth more than 3x what he was a season ago.
Before we go any further, disclaimers are important. I can't be certain in my sampling methods. The last post outlines why. In addition, to produce an inflation figure I ought to have prices from last season to compare to. I don't, because I hadn't thought of starting to collect the data then. However, at that time I remember that MV was almost always exactly AF or just a few k higher. And whilst AF's have risen slightly in the last season, they're not hugely higher. So I am using current AF figures to estimate player MV at this time last season, in the expectation that these two factors will more or less cancel each other out. Finally, I had to decide how heavily to weigh the 33 categories I sampled in my inflation "basket". In the end I decided that all 11 positions should be weighed equally, and that superstars should be considered to make up 20% of the basket, core senior players 50% and youths 30% - this was based on a pretty arbitrary estimate of how many transfers in the past season have fallen in each category. Oh and finally the system relies on MV, which some think is a load of rubbish. Actually I don't think it is, but even if you do you can't blame me for that - blame SI!
Now, the figures. As mentioned the headline figure this methodology produced is 313%. But the broken down findings are also quite interesting. The inflation rates on superstars (245%) and core senior players (256%) were very similar, indicating that the very top players aren't experiencing an enormous spiral in prices beyond others of a lower quality. But there is a big difference with youths, where inflation was at 455%. Indeed youth goalkeepers were the most inflated area of the market as a whole, coming in at a whopping 503% - i.e. costing 5x more than they did a season ago.
Positions wise inflation was fairly uniform. Defenders (300%) lagged slightly behind midfielders (323%), goalkeepers (325%) and strikers (329%) but I reckon that is probably almost within the margin of error of my samples.
What does all this mean? Well, there's good news and bad news. Firstly, the good news. I think it tells us that the database is fairly well balanced. If there was a real shortage of quality strikers for example, we'd expect to see striker inflation much higher than other categories. It isn't. There is a very slight bias against wingers and wide midfielders (inflation 309%) compared to central midfielders (inflation 336%) but I had expected this might be a much bigger gap given the popularity of narrow formations under the current ME.
The outlier figure is obviously youth. However, I think this is at least in part temporary - explained by it taking a while for academies to churn out the full quota of youth players the game expects. But in part it's probably down to the bias of many managers towards youths. That will probably sustain but even so if you're not already in it, youth certainly doesn't look to me like a good route to go down just now. The market is valuing even a fairly standard youth at 3.5x AF (16k v 55k) so you'll pay through the nose for your purchases, and as supply from academies increases I think there's a fair chance those prices will fall back again.
So on the whole the database is balanced and consistent, and apart from the current situation with youth and the trickle of unlocked players I think supply is fairly constant. The bad news is therefore that the new system has failed to control rises in demand adequately, and consequently prices have been pushed up hugely. This was entirely predictable because of the extra £975m in prize money that is flowing in to the GW this season (compared with last season) as a result of Season 1 performance, and without many more ways of it flowing out of the GW - wages have stayed pretty much stable, and no-one needs to do serious stadium work yet. More bad news is that next season prize money will increase again. However, higher team reps may cause greater wage rises and incentivise higher levels of stadium investment. Plus anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of teams are in debt right now, so they may choose to use increased winnings to pay that down. I will have a small wager that next season we will see significant inflation, but that it will be (just) under 100% - i.e. we won't see player prices doubling.
Ah but, I can hear you say... why does this inflation matter? In fact, isn't it good that teams have more money, it makes the game interesting by encouraging transfers and the community activity they provoke. Well whilst those are indeed good things, I think the damage caused is much greater. I'll outline why in the next post. If you can't wait until then, go and read back the forum posts by myheadhurts whilst discussing the post-reset economic model. (S)he was spot on...
And they're pretty shocking. 313% over last season means a player is now worth more than 3x what he was a season ago.
Before we go any further, disclaimers are important. I can't be certain in my sampling methods. The last post outlines why. In addition, to produce an inflation figure I ought to have prices from last season to compare to. I don't, because I hadn't thought of starting to collect the data then. However, at that time I remember that MV was almost always exactly AF or just a few k higher. And whilst AF's have risen slightly in the last season, they're not hugely higher. So I am using current AF figures to estimate player MV at this time last season, in the expectation that these two factors will more or less cancel each other out. Finally, I had to decide how heavily to weigh the 33 categories I sampled in my inflation "basket". In the end I decided that all 11 positions should be weighed equally, and that superstars should be considered to make up 20% of the basket, core senior players 50% and youths 30% - this was based on a pretty arbitrary estimate of how many transfers in the past season have fallen in each category. Oh and finally the system relies on MV, which some think is a load of rubbish. Actually I don't think it is, but even if you do you can't blame me for that - blame SI!
Now, the figures. As mentioned the headline figure this methodology produced is 313%. But the broken down findings are also quite interesting. The inflation rates on superstars (245%) and core senior players (256%) were very similar, indicating that the very top players aren't experiencing an enormous spiral in prices beyond others of a lower quality. But there is a big difference with youths, where inflation was at 455%. Indeed youth goalkeepers were the most inflated area of the market as a whole, coming in at a whopping 503% - i.e. costing 5x more than they did a season ago.
Positions wise inflation was fairly uniform. Defenders (300%) lagged slightly behind midfielders (323%), goalkeepers (325%) and strikers (329%) but I reckon that is probably almost within the margin of error of my samples.
What does all this mean? Well, there's good news and bad news. Firstly, the good news. I think it tells us that the database is fairly well balanced. If there was a real shortage of quality strikers for example, we'd expect to see striker inflation much higher than other categories. It isn't. There is a very slight bias against wingers and wide midfielders (inflation 309%) compared to central midfielders (inflation 336%) but I had expected this might be a much bigger gap given the popularity of narrow formations under the current ME.
The outlier figure is obviously youth. However, I think this is at least in part temporary - explained by it taking a while for academies to churn out the full quota of youth players the game expects. But in part it's probably down to the bias of many managers towards youths. That will probably sustain but even so if you're not already in it, youth certainly doesn't look to me like a good route to go down just now. The market is valuing even a fairly standard youth at 3.5x AF (16k v 55k) so you'll pay through the nose for your purchases, and as supply from academies increases I think there's a fair chance those prices will fall back again.
So on the whole the database is balanced and consistent, and apart from the current situation with youth and the trickle of unlocked players I think supply is fairly constant. The bad news is therefore that the new system has failed to control rises in demand adequately, and consequently prices have been pushed up hugely. This was entirely predictable because of the extra £975m in prize money that is flowing in to the GW this season (compared with last season) as a result of Season 1 performance, and without many more ways of it flowing out of the GW - wages have stayed pretty much stable, and no-one needs to do serious stadium work yet. More bad news is that next season prize money will increase again. However, higher team reps may cause greater wage rises and incentivise higher levels of stadium investment. Plus anecdotal evidence suggests a lot of teams are in debt right now, so they may choose to use increased winnings to pay that down. I will have a small wager that next season we will see significant inflation, but that it will be (just) under 100% - i.e. we won't see player prices doubling.
Ah but, I can hear you say... why does this inflation matter? In fact, isn't it good that teams have more money, it makes the game interesting by encouraging transfers and the community activity they provoke. Well whilst those are indeed good things, I think the damage caused is much greater. I'll outline why in the next post. If you can't wait until then, go and read back the forum posts by myheadhurts whilst discussing the post-reset economic model. (S)he was spot on...
Monday, 3 May 2010
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.
"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.
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