თემა: I.1

I quit hockey a couple years ago. Culmination of several factors - one being how many players you had to keep track of. Interestingly, each sport has reduced the number of players in play...hockey > soccer > handball > basketball. Since you can't sub on the fly, basketball should be the smallest team yet. That also means one or two superstars early can make or break a team.

Team OR increased to 44.

For me i would say lack of progress. Players get old, and i can't even replace them because of inflation. Player's go for crazy amounts there.

Yeah, it's not just the draft. I wouldn't even call that the last straw...I almost quit last season but then I glanced at my team and saw that I autopiloted my way into the NC semifinal. That bought me a little bit of interest, and I wasn't about to quit if I ended up with one of the two US spots in the international cup. Now I'm just going to get out before we get very far into the season.

The changes aren't going to make a difference for me. I'm not going to buy a pro pack or spend credits on setting up my draft order for a sport when I don't really care about my team, and I'm not going to forfeit any of my weekend time--even one every 8 weeks--for it either.

I don't know...to be honest, I kind of respectfully disagree with you on a lot of these points.

I don't think there's really such thing as starting too late in these sports. There are interesting strategies to create a team that can rise through the ranks fast. See, for example, Legion TD Mega in hockey II.3: promotions in his first two seasons, and now a team with a good shot at making the playoffs in arguably the best II league in US hockey. Now he's making a whole bunch of money and is starting to invest in facilities. That's gotta be an exciting three seasons for him, and his team is definitely going places. And you don't think that there's any way to catch up with the top teams? Leggman quit after dominating US hockey for like 15 seasons because it was too hard to keep his team together in free agency....the game structure is built to handicap those top teams in that way. So it's not like they're invincible. I think you just need to pick a strategy that works for you, in the sense of making you enjoy the game. Youth movements, heavy reliance on the market, tactical micromanagement...different strokes for different folks. My problem with handball is that none of these interest me.

I could be wrong, but I don't think you'll have much success sustaining a team with top facilities in division III. You just don't make the money in those divisions to support those facilities and the staff to run them. I will make a bunch of money off of my sales next week, but it wouldn't sustain my team for long if I sink it all into facilities.

To be continued...

I rather disagree with hockey feeling old, too. Those small changes just don't do it for me. They more make me think, "oh, that's a good idea" but not so much "OMG this game has so much depth now!!!" The reason I care is because I actually really like hockey, and to a smaller extent, soccer. I don't really care about handball.

I hope this doesn't sound overly argumentative...just stating my opinions; obviously you are entitled to yours as well.

I think there are a couple fundamental problems which handball is addressing for you guys that hockey and soccer maybe isn't. First is that a lot of the interesting stuff is restricted to the very best teams in the country. International cups are basically all I.1 teams, with the exception of the SuperLeague Cup (handball's not quite there yet, but it will be in another season or two). International teams are basically made up of mostly players from I.1 with a smattering of II-league players. I think this is a big part of why you're all so interested in handball...since you were in on the ground floor you're actually involved in all these things here but not in the other sports.

So here are a couple thoughts: What if we actually make international teams at every league level? So, the top level of international tournaments would be just I.1 players, but there would also be a national team of all players from II leagues, and players from III leagues, etc. And the manager has to come from that league level too. Suddenly, we've got that interesting aspect of the national team at every league level, rather than IV-league managers who have no reason to care what's going on at the NT level.

And then how about we actually make use of those all-star teams that nobody really cares about? What if the all-star teams from each league get entered into a tournament against other all-star teams from the same league level? And of course the manager would come from that league. Again, now managers at every level have players competing in national tournaments.

Wow, I'm writing like a novel here. Well, one last point. I think basketball will be particularly interesting because of the 70-day season (I did read that, right?). Suddenly evolution is sped up quit a bit, and turnover happens a lot faster. I think that will be especially good later on for people starting late, since they can see their progress a lot faster.

Too bad I care about as much about basketball as I do about handball. I probably won't even start a team on that one.

Regarding this point, it depends on how you do things in division III.

My hockey team for instance has been in division III since I started it four seasons ago. I've never had a money crunch of any sort. And I've listed below my total income and expenses to date (over all seasons).

-------------------------------
Income (over roughly 4 seasons)
-------------------------------
General sponsor - $469,901,873
Media sponsor - $81,509,724
Souvenir sale - $6,325,741
Skybox lease - $4,294,779
Prize money for ranking - $54,491,107
Prize money for statistics - $4,402,865
-----------------------------------------
Above Total - $620,926,089

-------------------------------
Expenses (over the same time span)
-------------------------------
Player salaries - $17,575,735
Staff salaries - $19,900,235
Facilities maintenance - $45,783,439
Arena maintenance - $60,281,863
-----------------------------------------
Above Total - $143,541,272

So you can see... there's absolutely ZERO issue when it comes to money. I would gather that your handball facilities, income, and costs are probably pretty close to what my hockey team's are.

So I doubt you'd have any problems AT ALL.

Two things:

1)
The thing is, the competition in division III is such that you don't really need the best of the best players.

If you were to do what I said before, just buy some extremely poor quality, old 300 OR guys from the market for $10,000... and never train them. Training them only increases your costs, requires time/effort from you if you don't have the pro-pack, and makes it more difficult to stay in division III so why bother?

2)
If you're mopping the floor with dead and weak teams, you're going to be improving your OTR pretty good compared to even teams in divisions above you. Did you know that right now, the team with the 2nd highest OTR in the U.S. is Cunning Procrastinators? Sure he's playing international matches (which helps), but he was in the top 10 last season too. That's because while he gets less OTR for wins, he consistently gets more wins due to his lower average quality of opponents.

Ok... but that's because handball is only a couple seasons in right? Well... no. In hockey, my team has the 46th highest OTR in the country. There's 100 teams in divisions I and II in hockey, that's 100 teams in divisions higher than me. Yet because I win nearly every game, I pretty high OTR compared to most of them. I probably couldn't beat even 5-10% of them in a real game, but I wouldn't be surprised if I make more money than they do.

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All of the above is not meant to be pushy, or to try to force you to do a certain thing. I'm just saying that it is absolutely possible to build your team and make money in division III. Doing so would give the U.S. another team with a very good SA which, even if you never attend a single draft, would still have a great shot at providing solid talent for the national teams.

At the end of the day, you make solid points... and I can't (and won't) tell you to do something that you're not interested in doing.

I'm merely presenting an option/point of view since you're already online for the other two management games anyways.

With people that play one sport, and they're getting tired and/or thinking of quitting (leggman for instance), I sort of understand them just packing up and walking away. But for anyone who is still seriously playing the other sports, and is going to be online anyways, I think it's a very reasonable option/suggestion.

Granted, all of this depends on how interested you are in the grande scheme (helping out the country, the national teams, and what not). If you don't care about that stuff, then nothing i say is likely going to make you think twice about leaving altogether lol.

by the way... I thought of another reason why you shouldnt quit. You're one of two teams that ive found in handball that I can play derbies against.

Haha.

2 more days and level 12 academy will be ready.

5 days for me.

Any people in New York want to gather, loan a field and play some 5 on 5 Handball? But we need 10 people from PPM.

How about Florida? and instead of handball soccer or football?

I don't think people will have enough stamina to play soccer. And for Handball all you need to do is catch and throw a ball into the net. But i'm not against Football either. I would love to see you sack Melon.