თემა: I.1

Junior Block 16 year old prospect with OR 700 and AQ 83%. Only 2M if anyone interested. Ends tomorrow.

Hey xalthos, you planning on running for the U21 team again this season? We've enjoyed some pretty good success under your management...

Hopefully we don't end up with some random foreigner winning the election (how it stands now).

It looks like the United States barely avoided losing the third division this season. There is one division III team left.

Well... I'd suggest that anyone who's interested in any of [handball_team=16057]'s players start saving up now. He hasn't logged on in nearly 2 weeks, and he didn't even log on to sign new sponsorship agreements for his Handball team.

That certainly doesn't look good.

I messaged the new U21 manager to ensure that he added a few of Emus' players (for protection), and I've added several of them to the U19 team for the same reason as well.

He has 16 National Team players in all, 13 are US-born. Just thought I'd give you all a heads up in case you were thinking of blowing your wads anytime soon. I'd wait a week or two to see how this all plays out.

So based on my current player salaries, the 25% decrease in salary cost would be savings of $60 million per season (I'd be saving ~500k each day from reduced costs if they were rolled out right now to every player).

Granted, that effect is gonna be somewhat muted, given that it's going to be rolled out over time after my players have continued training and would demand even higher contracts because of their elevated levels... but still... that's a humongous change.

Sure it makes things a bit easier going forward, but I'm not entirely sure if I like that the PPM gods took such a drastic step.

In the last week the Erratic Emus, the Hanover Fisters, and the Cunning Procrastinators folded.

Next season might be the season that division III disappears.

There are only 10 U.S. teams with level 13.5+ training facilities (and level 12+ regeneration facilities). Only 4 U.S. teams have level 15 training facilities (and level 13-15 regeneration facilities).

yeeeeah... it's looking like it'll be harder and harder to run the U19 team. We just aren't pulling players at a quick enough clip to stay competitive there.

It'll take a while for it to hit our senior national team, but it eventually will hit there too.

It's a shame, but I sort of blame the devs.

1) They haven't done much of any marketing of ppm stateside (the U.S. participation in this game is absolutely horrid, even in sports of U.S. interest).

2) They've basically committed to NOT updating these games anymore. Games that stop receiving updates tend to whittle away and die. Sad, because I've enjoyed making this management game a part of each day... but sometimes good things have to come to an end.

I'll be here as long as there's a U19 national team for me to run... but if that ever changes, I imagine I'll be hanging up the old ppm account too.

If it's any consolation, the U18 hockey team has been regularly losing major producers of talent but continues to have a good talent base as newer teams continue to develop. My own team was a random late-starting division II team that couldn't produce anything worthwhile when I took over the U18 hockey team, but now it is one of the major producers of talent in hockey. With a small handful of teams churning out 3-5 NT talents per season, the U18 hockey team has managed to survive competitively thus far.

Things might still be a little more dire in handball, but the U19 team could still survive. The recent loss of top teams in hockey did hurt the senior team a lot because there wasn't enough room to add a lot of the above average players that were too old for the U20 team and too young to make the senior team (the senior managers managers generally didn't add players that were 5 seasons away from being useful to the senior teams). That really isn't a problem in handball yet since top players from the youth NT's are still good enough to be useful for the senior team.

1) With the popularity of fantasy sports (though I don't really play them myself anymore) in the United States, I think PPM absolutely could have been a relative success in the United States. I suppose baseball and football might have been more successful (though I prefer hockey), even though all sports are similar in many ways. Even so, the U.S./Canadian NHL fanbase alone could have provided a significantly larger amount of managaers.


2) I was never surprised that they decided to stop creating new sports. It is probably unlikely that most people are going to continue buying propacks for more sports as they create more. Due to the similarity between all sports, it is also unlikely that new sports will encourage people previously uninterested in the propacks to start to purchase them.

The lack of significant updates to existing sports is a pity though. Maybe they'll sell the game at some point to someone willing to continue development.

I understand that the duel games are more profitable even if I don't understand why people play them more. I played the original tennis duel game briefly but eventually lost interest. The game required more time than I wanted to spend, became dull over time, and had some P2W aspects. I have no clue if those are still issues in their more recent games.


My favorite team to play in PPM is probably the U18 hockey team because I enjoy scouting for talent and drafting a new team every season.

Shit. I forgot to put my top players on the market before I folded...

yeeeeeah.... there were several guys that you had that were 17-18 who would've been on the u19 team next season. would've been nice to at least have a heads up that you were bowing out so i could add them / protect them.

It happens though.

At least Charles Younger is safe and sound on a very capable manager's team. He was the one i was most concerned about lol. In fact, every time I looked at his auction, I doubled the bid (to make sure I shook out all the... less developed teams who might fancy making a play for him).

Now we'll see where all of xalthos 's National team players end up...

I snagged 2 players... Unfortunately we lost a key USA player to a team with 1/1 facilities.

Several of them went for very cheap.

I went and started my level 15 Regen facility construction like a day before the auctions ended.

-_-

oops.

I only had a few million to spend, and that didn't get me very far.

Given that the team he went to is SO new / SO bad, perhaps it'll die soon, and he'll be back up on the market in short order.

I picked up Wicker and Ward. Wicker immediately upgrades an area of weakness for my team at LW, on both offense and defense for now. I only intend to train his offense going forward, unless the senior team really wants a dual weapon player.

Hey guys, I'm putting a player on the market Garry Bow . He's got FiP 94, Sho 71, Blk 63, Tec 94, Spe 96, Agr 93. Should be good, but not with me since I need the money to build facilities. Struggling with trying to keep this team in the black, guess you can't field a team the way I tried, oh well...

Okay, so... some friendly tips / help (maybe?).

1)

The majority of your players are foreigners (I think you have like 15 or so guys from outside the U.S.). These guys cost ~25% more than U.S. players.

My player salaries now cost me roughly 2.339 million a day. I have 8 foreigners on my team. They cost roughly 668k (around 29% of my total salary expense). If they were U.S.-born, they'd cost ~25% less, which would work out to a savings of ~135k / day. So i'm basically paying 15 million extra this season for these guys, just because they're foreign.

I'm personally okay with this number, as I've gotten much of the construction i wanted to get done, done, and the guys that I have from outside the U.S. tend to be VERY high AQ players. But I'd imagine that if you have a much larger number of these players, it would make your finances look even worse...

2)

You just got relegated from I.1 at the end of last season. There's always "lag" on sponsorship agreemeents. Right now, you probably have crappy sponsorship agreements because you didn't do awesomely last season. At the end of this season, when you renegotiate your agreements, they'll likely be significantly better and your money problems will likely disappear altogether.

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Try to stick with it... Like I say, next season, you'll probably be much better off. And when you shop for players, do your best to shop American. Trump's gonna be the new president after all lol! ^_^