Bazman's Blog
23 Jan 2019. [FS] Salary negotiation results - second season.
The second installation of player and staff salary negotiations are with us in week 0 of Season 16. For newer managers, this will be their first experience of dealing with such wage requests - don't worry, it's not so scary! The set-up is almost the same as it was for the first time, but for this round, there could be effects from previous season wearing off and also the potential for multiple bonuses or penalties to stack on top of each other. Disappointingly (from a blog perspective), I only had 5 requests to deal with from the Bandits' players and staff this season, here's the table of requests and outcomes:
| Name | Salary | Request | Cash increase | Percentage increase | Games played | Decision | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAVEY | 146080 | 160688 | 14608 | 10.00 | 22 | APP | +16% training TP for 2 seasons |
| LOMBART | 647158 | 880134 | 232976 | 36.00 | 36 | APP | no change |
| CHAPMAN | 106896 | 137895 | 30999 | 29.00 | 14 | APP | no change |
| KELLY | 290546 | 363182 | 72636 | 25.00 | 26 | APP | +11% matches TP for 1 season, +10% training TP for 2 seasons |
| Treacy | 122764 | 137495 | 14731 | 12.00 | Staff | DEN | -0.84 rating |
All in all, not a huge increase in cash terms for my club, but there are some interesting things to note. 1. Davey made two salary increase requests in two seasons and now has three bonuses, two of which appear to stack together (+16% training TP and +17% training TP). I checked the TP history of Davey after the latest training and the points gain tallies with the idea that Davey is getting a total bonus of +33% training TP .. this season and next he's going to train like a beast! 2. Any salary increase that was agreed in previous seasons has been wiped .. yes, the benefits stay but the costs vanish! You can see that from comparing Davey's base wage this season and his boosted wage from last season in these blogposts, but I double checked and it applies to all of the players. In fact it looks like some kind of general salary decrease has been silently applied for high earning players (salary negotiations or not) - for instance I bought Lombart from transfer last season and until the normal End-of-Season salary changes, he was earning well over $1m per week, so even with his "boosted" salary this season, I'm saving a sack full of cash.
I continued my policy of denying salary negotiations to staff members, but it backfired this season, with my U19 Coach Treacy losing 0.84 skill. Looking at it now, he only wanted a small increase, under $15k per week, and by denying it, I now face a bill of about $800k just to replace the lost skill points via seminars. Definitely a mistake on my part and a lesson to look at the numbers more carefully before I press the deny button in the future!
03 Oct 2018. [FS] Salary negotiation results.
The last update showed how the new salary negotiation procedure was working. Since then, I've made some choices for all of my players and staff that made salary requests and this post will explain what happened. First up, for the stats nerds, here's the numbers:
| Name | Salary | Request | Cash increase | Percentage increase | Games played | Decision | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DAVEY | 155600 | 163380 | 7780 | 5.00 | 28 | APP | +17% training TP, +1 potential for 2 seasons |
| ABLETT | 134019 | 143400 | 9381 | 7.00 | 25 | APP | +1 FIN +1 FIT +1 AGIL |
| BUTCHER | 54772 | 59153 | 4381 | 8.00 | 30 | APP | no change |
| BANKS | 161006 | 175496 | 14490 | 9.00 | 26 | APP | +11% matches TP for 3 seasons |
| MANBY | 216702 | 244873 | 28171 | 13.00 | 25 | APP | +13% matches TP for 3 seasons |
| MARINER | 352487 | 437083 | 84596 | 24.00 | 11 | APP | +15% training TP |
| REYNOLDS | 301953 | 380460 | 78507 | 26.00 | 11 | APP | +12% matches TP for 2 seasons |
| COLE | 180670 | 227644 | 46974 | 26.00 | 11 | APP | no change |
| NEVILLE | 353660 | 459758 | 106098 | 30.00 | 28 | APP | +12% training TP for 2 seasons |
| HODDLE | 281502 | 385657 | 104155 | 37.00 | 28 | APP | +19% matches TP for career, +13% training TP for 1 season |
| ASTLE | 458961 | 647135 | 188174 | 41.00 | 31 | APP | +16% training TP for career |
| GABRIEL | 336523 | 501419 | 164896 | 49.00 | 11 | DEN | -1 potential for entire career |
| [tot. players] | 837603 | ||||||
| Calskan | 972000 | 1176120 | 204120 | 21.00 | Staff | DEN | decay -3 weeks |
| Scheidler | 540000 | 664200 | 124200 | 23.00 | Staff | DEN | decreased seminar points 0.03 for the season |
| Erdesir | 174435 | 216299 | 41864 | 24.00 | Staff | DEN | decay -1 week |
| Pomonarenko | 259200 | 321408 | 62208 | 24.00 | Staff | DEN | no change |
| [tot. staff] | 432392 |
So, I approved (APP) most of the players' salary requests and denied (DEN) all of the staff requests. Before I made any decisions I did a bit of scouting of other people's players and staff to check out results. It looked like the vast majority of managers have just been accepting all requests from both groups, which is fair enough as the people with high quality players and staff can likely absorb the costs of this first round. I was intrigued by the Season 15 announcement though, where FS made it clear that we should be "considering the validity" of the requests, so I tried thinking it through.
For the staff category, I noticed that the available benefits come in three types (unless there are some rare types that I didn't see yet): "added protection from decay", "increased points gain from seminars" and a straight "stat gain". It seemed reasonable to expect that the possible penalties were the same effect types but with a negative value rather than a positive one. Looking at the staff that made requests, they all have 10.0 skill or very close and 5 seasons experience, so the possible benefits aren't very strong for them (don't need to gain big from seminars, other staff are always going to be sacrificed for decay and a stat gain doesn't help), which means the consideration here is more about whether I can suck up any penalties to save $432k per week on staff costs (nearly $7m per season and because these staff are 10.0 rated, I'm probably going to be keeping them until they retire, so that's about $35m if they last another 5 seasons on average - serious money!). Conclusion here - deny them all and hope the penalties aren't too harsh.
As you can see from the table and Figure 1, my gamble more or less paid off, with no penalties on the scout, decreased seminar points on the U19 A/Man and a small loss of decay protection on a coach and my A/Man - no actual stat loss (it's possible, I've seen it on other people's staff) and nothing that can't be dealt with - phew!
Fig. 1. Pomonarenko takes the news well but Scheidler throws his toys out of the pram.
For the players category, the hint from the developers seemed to be that some players would make valid demands and the demands from others would be less valid with the demands triggered by some combination of number of games played and the players' performances in those games. With this in mind, I took note of all of the requests I received and tallied it with the number of games each player had played. The values in the table are arranged in order of increasing request percentage, with the smallest being a reasonable sounding 5% increase (not bad for a player who was used 28 times last season) and the largest being a massive 49% ask (looking a bit greedy from a player who only featured in the National Cup games last season). The single figure percentage increases I granted quite happily and got some nice outcomes on additional training/matches gains, temporary potential gain and even some stat points! Looking at the rest, the 49% increase on an 11-appearance player looked like it wasn't really warranted, so I figured I'd deny that one - what a mistake, Gabriel was hit with an instant and permanent penalty to his potential. Ouch!
After that nasty hit, it started to look like the case that if a 49% increase off the back of a mere 11 appearances wasn't one of in the invalid requests, then pretty much none of the others would be, so they were all quicky paid out after that. The results of those deals was pleasing with the highlights being a couple of players getting additional TP (training points) from training or matches on a permanent basis. Accepting every request from this group of players would have cost $837k per week (about $13.4m per season) and even with denying one of the most expensive ones, I'll still be shelling out over $10m per season, so all in all a costly venture. It's part of the game's development plan to increase costs for top clubs though, so managers just have to navigate the situation as best they can .. anyone want to buy a cheap Gabriel?
01 Oct 2018. [FS] Season 15 changes.
Football Strategy's Season 15 starts today and some significant changes have come into effect. The two most noticable ones are salary negotiations and staff skill decay. Skill decay will be covered in a later post but today I'll look at the salary negotiations.
The salary negotiation scheme is a way that players and staff ask for extra salary between seasons, based on their performance or number of appearances in the previous season. The game news told us that some requests will be modest and some will be greedy. Also, granting some requests may lead to improvements in the skills, training or potential of the players and staff while denying some requests could lead to reductions or lower contributions from the players and staff.
The pictures in Figure 1 show how the salary negotiation requests arrive via the announcements page. The player Brandon Butcher wants an increase from $54,772 to $59,153 (presumably because he was ever-present in the U19 team last season). The player page for Butcher is also shown.
Fig. 1. The salary negotiation request from Bazman player Brandon Butcher.
The raise request for Butcher looked modest, so I used the "approve" button on the announcements page to grant it. Not much of a gamble for the Bandits as Brandon is currently on the transfer list anyway, but a good test to see how the system works.
After clicking the button, the announcements page updated with a confirmation and the player page updated the "Trophies and Events" section with a note of the salary increase that was granted, as shown in Figure 2.
Butcher is no doubt happy with his improved wages but doesn't appear to have returned the favour by improving his stats, training or potential.
Fig. 2. Brandon Butcher is granted a salary raise but doesn't get any improvement bonuses.
12 Jul 2018. The Baz Rating.
Often games will provide gamers with ratings for the virtual assets that they own, to let you know the quality of the asset. Some games provide a highly accurate rating, others provide a more approximate rating and sometimes the rating is highly context-dependent. Where it appears that it could add value to the analysis, Bazmanalytics provides a Baz Rating. Of course, any rating system is subjective, so it's unlikely that you can simply pick the top 11 Baz-rated football players for your team and go on to sweep the league! It is likely that a good ratings system will highlight the cluster of players that are most likely to allow you to sweep the league though.
The first analysis tool to calculate a Baz Rating is the Player Analyser Tool for FootballStrategy.org. The Baz Rating from this tool takes into account the relevant skills for a player's position, weighting the more important ones more heavily and the barely used skills less. Naturally, the weightings are the key to whether the rating system gives a good outcome or not and they've been generated in the following way:
- FS provides a table of the relative importance of attributes, this forms the basis.
- Baz applies some modifications to the relative importances, according to how it appears that the match engine works.
- The relative importances are re-scaled so that a player with 20 in every skill and zero bonus from field position would score 100%.
- The actual player skill values, including the field position bonus, are multiplied by the re-scaled importances.
- The Baz Rating is expressed as a percentage value.
Looking at the calculation method, you can see that a player with maximum skill values and no field position bonus will get a rating of 100% for any position. Therefore, the same player with any field position bonus, can score a Baz Rating of more than 100%. The same is true for players with very high skill values and very high field position bonuses, it is possible to exceed 100%. Such players are probably very rare inside the game though - if you see one, do post up the stats on the forum for everyone to marvel at!
11 Jul 2018. The Birth of Bazmanalytics.
Bazmanalytics.org was announced just over a month ago to the player community at FootballStrategy.org (often referred to as "FS"). The idea is to provide helper functions to online game players to assist in analysing, assessing, formatting and categorising the virtual assets that they have in-game. Some people make offline spreadsheets and calculators to help them with their game playing and Bazmanalytics is primarily performing that function, making tools so that everyone has access to them. Access to the tools is open, but you need to register to use The Forum (basically to stop robots filling it up with spamverts), do drop by on the forum and let us know what you like about Bazmanalytics and features you'd like to see.
Bazmanalytics opened with two helper tools for gamers, the Player Analyser Tool and the Transfer Advert Maker tool. Shortly after, the Staff Headquarters Analyser was added.
Thanks to everyone who has stopped by to try out the tools, the feedback so far has been great and it's been awesome to see that people are using the tools, with the most obvious example being the advert maker output making a regular appearance on the FS transfer advert thread.