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Balance Discussion

Hi,
one of my main concerns right now is balancing and as such I would like to discuss this with you.

I have thought up some balance decisions with certain goals in mind.

The goals:


1) Investing in scouts must be viable.
2) Investing in youth academy must be viable.
3) Taking active part in transfer market must be viable.
4) Keeping and training your original players must be viable.

The decisions I propose:

1. You have to choose a specific role your academy specializes on (ADC, TOP, JUN, MID, SUP).


The goal is so that you can't gather a whole team from just youth academy and if you want other types of new stronger players you will have to seek out transfer market or scout someone. It also forces you to put some of the players on transfer market as you don't need that many ADCs for example.

2. The younger the player the faster he improves.


This goes with my next point

3. The more you pay for initial investment in the youth academy the younger players you get


For example, for
Age - Investment
13 - 1000000
14 - 300000
15 - 100000
16 - 30000
17 - 10000
18 - 0

The investment gets a lot higher with each year as each year means extra gains from training and he will have more time in total as well as he will retire later.

The players will all be of low skill value, low enough that even with high investment training they won't get to your initial player's level when they are also trained hard enough. This means that keeping initial players will be viable, but once your initial players retire at 25 you will need youth players or go to transfer market. So players who look ahead will invest in youth academy to have better players in for example 5-10 seasons ( around 4 - 8 months in real life time). Perhaps this time should be a little quicker?

I would like discussions on around how many seasons it should take to potentially have benefit from youth players.

4. Players will retire at certain age and you can hire them as coaches


The skills will be converted to appropriate coach ones and you will have an extra season with this coach. Perhaps you can renew the contract if you offer a 10% rise every time. This is so you can have your initial player in your team for quite a while.

5. There will be injected random free agents for scouts.


The number of these players and skill will be regulated depending on how much people are actually investing in scouts. If too few teams invest, then more players will be injected to encourage investing and vice versa.

6. The players you initially get are 20 years old


This means that they will last for 5 seasons after which you can hire them as coaches. This means that in 5 seasons everyone who invested in youth academy at least some will have a decent advantage. What do you think?

Discussion, ideas and feedback on this would be appreciated!
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I dislike the way coaches and staff are distributed right now. I would much prefer being able to select staff offered to you (say you have a list of all staff and their salary) which you can then hire immediately. The higher the stats the more they cost of course.

Also think the sponsor system needs a little rework. IMO Star Player Elo should be replaced by Personality as sponsors usually only care about the marketability of players, if at all. Also more slots to start with. Need to increase the Econ of this game for entertainment, low budgets are not fun at all.
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i like the idea of focusing in the youth academy, cause let's say you need a top laner and you get 4 youth players but all of them are bad at toplane, well there goes x amount of money spend that is wasted. or you have to retrain them to toplane which takes ages.
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i actually like the concept of using former plaeyrs as coaches. I still think that coaches need a serious rewrodk to to be balanced. Each team should be able to hire a limited number of coaches IMO , since right now thereis nothing stomping a very rich team from simply buying 20 coaches to boost their player's stats to unreasonable amounts (for example i alone have 2 players over 35 in their main stat , and my jungler is over 40) while doing 0 ranked games for their team or players.
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Yeah, definitely the amount of coaches will be limited and also I want to not limit, but make it more ineffective putting a lot of hours in one single thing. For example if you train a player for more than 6-10 hours the each next hour will become less effective and so on.

But team rankeds will start to give team synergy and teamwork skill overall, as well as when champion experience becomes important (Soon™), then it becomes important to play solo queue and team rankeds as well and it will be up to the user to find the correct balance.
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Ooooh, former players turning into coaches. That's pretty cool.

I'm liking all this with one exception. This:
"You have to choose a specific role your academy specializes on (ADC, TOP, JUN, MID, SUP)."

It's not bad... but wouldn't this turn the whole academy thing into a gold farming tool? You only need one (maaaybe two) ADC/Top/Jun/etc players.

I would suggest having to invest into a chosen role over a period of time with an investment limit (just like the scout) - more cash you invest over time the better players you get with the key difference being that you can change the role you want to invest in at any time but you then have to start investing from nothing again.
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"I would suggest having to invest into a chosen role over a period of time with an investment limit (just like the scout) - more cash you invest over time the better players you get with the key difference being that you can change the role you want to invest in at any time but you then have to start investing from nothing again."

This one is perfect.

I like all the other ideas tho.
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The most worrying thing for me is the implication that you are stuck with your starting players for 5 seasons. Since the only way to get new players is to get them from the academy (unless scouting becomes REALLY good), and they will be bad short term. Also, nobody will put their top players on the transfer market. This means that you are boned for the first 5 months after launch if you get unlucky at the start. I kind of get why you want starting players to remain viable, and situations like the start of this season, where everybody threw away their starting players for fresh recruits, should be avoided, but you also need a viable alternative for your starting players, preferably from day 1.

For me, training and youth training needs a complete overhaul. The improvement rate for players is just ridiculous. There is something seriously wrong when it is better to recruit your youth player and then train him instead of letting him train in your academy which has only the purpose of improving young players.

I would suggest severely nerfing training for active players, with significant deterioration of skills if not trained and a best case scenario (young, heavy training schedule) of +3 points in a given skill per season, if that. Age should also heavily factor into the equation, where you would have to heavily invest in training a 24-25 year old just to stop him from deteriorating. Nobody stops on their peak. Ideally, a player would only have 1-2 seasons where he is at his best (say 21-22) and then start deteriorating. This way, you will have to keep working on your team in order to keep having the best players. I would also suggest that it becomes harder to improve the more skilled you are. For example it should take twice as long to go from 20 to 21 than it would take to go from 10 to 11.

Youth training should yield larger gains, and you have to be able to target certain areas (the proposed academies per role are a solution) This, together with the nerfed active player training, would mean that a player's quality is mostly decided by how much time and money you invest in him in the youth academy. You can crank out mediocre players for quick gains, or save up for god tier players. You can not take a mediocre player and turn him into a god after the fact (that would make the youth academy training redundant.).

About youth players, also note that:
1) if it takes 5 years of heavy investments to create a good player, that does not mean there will be good players by season 5. The first season is spent building your economy, team and facilities, only then will there be teams with the resources to try and invest in such an endeavour (and if the welfare is reduced, it could take even longer) so estimate 7-8 seasons until a max tier player is produced
2) I believe there should be more RNG with youth players. I have played Hattrick, a similar online football management game, and there you would get 10 rubbish players for each good one. The more you invested, the better all the players, but you would also get a higher chance for a good player. This makes it more exciting, and stops the market from overflowing with players of similar skill. It also makes the good players way more special.

Just my 2 cents
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I like the RNG idea, but everywhere, when you start the game you get 1 decent player, 2 mediocre and 2 bad, then you have to start working group from there.
I don't think you should get a player from Academy daily, maybe make it like you start investing and then mid-season you get to hire like 2 players out of 5-6 5hat the game would offer you. And their skills would depend on the money spent this season or even more. These players would be random roles, so maybe your 2 best youths are top but you "need" an adc so you have to decide if you prefer what you need or what's best.
Ps: writing on mobile so I can't even read what I'm typing so it gets hard to write a lot :[
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Specialized YA that produces useful players before season 5 would make the game a lot more interesting imo.
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A lot of the ideas in this thread are very good, but avoid the issue of usability.

There needs to be an even balance between the Scout, Market, and Academy.

A team that is trained via Academy might be the strongest long-term, but maybe heavily investing in the Scout will allow you to find equally good players that are around 20-21, meaning that you payed less for them but they won't last as many seasons.

The marketplace is always going to be a bit of a random factor as it is player controlled. How can we make it so that it's rewarding for teams to sell their best players? Money is probably not the answer, so people aren't selling.

Perhaps players on the Marketplace can be 'loaned' instead, where the buyer will pay the seller for each team ranked/league match that player participates in for them. This would significantly increase the skill level of players on the market. But again, the question of balance...

I don't envy the decisions you guy will have to make as the designers of this game!
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I believe that a solution to the problem of really imba players can be fixed very easily. If you have the distribution of a stat be a bell curve then you can solve a lot of problems.

For example I have a top laner. The average top lane stat is 15. Anything above requires more and more resources to raise and keep it there. So no players with 5 coaches getting to like 40 top stat because that's so ridiculous. A god tier top laner would have something like 30 stat, double the skill of an average "pro" top laner. But that would involve literally pouring all your investment into that one player to get him to 30.

Then the manager will need to make a decision. Shall I have a balanced team of all 15 stat players? Or do I focus everything into one player and hope he carries the game for me? This mimics real life lol where there are teams that get solo carried such as teams by froggen/bjergsen etc. And there are teams with good players in certain roles but use strategy to beat other teams.
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er....my jungler has 42 in jungle alone. ANd player like mops and jaegy most likely have better. Actually , i have no player under 30 right now in their main stat , and neither of them uses 5 coaches at once. At most they have 2-3 if i split said coach's training sesions between players
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Nah, you guys have way better stats than me. I'm still waiting for that plateau :)
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seeing our games , your players at elast have way higher tech then mine , that's for certain.
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And I'm here with my players with max 25 stats u_u

On the topic of balance, coaches are too effective and YA training not enough (coaching > YA training should never happen). A rework on coach bidding is also necessary.
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My guys are all around 32 main with 31 tech.
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well , most og my guys are quite a bit lower then that tech wise , and that's obvious looking at how bad they cs. A 30-30 is better imo then a 40-20 for example
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You guys are making me super jealous with your talks of level 30+ players. My highest stat player right now has 21 in his role, and no one else on the team has above 18 in the main stat. I know at one point my strategy could beat Lolo...but not anymore. I'm really wondering if I can ever catch up to the Top 10. D:
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Okay so my ideas about this whole stuff is somewhat influenced by other manager games i played.

So first the Scouting.
I think this is the place to add a position specific search instead of using it for the academy. I think the scouting system right now is totally useless and needs BIG changes.
So first of all give the players a bigger chance to invest than 300 per day which is basically effordable by everyone all the time. Lets say you can spend up to 10k a day which influences the quality and age of the players you find.

Second, as most players let just mostly bad players running out of contract for the scout market you need players send in from outside. Otherwise the top 10-30% wont ever use the Scouting as there wont be any player worth for them.

Third the idea I already mentioned. Lets say you can change the position you are looking for every day or every third day.
Then the scout shows you 3 players everyday on the same level. Like maybe you spend 5k this day so you get players with max stats at 12 and ages varying from 16-20. So you can either choose a younger worse player or a player that might boost your team instantly but is already older and wont improve to much.

Potentially you get in the Scouting better but older players as you get others on the Academy. "Lore"wise this could be a pool of experienced players looking for a last big contract or a last chance to show themselves.

I guess the numbers are still pretty random in this but i hope you get the idea.


Next up the Academy. I think the idea of looking for special positions is generally good but you should not be too bound to it. Same as for the Scouting change it to a 1-3 days based system after the time you can change the preference.

Also dont force it into an 1 position only system. Let the player decide how much he wants to look for a single position with different options. One could be that you set a stat players cant be under you find. E.G. you need a new ADC which needs a decent quality as your main team is around 20 so your ADC talent should have ~10 stats for adc. So you set the option to only look for players with Stat #X on Position ABC. This might result in only finding 2 players for the 5 open slots but at least they are useful and dont block any spots.
Another idea would be to choose one position E.G. Support and decide how important it is the player has a decent stat in support by a percentage thing from Very Important to Not important at all.

then add some smoother steps for the money like 1k steps that you type in (dont need a giant spoiler window then) and you could say players with 1k have 12 points put in the positions + idk 5 points for personality tech and stuff. Each 1/2/5k you spend more this increases by 1/2/3 points (again dont used math so far just examples) overall.

This means you can still be lucky on the academy while you have smoother options how much you spend and you can somewhat prepare to what will come out of the academy the next day. Also you can focus a bit more on some positions you want to improve without being heavily forced into one position. With the right numbers the academy will be a nice option + when you add the age the things the academy provides differs from the scouting.


Third thing is the Market. I guess one thing that you need to change first of all is if you buy a player he should get a new contract. had it once that i bought a player with only one day left. This could be abused in case somebody wants to sell a player because extending the contract would boost the wage so much he cost too much daily and the buyer sees a wrong wage and pays some money just to see he either needs to boost the wage a lot or just throw the money away and let the player go.
Another thing is that right now players have no benefit from selling players to make money. With big investions (maybe you could even invest in better academy or stuff as a facility) and worse training you would be more in need to buy or sell players for money or player upgrades.

Another thing would be setting an Instabuy option. That would make it easier for sellers to get their money and more reliable for buyers.

The biggest problem for the market atm is that no one wants to sell or buy players as they dont get older or worse cause you can train them so hard. If you change that the market will pretty much instantly get useful. Overall the market is pretty healthy its just other things being unbalanced.


Last thing the Training and keeping of players.
Most things should improve by adding an age for players. The only thing I see necessary is to reform training: Give coaches less power by assigning a coach to improve a special position of a player while the coaches side stats (aggro, experience (translates into lead and or personality), tech) passively translate to the player. So your ADC wont have 20 in jung 21 sup 22 mid 20 top and just 24 adc. instead it would more like 10, 11,10 in top mid and jun while 31 in adc and 20 in sup or so. The rest is just the rate of improvements like how often a coach upgrades a stat.

Hope these ideas might help :)