BuzzerBeater Forums

Following up on the record transfer by the Turkey Sandwiches, and after my experience this evening, is it within the rules and ethics to have your friend bid on one or more of your players to give you more money to bid on players? As I was in a bid war for a player with 3BE3DA this evening, his team was able to get $5.6 million from fellow Ukranian team BK Elmira Jakals on two of his players that 3BE3DA will simply rebid on and keep. The bidding lasted over 15 minutes as 3BE3DA had to wait for BK Elmira Jakals to raise the bid on the those 3BE3DA players to raise his bid in our auction. As a result, 3BE3DA won the bid for the player when I was unable to bid any higher. It seems to me that this is a loophole in the game design, where your friends can provide you a very cheap loan (just 2% cost on repurchasing your player), and in my opinion, extremely unethical.

If it is thought to be in the rules, perhaps this could be moved over to the suggestion forum to keep this from happening as it takes away from the game experience.

As such, I would like to hear what other people have to say. If I am of the minority opinion on this, then I guess I will have to come around to the "dark" side and form an alliance (well, collude) with some other teams to provide loans to each other when bidding on players to make sure we can purchase them.

I have run into this several times as well. This was particularly bad a couple months ago when several people had multiple accounts colluding to purchase players. I knew they were cheating based on their transfer histories, but there was no way to get them banned in time to help me in my auction bid. I actually immediately started saving up my money to buy the guy as a Free Agent 6 weeks later and almost got him at that point.

I guess you could delay the cash influx until the actual sale goes through instead of letting people effectively buy on margin. However, for me, the incremental cash from a pending sale has been a critical component of my ability to buy the player I wanted more than once.

Losk0 bid against an entire country and he overpaid by ~$2.5M because of it.

The bidding collusion mechanism is easy to do - I don't think the cheating engine really cares about bids in process - but I might be wrong. If this is ruled as Ok, I'd be happy to collude with you and share the bidding power. I have a $1K/week salary guy that should be worth a couple million in temporary spending power - I just have to fire him after I purchase the player I want and no one is the wiser (other than my bleeding bank account). Of course, if the top teams collude (*cough mutual TIEs*) then the game becomes less competitive and it is more difficult to succeed.

Anyway, I started a Federation called the First Bank of DC that provides funding for player acquisitions. I need to find some way to charge interest or profit from my loans to cover my costs.

Any suggestions?

Last edited by ardain at 07/31/2008 22:35:38

I'm confused.

Let's say that 3BE3DA had $2M in cash, and then the bidding went to $3M. So he had to put a couple of players on the market, and his accomplice bids $1.2M on them (and we'll assume fair market value). So now 3BE3DA can bid $3.2M, and you can't raise.

So 3BE3DA has the player, $1.2 in debt, but $1.2 in receivables, for a net of $0.

So where does he get the money to bid on his own player? In HT, he wouldn't be able to bid, because it treats a self-bid as two separate transactions, where he is treated first as a bidder, and then as a seller.

I think that GMs should to follow that behaviour..

there can be automaticly saved hidden history of bidding

and

if one user bid on a same player like the other (both in the alliance), this behaviout will be clearly seen from that history...

and if is that happening few times (same users bids on a same players again and again), this behaviour should be banned

it is kind of easy for a programming

Last edited by Iordanou at 08/01/2008 03:08:57

Good to know even Torooo has problems.... But anyway: I really don't see anything wrong with it. You could have done the same, and we will just have to wait if and which players he buys back before we can tell anything about the arguability of 3BE3DA's ethics. His players are on the TL and his "mate" didn't overbid on the prices compared to the latest transfers. Maybe 3 just wants to build a new team, and was planning on selling these players anyway... That someone else with a lot of cash from DII is willing to help him get that cash early available isn't a problem for me. The player you wanted isn't allowed to play in the play offs and there are more fish in the sea for you! As both early bids are bollow the markets max, they will probably both be overbid and otherwise Elmira will lose a lot of it's possibilitys for next season. But that's his risk. In my opinion it would only be wrong if 3 bought back a 1k player from Elmira for far too much, or if both teams are runned from the same IP..

Collusion is wrong in any sport.

Proving it is another story, but I certainly agree with the original poster that it goes against the spirit of sportsmanship and becomes gamesmanship.

I really hate to say this..... Collusion isn't written in the rules as wrong. I harken back to previous discussions about Mutual TIE's (a form of collusion) and the group made a valid point of it's not written in the rules and until it is, it's not illegal.

If multiple owners want to push the prices, to insure where a player goes, raise the price on a guy, or help each other in a match - there is little to govern that and prove anything. This game is based on money and it just seems as though there are more ways to generate enough cash to survive.

Reston, I would advise maintaining the high road.... This way we can still play competitively in our division.

Why don't make unavailable the money till the transfer is really concluded?
With this simply rule we can avoid early bid and unfair bid wars.

There is a big difference between illegal and wrong.

Why don't make unavailable the money till the transfer is really concluded?
With this simply rule we can avoid early bid and unfair bid wars.

The ability to use money from a pending sale adds a great deal of liquidity to the market. If you had a player who might be worth $3 million, your market would be limited to teams with $3M in cash, and would cut out teams who have $1 million in cash and a player worth $2M.

It would be difficult to hold off completion of the first sale, until the 2nd sale is completed, and besides the 2nd sale might be contingent on a 3rd sale, etc.

You could let a buyer take a loan from the bank. But you would have to have some way to evaluate your ability to repay to loan, either through ordinary revenue, or a sale of a player. If you could figure out a way to do that, you wouldn't need to have early sales. You could go to the bank and borrow $3M to bid on the player you want to buy, with some repayment schedule, and some of your players as collateral.