I also posted in the "It's next week" thread.  Ash and I see a lot of things alike.  I read in one of the posts where Ash was involved in making these changes.  If he was then someone spent little time listening.  One thing is sure, there is little chance that any kind of fix will be coming soon. That is really a shame because to me it simply means that basketball at WIS will cease to exist.  In the four or more years I have been here a free full season game has never been offered. I still wonder what that is all about. Most everyone who comes to this site to play basketball will first try out the free exhibition seasons.  Once they find out they can only play maybe one star player and a bunch of scrubs I seriously doubt they will pay to play. I think the free game is in hopes that people who don't know how screwed up this is will at least find something they like and then pay to play.

There may be a few people who find this change to be a good thing. What are you thinking?  No pay means no play and with no income coming in you will never see anything in the future change from what it is.  The main reason it has taken so long to get this last release is there are far less players here now than there were 4 years ago.  Believe me when I say there was little change in actual programming to make this last release. The release that was made prior to this release had a lot to do with WIS establishing a pricing structure on players to make the game more real life.  Now we have a release that has completely altered that pricing structure and has gone way to much the other way.  Is this an admission of missing the boat on the prior release or simply trying to adhere to a lot of current demands to make changes.  Why do people ask for changes?  I think the biggest reason is the game becomes boring without change.  Many people think it is the so called cookie cutters.  There will always be cookie cutters without minor changes taking place in a reasonable period of time.

One thing Ash and I disagree on is how this can be fixed.  The pricing structure on salary's is all over the place.  The change in pricing is from making some players slightly cheaper " check out some Wilts and Jordans" to increasing the cost of some players as much as 300%.  This is why I favor a change in the cap rather then a fixed % of change across the board.

One last thing Ash and I agree on is the noobs' that have no clue need to STFU and have fun playing those scrubs until the open leagues take months to fill and basketball here will cease to exist.

I have four teams yet to play which will be used up in theme leagues which i think will fill a little quicker now with many refusing to play the open leagues. After that WIS has seen the last of my money.   Even though I am a basketball fanatic had this been the structure when I played my first exhibition game I would have never been here in the first place.

hoosier, it seemed pretty clear to me that the free game was offered because so many customers vocally suggested it as an enticement to help alleviate the frustration of waiting so long for the new player release.  And it's been clear from the start that no changes to the sim program itself would come with this release - it was always about only salaries and position effectiveness.  seble took several rounds of input from users who disagreed with each other, sometimes significantly, on what changes they'd like to see.

What everyone seems to agree on is that salaries (overall and especially for bench players) have gone up too much.  Your suggested fix would be absolutely fine with me.  Raise the cap or lower the salaries and let's get on with it. 

I'd like to clarify my "involvement" in the changes to this version of the sim... I had no behind the scenes involvement.  I posted feedback like the rest of you.  I've been doing it since September 3, 2008 - when the last player release came out.  I've sent some tickets, too, but none of that actually got changed.  But yeah, I was very involved in the feedback threads.  But that was it.

A $47M open league cap would be good.  Many of my former OL champ teams come out $50M or more with the current salaries, so that's still progress towards the old issue of everyone being so cheap that you could get everything, yet we'd still have a little room to do more than what's available now.

As I stated in the "It's Next Week" thread, no one comes to a "What-If" website to rebuild the 1979 Denver Nuggets.

This site is doomed unless they change the philosophy that a $42M team should be a "real" team.

Well, it is obvious the there are strong disagreements on the salary structure.  However, telling what you perceive to be noobs (which is a screwed up definition anyway...  I have used this site more than most of you) seems to be bigger impediment to pushing people off this sim than the salary structure.  We are all entitled to disagree and it seems like we joined this site/play these sims for different reasons.  For me, in this sim or any of the other sims, the harder they make it to build teams that are of obvious quality, the more skill it takes to build a team that wins...  and I play for the challenge not the dream team building aspects.  I also think the games that continuously make it more difficult to build all star teams and continue to tinker with making it more and more difficult (HBD, SLB, GD (although I have never played this), HD) are the ones with a far greater deal of success on this website so I think that is attributed to what actually goes to the long term viability of these sims.  All that being said, I could deal with any large scale changes in engine or salary but if you think constantly ******** about how you can't build the sort of teams you want is the way to get it fixed or return the sim to its glory days, I think you are in for disappointment.

You've said over and over what you prefer.  Apparently, you are in the minority.  You seem to think you have a right to repeatedly say what you prefer, but if anyone else disagrees with you more than once, they're constantly ********.  Hypocrisy is cool.

Also, I don't care if you have been around this site for 5 or 6 years and have played thousands of seasons in other sports... if you've only played 6 full wisnba seasons, you're a wisnba noob and really shouldn't have much say about what needs to change and what needs to stay the same.  The only thing  you need to do is to actually play the sim and figure it out, since you're very green.  You don't see me popping my head into wismlb and offering up opinions about anything.

Posted by ncih on 10/9/2010 1:49:00 PM (view original):
As I stated in the "It's Next Week" thread, no one comes to a "What-If" website to rebuild the 1979 Denver Nuggets.

This site is doomed unless they change the philosophy that a $42M team should be a "real" team.

Agreed 100%.

just so we all understand what's happening here a timeline:

2001-2004/2005 -ish  thriving sim - glitchy as heck but growing in popularity

05/06 tinmanpb and seble decide for more realism - 42m should be about the price of a real NBA team

2007 - present - dwindling user base death of the sim

so it's pretty clear what happened

and sure a couple of you are around that really dig it but that's really why there are so few users when there used to be a ton more - there are a handful of guys like you who dig this realism approach (although the Lakers currently have a 94 million dollar salary structure so whose real are we talking about?) and then there's silent majority of users who just said f- this and left over the last 4 or 5 years or never joined

because what if Darrell Griffith and Darrell Walker played in the same back court just doesnt appeal to a large majority of true NBA fans

I didn't start playing the nba sim until 2007, so I don't know what it was like before that.  Are you sure the main reason for declining popularity is that you can't create a super team in an OL?  I ask because you can't come anywhere close to creating a super team in an mlb sim OL (and that doesn't seem to hurt its popularity).

Yeah...  that was my thought as well.

the MBL sim has many, many, many more users to draw from.  I'm sure it doesn't take 5 weeks to fill a long-standing theme league there.  And I doubt open leagues take a week or more to fill.

The sim went to he)) after the salaries dropped to super low levels allowing the well-known super teams of the last 2 years.  That's when you start to see some good owners (tianyi, bballjones etc) starting to drop out because you could build a 60 win OL team in your sleep.  No challenge.  

But...I do support a percentage salary decrease.   I might have even been the guy who first suggested it...
I'll play either way, but it just makes sense to loosen things up a little.

I for one became less interested in open leagues when it became so easy to put multiple superstars on the same team.  i think that was around '08.  But we came here for various reasons and stayed (or not) for various reasons. 

The main thing that drove me out of open leagues - and that for the most part will keep me out of them no matter what happens to salary or cap levels - is a lack of interest in multiple uses of the same given player in a given league.  My own "whatif" premise has never included and probably will never include any variation on "what if a league had 7 Wilts, 8 Rodman, and 6 Barkleys?".  That's why I gravitated to progressive and draft leagues and have stayed there. 

So I don't really much care what happens in open leagues AS LONG AS they remain interesting enough to enough people to help keep the NBA game alive at WIS.  Theme league traffic clearly won't do it.  So I am concerned that the across-the-board jump in salaries makes it too difficult for most users to put together several teams a year that they find really interesting.  It's pretty hard now to find superstars that don't break the bank, but the bigger problem is putting together a bench.  So I'm very cool with ash's suggestion of raising the OL cap to $47 mil, since that's a more straightforward remedy at this point than more slicing and dicing of the salary structure.

Posted by ashamael on 10/9/2010 5:28:00 PM (view original):
the MBL sim has many, many, many more users to draw from.  I'm sure it doesn't take 5 weeks to fill a long-standing theme league there.  And I doubt open leagues take a week or more to fill.

I haven't played an OL in the mlb sim in a long time, but I know that champs leagues don't fill within a week.