2016-07-08 12:17

Chapter 10 - The long way to become RZA Transfer Tycoon
Version 1.2.0 - 03.07.2018

The Transfer Market is one of the three places you can get your players from and it is by far the trickiest one.
The draft gives you the chance to sort your players by your own value rules and from that on it’s more or less luck. Not hard to tackle and you have to live with the results.
The Youth Academy is your own baby and the only thing which is not in your hands is the prospects you get each training u p d a t e to choose from. But considering the 24 updates and a wide range of players to s e l e c t from, it’s not that heavy to deal with. The rest is work and strategy.
The Transfer Market is work, luck, money, greed, a business model for some and a nightmare for many others.

Warning
As a beginner, with a lot of stadium left to build, I suggest to not bother with the market as long as you don’t know the rules and the side effects. The time will come you will want some players from the market to enhance your team, but I do suggest that you avoid high skill veterans with non-physical skills higher than 35 and I also suggest that you set yourself a money cap, which you not surpass, like 1.000.000$ or 10.000.000$ for a players buying price.
Why am I such a chicken?
Because ONE wrong decision in the beginning can set you back for some time and can even drive you to quit the game or to restart the franchise.

Imagine you did save your money and decided to get that QB, which will be your starter for seasons to come. Imagine some other teams did see him, too. A bidding war happens and you have to pay almost every dime you have to get that guy. Now you got him and with age of 26 he is not old, but the owner before did train him only on VIS and PAS and both skills are at 45. That’s a huge wage you will suddenly have on top of your existing wages and depended on your stadium built and the upcoming games you might get into financial trouble. Worst case scenario is that you can’t get the income needed to support your team. In that case you might have to cut exactly that QB or even worse, the system might cut that player and even more from your roster, if you don’t do enough.
This scenario can still be topped by a shopping tour, because you want to improve your team fast and you decide not to buy one player but a lot, like 5 to 10, each for a small price, summed up to almost everything you have. Once they join your team you realize that they were in the market for a small price and no bid for a reason. They are expensive and not really good trained. Suddenly your team wage explode and you get into real trouble, players get cut, you can’t sell those dump player and you can’t build your stadium.
You think this is nonsense? It happens, every season.
So be warned that the market is a risky place.

The laws of the market
Assuming you know already enough to judge the consequences in a right way, you will have to deal with some strange phenomenal. Sometimes you get good players for a nice price, sometimes you get an equally skilled player only with a huge amount of money.
The driving factor behind this behaviour is the human one. Every day do new managers come to the game and everyday do some leave. But the amount of managers coming and going per day are different. They do come in waves and by that they do also get to certain level by waves.
Suddenly many managers do seek a QB while some other day only one manager is looking.
On top of that do the veteran managers have their rituals, like after draft sales, after regular season / playoff sales, before season rollover sales and so on.
The amount of managers seeking for special players do change and so do the prices. A bidding war is good for the seller and suddenly a 10.000.000$ player is sold for 50.000.000$ because every manager has his own limits, pockets and don’t forget stubbornness on top of this.
The bottom line is that if you NEED a player NOW, be prepared to pay more than he might be worth, while if you like to have a player at some point of the season, you can wait for the right one to come up and buy him cheaper. Maybe.
The transfer agents are sometime a curse for the patient ones.
The Agents do allow every supporter to set up a player profile they seek.
They can make that profile quite detailed, setting limits for each skill and age and many things more, or they can just ask for every player with ONE certain parameter.
The result is always the same, whenever players fitting the profile are found during daily update, a mail is send and the supporter can see all the players worth a look, so they don’t miss one.
So if YOU look for a player and some other guy with an agent looks for the same kind of player, a bidding war might happen anyway.

Direct Hirings
One nice thing as human resources department owner is, that you can HIRE free agent players, if they did not receive an offer so far and there are only 24 hours left on his offer. It’s not easy to find many of those worth a shot, but if you find one, you save the whole bidding process and get the player for yourself. Cheapest way to get a player. This can be a huge benefit in early days, if you seek players outside the common path, like low level talent players with good physicals to be the first generation or youth players send by the system with unknown caps. Those come for change, but be aware that they will enter your senior team (I never tried this with 16 year olds, could be that this is not possible with them).

Is it possible to make a profit, longterm?
Now let’s talk about profit.
If you would like to become the next transfer agent tycoon and you want to make BIG money, well, there might be some things you have to consider.
The first is you have to get that player you want to sell, somehow. Draft, Youth Academy or Transfer Market are the main sources.
Draftees do come for free, but the selection process is quite luck driven and there are only 3 per season.
The Youth Academy might give you more players, but you need to invest money here and maybe you do invest also extra training points. If that’s all worth to sell a player, is up to you.
An almost unlimited amount of players to work with does only give you the transfer market and you will have to hire those players (as HR Department user) or most of the time you have to buy those players.
Second you have to consider that you need roster space for those players and those slots will be eventually missed for your playing players or developing players.
Third point to consider is the selling part. You might find from time to time managers willing to buy players way beyond their believed to be regular price (the community normally has different opinions on a players value) but normally it does not happen that the price does skyrocket every time. As a major risk in this buy and sell business you don’t have the chance to set a starting price. The system does that! No chance to buy or hire a guy for let’s say 10.000.000$ and ASK for 20.000.000$ and keeping that offer up until some desperate manager turns up and buys that player. No, the system will set up a price, like 200.000$ based on skills and some manager will very likely offer that money, if the player is really worth millions.
So you might end up selling a player for much less than you did pay for buying him. It comes down to advertisement, timing and luck.
As 4th thing to consider is the new tax system on selling players. You can check the number in the manual, but the essence is, that day-traders, so managers who buy and sell players in a very quick way, will have now a very hard time to make a profit.
If that player did not play any game for your team the tax is 50%! It gets down to 25%, if the player did play in 15 games or more, which is more or less half a season, if he plays in League and Supercup games or a complete regular season in Supercup games.
Given all the circumstances of the game I doubt there is a great way to make a profit with this rule as trader now.

I’m not a big fan of that transfer market, so I can’t give you a deep hint on becoming a transfer tycoon, but be assured that the normally used buy cheap, train him up and sell high approach is not a sure thing in this game. Some managers do ignore the market completely, at least for buying players, which does leave you with even less customers. But it is possible to make a profit, as you can see in the stats of the game itself.
Funny fact is, there were about 30 to 40 managers who did make some kind of profit, out of over 500 to 700 managers overall. Now there are less than 400 players overall, but still very few players with a profit in transfers. Many of those profit making managers did only buy some players if really needed and are not really in that transfer agent tycoon business. So if you find a way to make this happen, your competition won’t be that much. ;-)

Most managers do use the transfer market only for two purposes.
The first is to get a player they need for their own team, long term or short term.
The second is to sell players which became expendable to get some kind of money from him and support your team a bit further.

So don’t expect a mad bidding war on every offer you place and don’t expect a career opportunity with which you can double your income. All this can happen, but not that often.

Bidding on players
Be aware that as a buyer you have the chance to set up an offer and the system does bid on the current ask price as much as needed to have the highest offer standing if your bid was high enough.
If not, the current price will rise up to the amount you did put in and you are still not the highest bidder.
If you ARE the highest bidder, but you did put in a higher amount as “last offer size”, as long as competitors do bid less money, you will stay the highest bidder.
Some managers do use that functionality at the start to test the offers from the other competitors and do only offer the highest current price play a few more bucks, even only 1$ more.
Sometimes it works and you get by that a player quite cheap, sometimes not.
As a side effect you can now see the player on your bidding list until the auction did finish.
Some managers do really set up a highest amount ONCE and don’t increase that amount once they were outbid. Some managers do like to increase it slowly on purpose and have their limit in their mind. There are even late offers on soon to be closed auctions, but not as much as you would think or like to see.

A last hint
If you are really interested in a player, scout him.
That makes only sense if you have a level 20 scout, but if you have that, use it.
But the scout has limits.
He won’t tell you the caps and the managers might even lie to you in the transfer market add or on PM. Most managers don’t do it, so ask them.
I can’t remember whether I was ever cheated that way, I would guess not, but I don’t buy players that often, so I’m not the best example.
Regardless, a scout will tell you his traits and his talent and that will help you to judge the player a bit better than before. The scout report also tells you whether he will retire or not.

Finding your way
Given the market and the managers as they are, you will have to find your way to use it.
Some do use it as player hiring tool very often, some only at the start to find players a bit better than the current roster players, some do seek veterans to plug gaps in the starting line up, some do just sell their drafted and YA trained Players and some do play transfer market tycoon.
Get a feeling for the market and it’s very likely you will spend some money which you will consider as burned a while later.
Relax, it’s just a game and you are supposed to have fun.
So don’t get to serious on this matter and use this tool the best way you can control it.

forward to Chapter 11 - Earn and spend money in the game
back to Chapter 09 - The lottery of the draft

Tags: Jack6s RZA Guide