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Playing for Free Part One - For new players (28/09/2014 14:52) |
Playing ManagerLeague for Free Recently I’ve seen a lot of managers bemoaning the “fact” that you can’t win in ManagerLeague without paying real cash. While I think that the developers deserve compensation off the work they do in creating and developing the game, I also think it is possible to play the game for free and have success. There is naturally a trade off, and it is one you’ll find everywhere in life: what you don’t pay for in cash you pay for in time. Playing ManagerLeague for free is going to take you considerably more time than paying managers need to achieve success. This blog will suggest ways to develop a team for free. As a result it will focus on ways to play 201 friendlies, gain cash and importantly gain credits. I have not personally attempted this method, instead I have decided to buy credits to save myself time (and make money more easily). I have consulted other managers, pulled out my calculator and thought until it hurt to come up with some ideas. I hope that at the very least this blog will provoke some discussion! PART 1: At the Beginning – for new managers You need to get your house in order. Firstly, get yourself the full complement of excellent staff (found under the ‘team’ button. Staff wages increase as you rise through the divisions so save yourself some money by hiring them all for 99 rounds. Next, you need a sponsor (found under the ‘economy’ button). Get your calculator out! Have a look at the department you are in (your league table, found under the 'data' button) to see what position your team is likely to finish. If your league is full of bots (automated teams with no owners) you should finish first. If you are in a department with many other managers, look at their team quality and their team stats (by clicking on their team name) to decide where you will finish. Sponsors pay ‘per round’ for the first 34 rounds so remember this in your calculations. As you will likely start some way into the season disregard the cup bonuses because you will have been removed from these competitions. Cup bonuses do not include player cups. Complete all of the basic achievements. Many of these can be done through the tutorial (found under the ‘help’ button) and those that aren’t are fairly easy. Experienced managers will help you if you ask in the forums (found under the ‘general’ button). Recruiting new managers to the game will earn you a credit for each one that joins, and you could enter into the Chairman's Christmas Calendar competition You need to continually develop your stadium (found under the ‘economy’ button). Focus on capacity first, and then once at around 25,000 look at your restaurant and club shop. By this time you will know enough about the game to make your own decisions and will know where to look for advice, so that is as much as I need to say here. Just make sure your first capacity upgrade is underway as soon as possible! While at your stadium you can set your ticket price. You will need to experiment to discover the maximum set price before your attendance starts to drop (I think it’s somewhere around 33). Set your restaurant profit and shop profit to 30% at the beginning (before you have made these upgrades) to get the best out of your ticket price. Sack players! This can be done by clicking on the player’s name and pressing the 'sack player' button. You will have many very poor quality players that no-one is ever going to buy. When you sack them they actually give you 40% of their value. This is an excellent source of revenue in your first season. Keep your best 18 or 19 players, and get rid of the rest. Remember that age is as important as quality when deciding who is a bad player, but any player under 60 quality is not going to be worth keeping. Again, if you’re looking for advice regarding who to sack and who to keep ask in the forums. The experienced managers love to help. You might also sell players. This should only be done early in the season (in the first five rounds – look at the top right corner of the screen to see what round it is, underneath your bank-balance), and only with specific players. Players that are 17 years old, 70Q or over, with good perception and speed, and with a low main attribute (keeping for keepers, tackling for defenders, passing for midfielders and shooting for attackers) can make a great profit. First they need to play at least six games (not including player cups). Once they have done this you can scout them by clicking on their name and then pressing ‘scout’ (make sure you have hired an excellent scout). If they come up with 4.5 or 5 stars then you potentially have a very valuable player. Look at the transfer tutorial (under the ‘help’ button) to learn how to buy and sell players. Try not to place the auto-accept price too high, because a lower auto-accept will be more likely to attract a bid, and once a bid is placed it tends to attract more bids. Hopefully you will have a bidding war on your hands! You can advertise players in the transfer forum (found under the ‘transfer’ button) but advertising them anywhere else will get you in trouble with the moderators. At this point you will have money burning holes in your pockets. Unless you are in the first three rounds of the game, you should avoid buying players. This is because you need to develop profit producing players before the end of the season and you will not have enough time to do so. At the end of each season players will lose some of their attributes and will age one year (commonly referred to as the ‘barbeque’ effect), and combined this will reduce their value by quite a lot! So you need to wait until the very beginning of the next season to buy new players. You may have to pay some tax (paid at the beginning of the next season), but this isn’t likely to be a great deal early in the game. You can hide some of your profit by paying for a 10 million dollar training camp in round 37. This camp will take place in the following season, and when the new season starts you simply cancel it and get your money back! Schedule a training camp! Training camps are found under the ‘team’ button in ‘training’. Although it is unlikely you will be able to spend big bucks on them in the early seasons you should never miss one. In the beginning it is best to play a camp with high intensity, but with everything else left unchanged. This should cost 1.6 million. You will see the benefits! Schedule player cups. These are found under the ‘cups’ button. Search for credit-cost free and public cups. You can play one cup per day (Saturday and Sunday). Although they cost to join (don’t pay credits to join, be sure to find credit-free cups!) you will make you money back, plus a little profit, and will get good player gains – and that is if you lose the first game! If you win you are in pure profit territory and have extra player gains to enjoy! Earn free credits! This is found under the ‘options’ button and is a link to various real-world companies that have sponsored the game, and in return can offer credits to managers in exchange for various tasks, such as completing a survey or downloading an app. Be wary of downloading apps. Try to take surveys, they can earn you around 5 credits per day and can be done every day or every few days. Unlike some other offers, the surveys pay instantly. Doing surveys could potentially earn you a good number of credits! Buying New Players In this blog the aim is to not buy credits with real money. This means you will need to buy players in order to sell them for a profit. 17 year old players are the best source of profit and so the following advice is aimed specifically at buying youths to sell. Buying players is a difficult art to master, however, and requires some elaboration. There a two basic sources of players: transfer-listed players (owned by other managers), and unsigned players (generated by the game throughout the season and not owned by anyone, or sacked by other managers). Unsigned players cost an additional credit to buy, but unlike signed players, join your team immediately after you have bid for them. As a new manager you need to realise that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is. Assume that all other managers know more than you do about the game and are aware of the true value of their players better than you are. As a result I would advise against buying youths from other managers in your early seasons – all of the truly good signed youth players cost more than you can afford. Instead, look at the unsigned players market. The best way to buy from the unsigned market is to ensure you are online at the very beginning of the new season. Wait with the ManagerLeague countdown page up (it refreshes for you) until the game becomes available. Other managers will be doing exactly the same thing as you so don’t mess about! Sometimes it takes a while for the new unsigned players to be released into the system, but you’ll need to wait – we’re substituting money for time (and patience!) remember? Go straight to player search (under the ‘transfer’ button) and look for a 17 year old attacking player with 70Q. You want a player with high perception (70+), high speed (70+), good stamina (60+) and a low shooting attribute. This last one may sound strange, but the main attribute of a player contributes the greatest toward their quality (and hence their value), and it is easier to improve an attribute the lower it is. That means that you have a better chance of improving the value of a player with a low main attribute. Remember that the price managers are willing to pay for a player may be very different to their game value! Attacking players generally gain higher prices than the other positions. Midfielders are next, then defenders and finally keepers. Similar rules apply to buying other players – speed and perception should be 70+, the main attribute should be low, but with defenders and midfielders you want a stamina of 70+ also. To get an idea of the going price for a player, check out [url]http://ml-reports.com,ML Reports[/url] One of the most important factors that determine a player’s value is their potential – the star rating you get from scouting. This rating ranges from 0.5 to 5 stars, shows how well the player's attributes improve and is therefore highly regarded by most managers (although this is a bit of a contentious issue). The greatest issue with buying unsigned players is that you can’t be sure what their potential will be. Even with an excellent scout there is a +3/-3 accuracy range on number of stars, meaning that a player who is 2.5 stars could be scouted at 5 or at 0.5 stars (because there is no zero or 5.5 star rating). Some managers will scout a player repeatedly to get an idea of what rating the player will be, but even this is unreliable. There is a little that can be learned, however, from scouting unsigned players. Any player that gets a star rating of less than 2 stars cannot be 5 stars. A player that gets a 1 star scouted rating can be at best a 4 star player, and a player that gets 0.5 can at best be 3.5. Also, any player that gets 5 stars when scouted cannot be less than 2 stars in actuality. Scouting costs money, and you probably won’t have much to spend, so you might want to avoid over-scouting. Bad potential players can still gain quite well and make a profit. You will also get a 17 year old player for free at the beginning of every season. These players are a bit of a lottery, but sometimes you will win! Stadium upgrades help improve the quality of your home-grown players, as does the division you are in. The benefit of your home-grown youths is firstly that they are free, but also that you can play them in friendlies to determine their potential (their star rating). It is unlikely that you will get a player with 70+ quality in your first few seasons, so you will need to develop them before they can be sold. If they are 5 stars you will be able to make a decent profit on them by selling near the end of the season so long as they are 70Q or more. There is another alternative. This is useful if you have little cash or miss the unsigned market. At the beginning of the season most managers will play friendlies to determine the potential of their new players. The more wealthy (generally mid-range) managers may not be interested in their new youth player if he is below 70Q. However if he is played in friendlies you can get an accurate idea of his star rating (sometimes they will get played to keep other better players fresh for the player cups that occur at the beginning of the season). You will be able to tell how many friendlies he has played by looking at the F number (at the right of the player attributes) in the player details window. Because players under 70Q can only be bought for their value (the value the game has for them), you can get them very cheap. In fact, because each new bid has to be at least 5% higher than the previous bid, you can get a player for cheaper than their game value. Say a player has 69Q, their game value will be $15,249,247. So all you need to do is make a bid that if you add 5% will be higher than this value. To find this number you simply divide the player value by 1.05 and then add a little bit extra: 15,249,247/1.05 = 14,523,092. So if you bid 14,530,000 no other manager will be able to make a bid. You might even want to let them know that they won’t be receiving any higher bids! While this is a good tactic you must remember that the manager doesn’t have to accept the bid unless they have put an auto-accept value less than your bid. Using this tactic will require you to train the player for a sale at the end of the season, attaining the highest player quality possible, so avoid players with low quality (try to get 68 and 69Q players if you can). Only buy players with 4.5 to 5 stars! Selling Your Developed Players The more friendlies your youths play the better they will be, and the more money you will make. It is best to get your friendlies finished as soon as possible. See the next blog instalment to see how to achieve 200 friendlies! Finishing early gives you time to sell and, if you look at the selling history, tends to gain a higher price. Finishing your friendlies early also gives you the opportunity to get gains from individual training, improving your team and the price you can get for your youths. Always post your players on the transfer forums – this is the only advertising you are allowed to do! Be sure to only post them on the appropriate forums, and never offer a player to another manager through a private message or the other forums. Advertise the age, quality, position, star rating and auto-accept value of the player, as well as posting the link. If the player has a poor star rating, leave it out of your advertisement! Click on the player’s name, and look just under their profile picture. Copy and paste the text that says: (PLAYER: XXXXXXXX) and that will produce the link. Managers like to know that they will definitely get the player if they offer a certain price, due to the time-consuming nature of purchasing a signed player and the possibility that a manager will transfer-list a player and never return to accept the bid. Thus you should always place an auto-accept value to entice as many suitors as possible. Don’t go overboard with your auto-accept price, however. It seems that many managers search the active transfers list for potential buys, so getting your first bid is a great way to get the best price. Offering a reasonable auto-accept is the most effective way to achieve maximum exposure. For More Information For player development and the performance of your team in the department you will need senior players. Such a discussion is outside of the scope of this blog but is explained at length elsewhere (forums are a rich source of knowledge and advice). This blog is about being economically capable of maintaining an elite team without paying credits, so non-economic aspects of the game (such as training) also haven’t been addressed here. To learn more check out [url]http://ManagerLeague.com/blogperma.pl?id=5921,ML Help Guide[/url] and (THREAD:45761)
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