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Subject: SW price article repost Posted by: Ender - [13443221] Fri, Oct 27, 12:08 There was a request in a nother thread for this info. I thought perhaps there are more gurupies who aren't playing football that may have missed this post in the football forum. This is taken in its entirety from the SW message forum. The Big Question: How Do Our Price Changes Work? By Dean Carrano 9/18/00 What makes Small World games special? A lot of things…but the most obvious one is probably the "market" aspect of our games. You don't merely draft some players in Small World…your squad has a salary cap. For maximum success, you must "play the market" and increase that salary cap, so that you can afford better players. The market is what makes our games uniquely fun and challenging. It also means that you, and owners just like you, control what happens in our games! So, how do you "play the market" and increase your franchise's value? It's easy to see: Spend your money on players whose value will go up. When you sell a player for a higher price than you bought him, you make a profit which you can then use to improve your team. It might help to know exactly how the all-important price changes are determined. Think of every player as being on an elevator which represents his Small World price -- the higher he goes on the elevator, the higher salary he commands. Every time an owner of a Small World team sells the player off his team, the elevator goes down a bit. Every time an owner of a Small World team buys the player onto his team, the elevator goes up a bit. That's the basic idea. Here are the wrinkles. First of all, a sell actually moves the elevator down more than a buy moves the elevator up. That's because every day, new owners join the game and draft new teams. Each new team has a bunch of buys and no sells. So, at the end of the day, our market ends up with more buys than sells. To adjust for that, we make each buy have less "pushing power" than each sell. Second of all, if there is very little trading activity around a player, his price will gradually go down -- just like gravity would bring a real elevator down eventually. We do this because if there is no activity around a player, it means that the market must feel his price is too high. We want to get that player "back in the game", so we gradually move his price down until he reaches the level our owners feel is right. Here's a peek into how we do that. Basically, we ask two questions. First, we ask, "Do a lot of our owners own this player?" Then we ask, "Was this player traded frequently during the last pricing period?" If the answer to both questions is "no", then the player's price drops by a maximum predetermined amount that varies from game to game. If the answer to both questions is "yes", then this aspect of our repricing system does not drop the player's price at all. If the answer to one question is "yes" but the answer to the other is "no", then the player's price drops by an intermediate amount. Let's touch on some other pricing issues that tend to come up. A player's real-life performance has no direct effect on his Small World salary. Only the buys and sells made by owners of Small World teams affect Small World prices! Of course, our owners tend to be very aware of who is doing well and who is doing poorly, and usually buy and sell accordingly. But all is not always equal. If a player's achievements tend to get a lot of publicity -- or, alternatively, if the player tends not to get much attention -- that could affect the tendency of owners to buy the player. Preseason buys and sells do not affect a player's price. In other words, on Opening Day, the player's "elevator" starts on the "floor" that our Pricing Committee has decided is right for that player. This inevitably will have some ramifications later in the season. If a player was a very popular preseason buy, his price has more downside than upside. Plenty of people own him and can potentially sell him, driving down his price. Fewer people can buy him to push his price up, since so many owners already have him on their team. If the player was perceived to be overpriced at the beginning of the year-- and, thus, no one bought him in the preseason -- then his price has more upside than downside. If there continues to be no interest in such a player, "gravity" will eventually bring his price down to a more appropriate level. Some folks have wondered whether the overall price movements are larger on days on which a lot of trading occurs (such as the day after trades are given out.) The answer is "no". If there are many trades on a certain day, each individual trade is worth less. If there are few trades on a certain day, each individual trade is worth more. Either way, the overall market movement is the same. We don't want a player's price to change too drastically as a result of one price change. So we set a maximum amount for each price change. A player's price can't go up or down more than that maximum amount in one price change. The exact amount varies from game to game. If this maximum is reached -- which is a pretty rare thing -- then any trades that would make the price move any further are simply ignored. There is no "carryover" to the next price change. Each game is unique, and price changes may not happen for the same reasons in different games. In any of our games, the largest factor in owners' buying patterns is normally the recent performance of players. But there are always other considerations. For example, in baseball, the biggest price changes have historically occurred when owners rotate between starting pitchers. Owners sell a starter after he pitches and buy another starter scheduled to start the next day. Sometimes, this leads to seemingly counterintuitive results: A pitcher could pitch a terrific game and then go down in price. This makes sense since the underlying strategy is sound. In many sports, owners will buy based on the upcoming schedule. They will sell players who have few scheduled games in the near future, and buy ones who have a busy slate coming up. Again, this may result in price movements that don't reflect the players' recent performance. If you're a little confused, visit our Message Boards to see what owners are thinking when they make trades and remember to check out the articles, posted daily. And remember, every time you buy or sell a player, you put your own two cents in! | ||||||
| 1 | rockafellerskank ID: 18472719 Fri, Oct 27, 12:17 |
thanks Ender. I had meant to do this b4. rfs | |||||
| 2 | Ref ID: 1442849 Fri, Oct 27, 12:21 | I know they got this article idea and many of its words or phrases from this site. i.e. gravity. | |||||
| 3 | Doug ID: 19850280 Sat, Oct 28, 13:13 | I was looking for this... thanks! | |||||
| 4 | KnicksFan Donor ID: 57832250 Tue, Dec 18, 2001, 13:48 | BUTT. Some people seem to misunderstand the way the price changes and gravity work. Hopefully this thread, while slightly obsolete with the muted price changes, can clarify some things. | |||||
| 5 | DR Stars ID: 162592010 Tue, Dec 18, 2001, 13:57 |
To Guru: Maybe you can clarify something for me. On another thread I said that previous days activity (in the buy/sell market) affects today's price changes. A line in the original post here says: Then we ask, "Was this player traded frequently during the last pricing period?" There it implies there is a significance to it, is it only related to gravity? or does it affect pricing in other ways? or is this simply an old formula? | |||||
| 6 | Guru ID: 330592710 Tue, Dec 18, 2001, 14:02 |
I don't follow your question. But if it relates to gravity, then my best answer is probably "I don't know". In the days before gravity, Small World released detail information on buys and sells that allowed us to exactly reproduce the price changes. (It also allowed us to definitively diagnose some irregularites... but I digress). However, we've never been able to completely figure out the gravity criteria. And in the absence of the underlying data, we can only speculate based on intuition. | |||||
| 7 | DR Stars ID: 162592010 Tue, Dec 18, 2001, 14:13 | Sorry for my english, it'shard to put together long questions for me. The main question is: if a player has a price gain today, will that affect his price change tomorrow, in addition to buys and sells from freeze today to freeze tomorrow. According to the original post it does in terms of gravity. | |||||
| 8 | highlander ID: 18462916 Thu, Oct 03, 2002, 03:35 | butt | |||||
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