Subject: [Idea] Merge of small countries/leagues

ohhhhh I see what you are saying now.

I knew I was missing something. It's a nice idea, but it would be next to impossible to implement. Too many teams, too many bot teams.

Maybe if you limited it to only the top 6 teams in every league?

Who honestly watches live games anyway? at 1.0 match speed? BLEH.

I'd say I watch somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 my games live within the league, as well as the competitive games in the cup.
I don't watch games I don't expect to be competitive or juniors (unless its like the last or second last round of the league and I'm in the running for 1st).

What is arguably Sokker's best feature, the one that separates it from other football management games, many don't even watch (and I don't watch enough).

Really the longer this takes to be implemented, the more countries that will need to be integrated in to the one league. I suppose if there's enough, they could have a few merged leagues, possibly based on timezones.

I suggested it a few weeks ago but running a World League alongside the national leagues would sort a lot of issues regarding inactive leagues and balancing finances between nations.
The game is inherently unbalanced in it's current state, not just between the top and bottom of national leagues, but between nations. You can sort it 2 ways, either you introduce a minimum income for all clubs or build the financial system from the top downwards, instead of the bottom up as it currently is now.

But from the top downwards would also be unfair since you would be making same money as champion of a 2-team African/Asian country while playing with 19yo players for a rating of 50, as you would be making competing in Poland against teams playing for 80+ rating, which obviously costs much more (wages, players etc.)

Would that actually be unfair though? Under the current system, it would only affect the International Cup, and it wouldn't affect it by much.
The system as it is now makes that International Cup a joke and, worse than that, it gives a huge advantage to Polish clubs in the transfer market simply for being Polish.

Like I said, an international league would probably be a better solution. Quite honestly, at this stage, I wouldn't totally be against scrapping national leagues and just having an international league instead. It would solve quite a few issues.

I don’t think top down is the right approach. I do think if you merged leagues together to get a certain size (eg 2 full divisions minimum of users - possibly even 3) would fix most of the financial issues and then we’re on a similar level as bigger nations. That is it will self correct.

Problem is there are hurdles to overcome such as when to merge when to unmerge, champions cup spots, language barriers, who slots into where in the league structure etc.

I’d like to keep players from my youth school as my own nationality and I’d also like the cup to be a national cup. Happy for the league to no longer be domestic but to be the newly merged league.

Top down is just as wrong as bottom up. It’s not even really bottom up atm, divisions have next to nothing to do with it. It’s just bigger leagues have older users and older fan bases. So lack of competition and users means sides end up promoted into leagues they are perhaps too early to be in based on fan size alone. So question is you need to get the balance to allow progression towards what the top nations get and that’s only realistically achievable with merged leagues of a sufficient size. Slows progress in divisions but you play against more teams your level this better chance to grow fans and less variability in revenue streams.
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there are ~7600 active teams at the moment, now how the cup round would look like

2 teams
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512
1024
2048
4096

and that's the limit since there aren't enough teams for creating next round - so ~3500 users would be excluded from the Cup, I'm sure they would be thrilled

Easy solution... Make 3 cups and split the countries into Europe 1, Europe 2 and World for all other continents.

Merge every single country under the same league system, but keep the National Cups to decide a champion from each country and the Champions Cup to draft every Cup champions + Top League champions as well. Some will win, some will lose, but it'll reduce the number of bots on every league. (and of course, youth systems will only pop players of the club's nationality).

May seem radical, but since only a handful of nations has over 200 users it's also a plan thinking on the long term. Unless my math is wrong, with 7652 teams on sokker, we have enough teams to make a 7-tier system using the current format (7 tiers would be 13116 teams, with 4368 of them on tier 6 or above, meaning 6 tiers of full teams and 3284 human teams out of 7652 total teams on 7th tier, so 42% of the last division would have human teams).

Sokker may also benefit from kicking bot teams from the league system after a season is over, but I guess that's too much to ask.

The easy solution is simply to use bots to fill out the space.

But there already wont be enough weeks in a season for such cup:)

@Dtox
That would SUCK though.

Now you have „real” leagues and cups, you become a champion of a country etc.

I couldnt be bothered with a generic title of „One of Three or Four National Cups.01”

"If it doesn't interest you, feel free to walk away"- Grelka, Riften market / Skyrim

There's a big difference between...I don't care and that would suck!!

Well from my point of view it would suck

And yeah, it wouldn't interest me, question is how many % of users would actually be interested in that because maybe it's the idea that can walk away freely

Creating different new leagues out of thin air, then changing them based on user changes, making different National cups - there would be no continuity

I'm all for creating some kind of hubs for very small countries so they can actually compete (for example Oceania, Europe, Africa, Asia etc. leagues gathering countries that have less than 30 or 50 users) but creating some weird Europe 1 Europe 2 Europe 3 etc. leagues or cups would make the game much less interesting from my point of view

Well not that's interesting anyway, but it would become worse imo
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Worse than nothing? I guess in Poland there's not a problem about too little challenges

No, Poland has the problem of retaining users knowing they have virtually zero chance of ever reaching the Ekstraklada.

I mean, if I were a Polish user, I'd have quit right away - probably.

That's not entirely true, there were old users coming back with new teams that were able to reach Ekstraklasa after 3-4 years of playing so it's doable.. but obviously ridiculous since you have to become a massive trader and your game is basically doing transfers all the time.

Problem is, people now want to make one big league - now imagine how that will end up:)

First thing - suddenly new normal playing users will have to stay in 7th, max 6th league for many years and they won't go higher because the level at 4th league will already crush them, even 5th will be a massive challenge for years

There are 4th tier leagues in Poland that have teams playing for 65-70, now if we add all top teams from Italy, Nederland, Spain etc. then suddenly 4th league will have an average level of 70+.

Second thing - many people playing at top level in their smaller countries will suddenly get down to 4th-5th league and won't be able to compete with top users from other countries

Which is often their fault, there are lots of countries that are at low level because of the level they manage their clubs at

I wonder how those teams would react after being thrown down and seeing that they are unable to move up :)

For example, look at England with 100 users - one of biggest countries since many many years ago, only around 10 bigger countries in the game at the moment

And yet their level except for 1 team is very low...

Their top 10 teams this season:

73.4 Thamesmead Town FC Premiership
68.6 Man United 1995-96 Premiership
65.7 Legia Będzin Premiership
64.3 Rock Bottom Premiership
63.0 Padstow Rovers Premiership
61.9 Elmstead Legends Division II.02
61.0 kowal203 Premiership
60.6 Forest Hill F.C. Division II.02
60.4 Sporting Ampullae Of Loren... Premiership
60.4 POLISH BOSTON GKS`71

Except for Thamesmead all of them would end up how low - between 5th and 6th league?

Poland has 9 teams playing (average ratings, not max) for 79-84
It has 53 users playing for over 70 rating

It's just my opinion, but I think that even many old users would get discouraged if thet were suddenly moved to a role of low league teams without even real chances to go up.

Obviously someone can say that they would start getting more money from sponsors/tickets but that's not how you build a really strong team, you do it with transfers & training and most people don't know or don't care to do that...

And new users would definitely get discouraged if they saw that they need years of playing to even reach 5th league.
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