Subject: [Idea] Merge of small countries/leagues

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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Worse than nothing? I guess in Poland there's not a problem about too little challenges

yes, I do believe that a bad idea is worse than nothing

So people would quit because of the challenge? I'm not sure I agree but let's say you're right.
Run the World League as a separate entity instead. Scrap the Champions Cup and use that day for WL games. 14 rounds (15 teams), ticket revenue shared as there's no such thing as home advantage in this game. The big league would mean less levels and more mobility up and down.

It would also mean 4 official games (2x League, 1x World League, National cups) so even more problems with injuries & cards.

And yes, I Think that the level of challenge would be too big for many people so they would just quit/become inactive/leave the game soon after joining

I wouldn't mind to be a 7th or 8th tier team, if that is where my team belongs to currently internationally, CHALLENGE is rather good than having none. Obviously i would need to check into my team mangement if my incomes will get lower but there are always possibilities, and it's a football team managment game after all.

Turn off training/injuries/cards for the national cup. Most teams are knocked out after 2 weeks anyway. There are always solutions.

You are a trader (223 bought players in 3 years, I bought 484 in 18 years...) so it's not that bad for you, because you can improve relatively quickly if you mass trade & train properly.

But for people playing "normally" without doing many transfers it will be terrible, they will simply stay at the lowest level for years.

@Camus
If anything, the International League would need being in Arcade mode, because as you mentioned - most people already get knocked out of cup early.

So for weaker users it would be 3 games instead of 2, for stronger teams it would be 4 games instead of 3.

That will require much wider squads and injury/card instant buys (because there will be 1-2 days between the games) which people at lower/mid level cannot afford. People are frustrated with injuries already, they would be even more frustrated.

POSSIBLY it would be better to change the league to 11 games instead of 22 [no rematches] and add 11 games of International League instead.
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No, I agree with your post.

USA is the same. I mean, I'm okay at tactics but I made the ML in one year... and with a team average score of about 55...odds are better than not I'll finish top 6.

Pushing this back up as countries continue to die out whilst we wait.

The plan is simple (the coding unsure):

1. Merge all countries that can't fill 2 divisions with human players (actual human players, not these boosted manager numbers where 50% logged in for a single day and should be bot)

2a. All teams that would be merged are sorted by rating and the top 12 go to A-league, next 36 B- league etc.

OR

2b. All teams start in division 3/4 and work their way up to A League. This is less preferred but a suitable solution.

3. All teams retain their signed up nation.

4. You play in your own nations cup and pull your own nations youth.

5. The winners of each nations cup plays in the champions cup

6. Now you keep small nations in the game as they are on par with large nations potential incomes, they actually have competition to play against and they get to talk to others (google translate is great and on Chrome, you just right click and press translate, it's simple).

Doing this, it would currently account for about 58 nations and 800 teams, but if those countries are anything like Australia, only 40% have logged in during the past month, so it's actually only 320 teams

This allows for countries to go from an unhealthy, less than half full 2nd division, to a healthy completely full 3 divisions and partial filled 4th division perfect for new players
(edited)

Yeah, they should do that and from what I know they plan to do that, the problem is that they are running short on money since a long time and everything takes them a lot of time now. Just look at last year, almost nothing happened.

can you merge ex jugoslavia balkan (at least serbia and crna gora) :'D

this is very true

Or... scrap all the national leagues and have 1 big world league.

Ok, back to reality.
I worry about what this would do to the national communities, who would no longer be playing against people from their own countries. This game is already very quiet.

I could agree 100% if you made it into regional leagues.... like scandinavia... great Britain..... I dont have complete overview of what to merge... but this i think will do a lot when building the new communities... great idea to still have national cup

Yeah, that’s also my concern, especially since it would mess up all the different languages together.

You could still keep national forum and add an international league one, but since you’d rival different teams…

On the other hand there’s lots of very small countries with 1-20 active users and for them such merge would have much more benefits than vices.

Now the question is where you put the line and how big is big enough not to be included in the merge.