gets my upvote

Well said. I don't agree with artificially protecting certain players from price drops.

i want the personal opinion!

Totally agreed Ruth. Even i transferred out Lukaku to get for cheap on WC but he didn't drop that much. Only to cost me 0.1m loss

Hasn't Kane dropped 0.2m from peak? He was 12.8m at one point but now 12.6m

I do agree that the changes are inconsistent though and frustrating!

Kane has dropped 0.2m from peak

Dunno if it's still the same, but it used to be something like.. Fall threshold (unless falling below starting value) is the same as the Rise threshold, unless the player is red flagged in which case its increased a fair bit. The threshold this season is something around 55k NTI / NTO. Wildcard transfers in & out don't affect drops.

Agree though there have been some oddities with some players. Even had every single person that wildcarded last week sold Lukaku he should have dropped to 11.6m by now

You are dismissing chaos though and lies.

It is now unto us to recognise hidden historical lies and subterfuge which are now being rubbed in the face of a weak aged camel carrying a ridiculously heavy stone for the Pharaohs to build a pyramid of lies that will be worshipped by the future sick camel owners.

Mechanism is a poor title imo as it negates the necessary of looking into the mirror and acknowledging your own reflection.

Appreciate the viewpoint, Ruth. It is quite an annoyance that some players are protected through market manipulation by FPL themselves.

This is spot on (and in general I genuinely don't like what you serve up one bit).

I'm not sure whether individual player prices are being manipulated or whether it is just a quirk of the new algorithm but if the former then that is clearly wrong. It doesn't matter what the rules are but they should be consistent.

Agree wholeheartedly . Mark are you out of bed ?

With both Wild Card and Free Hit chips in play everyweek it is probably an issue with transfers being skewed even more for for the heavily owned players.

Controlling the extremes of movement of price in such cases is not a bad thing in my view, especially as the masses do not follow or analys the potential movement in price in the same way as FFS.

The playing field is being levelled for the masses, will probably keep more players interested and teams live, to the benefit of the overall game.

What is means is that the FPL fanatics will find it harder to mass a huge TV and the advantages it provides, which in my view is a good thing.

Saying that, many on here are already upto a TV of 102 or above, so the new rules are not really changing the overall situation with TV

I agree - the leader of the FPL Price Change Oompa Loompa's ought to read this.

Hulk Hulk Hulk Hulk

All manipulation of this type does is bring into question the integrity of the game and the people who run it.

What I can't understand (if true) is how much they actually think it is worth to artificially maintain prices of highly owned players.

The average player in my office doesn't know the price of their players until it comes to making a transfer (I help a few of them out occasionally).

The market side of it is a much more in depth part of the game and trying to stabilise it to help the average player surely misses the profile of how they play. If they can't afford someone, they just pick someone else.

I suppose one part is the disparity between selling value and price if a player has risen. Meaning if they sell Kane because he's injured, then he scores against palace and they try to bring him back, they won't be able to (depending on when they bought). Which would be annoying.

I say scrap the .2 = .1 of profit, that way the market would actually be a market and that issue I described goes away

1. If you take FPL as a game then the rules should be clear & consistent.
2.Essentially FPL is a game of strategy of which buying (& selling) the right players is one of the key elements.
3. I agree with Ruth - why "protect" inactive managers?
4. If controlling value against high-value teams is key why put a "most valuable team" table on your home page?
5. Protecting injured player values is reasonable.
6. There is already a perfectly fair handbrake on player values in the +/-0.3 value change per week. If a player happens to hit that by Tuesday so be it.
7. I'm never one that particularly worries about TV. Held several players this season that I knew were dropping but could still be useful in my team. Concentrating on points gives me a current OR of 9k and a TV now down to 101.3..

'The way it penalises active managers is that there is a significant chance that when you remove an injured player you will have to pay more to get them back than what you sold for, despite there being a big market swing.'

Not sure I agree here. I don't understand the definition of active manager vs passive manager. One who likes to make lots of transfers over one who doesn't take hits? In my view stronger managers don't place huge focus on price changes in any event.

Managers just have to factor this rule change into their thinking.

I understand that being unaware of this change until now is frustrating but we just have to roll with the punches. ALL managers in the same boat. The best managers will adapt.

Everybody thinks it, glad it's getting some discussion. There is definitely something rotten in Denmark!

1000000% agree

this is broderline scandalous

price changes this season are utter sheeeeeiiiit!

I wonder to what extent the WCs & Free Hit chip impact on the market? Surely they can't be soley attributed to the point Ruth is making.
Similarly, the flags can't be blamed either. Has Lukaku had one this year?
When stripped to the bones, FPL is a game of buying and selling players. If the market is being manipulated, as Ruth suggests, the game is indeed broken.

Absolutely Ruth_NZ!!!

It seems FPL Towers are continually trying to "level the playing field", and making it harder to active or well planned managers to gain an advantage. That just adds to the luck factor of a game that we already accept has a large portion of luck driving our results.

They really need to stop dismissing their avid players and appealing to the lowest common denominator. It will kill the game.

I don't know to much about the actual maths when it comes to price rises and falls. I thought that maybe the price fall was some how related to percentage owned, maybe higher owned players drop slower? But the numbers don't seem to add up when comparing Salah's drop least week to Kanes. Salah the higher owned player drops 0.1m from a couple of hundred thousand sales where as Kane's dropped three times that. Is this down to the fact Kane's price went up then down meaning the 2nd price change of the week requires more transfers and now being the 3rd even more is needed? Having said that Aguero went up by 0.3m with a similar amount of transfers to Kane.

I do think the price change system is flawed as there seems to be not specific pattern or consistency. Mee being a prime example. I do wonder if aguero Kane morata injuries combined with back to back assists have saved lukaku from plummeting like a lead balloon.

Not that it will ever, ever happen but I would personally love it if they scrapped price changes altogether. This whole side game about gambling on price changes is a chore for me, I'd much rather just concentrate fully on trying to assemble a team who will score fantasy points.

I know that's going to be an unpopular view but... meh.

This issue seems to be hitting hardest the players who are taking value most seriously. Those that make early transfers and hits to avoid losing team value.

I think we need math explanation here.
We can calculate percentage, but the baseline is unknown.
I personally don’t think that FPL dudes are making any manual corrections.

Sadly, I'm not currently in a state of health to debate or analyse this but I will come back to this in the international break. I don't have any input or insight into what's being tweaked in the algorithm. I do know that 75% flags no longer wipe out NTI and that's a good thing so I presume that, having introduced that, ISM are probably more hands on with the algorithm while they monitor the impact of the change.

All I will say is that there's a danger that our opinion on what is "wrong" currently is based on our expectations raised by what has become accepted as correct in the past, based on third party tools and an acceptance of how the algorithm works.

The reason why nothing transparent is given on the algorithm is so that ISM can choose to tweak and manage on the fly.

I'm pretty sure nothing is set in stone and the algorithm can change again.

All I can do at this point is try to make ISM aware of the concerns, when I'm back on my feet I'll look into this more.

I still think players shouldn't be allowed to be sold or bought during a gameweek. That would slow down price changes without having to tweak algorithms as much and stop players price rising and falling in the same week.

+ 42. It is a complete shambles, this Season. From Batshuayi onwards.

I think you have enough of an advantage over non-active players by being, erm, active. If it keeps semi-active people engaged, it's a positive for the game. I'm happy to just roll with it.

Last year all we did was b1tch and moan about prices moving too fast and it ruined the game for us serious players who are less impulsive, so I am pleased to see we are all still back here b1tching and moaning that they are not moving fast enough now and it is ruining it for us serious players who like to make more transfers.

My main game is AFL Fantasy (aussie rules).

In this game, price changes are dictated by performance with a breakeven system to determine the size of the rise/loss. This rewards people who actually make good picks. There is no stress regarding early transfers.

It is infinitely better.

Maybe their 'objective' is to stop people knowing the price changes before they happen, stopping those who check every day from gaining an advantage over the more 'casual' player. Success in this game should be about scoring points, not successfully negotiating price changes better than someone else because you go on a different website every day to check. If FPL wanted people to know the price changes, they would tell us themselves.

Is it possible the price change sites are not able to reflect wildcard and free hit chip usage, resulting in false expectations on ownership change? Might be a high percentage of Kane dumping was under Free Hit chip, which is a temp drop. Just thinking out loud.

I have absolutely no idea why they can't make the price change system transparent. They must know a lot of people play in mini leagues for money but it's hard to have a serious competition when one of the main game rules is deliberately withheld. It's like playing chess without knowing what the knight does.

They claim on the site that price changes are dictated by the transfer market but Sanchez shows this demonstrably isn't true. Starts at 12.0 with 126k owners, now is 11.8 with 179k and probably going to drop again. Or de Bruyne who started at 1.2m owners and now has 1.0m but is 0.1 above base price.

There's absolutely no consistency and, for me at least, it makes the game less fun to play. One of the keys to enjoying strategy games is knowing all the rules and we simply don't.

Nice hot topic and great discussion (so actually a hot topic - yipee).

I would agree with the opinion that is there definitely an element of price fixing by FPL towers. What I will say is I don't think it's anything new, in previous seasons there were examples of what looked to be fairly blatant examples.

Perhaps it more prevalent this time around.

For me personally I think to gain advantage we adjust to the game we are playing. From early in the season price changes seemed to not

Judging by the number of upvotes for the OP I think I am in the minority here, but the idea of an integrity issue seems misguided to me: am I the only one who sees FPLStats and the other price change sites as a cheat that I access and use over those who aren't aware of their existence?

FPL gives what it gives as far as information: transfers in and out by the week, and from that people should be able to make a crude guess as to whether a player might be likely to rise or fall. Yet we have access to these data scraping sites that give us very detailed and fairly accurate predictions of exactly how much time we have to make decisions whereas the masses who just use FPL do not. The integrity issue might lie more firmly in the laps of those FFS users who have streams of information, opinion, and judgment flowing to them while participating in minileagues against mainstream FPL users, actually. Sharks and fish at a poker table have nothing on FFS diehards and FPL casuals swimming in the same pool.

The cases of Lukaku and Kane are certainly compelling as far as some sort of intervention happening to control their price activity, but if I recall RVP in his heyday and Aguero in the past few seasons also enjoyed a similar privileged status, so it might not be a new manipulation for this year.

And, I can use my special status of a 3M rank this year to tell you that there are probably about 35,000 people in the FFS leagues (near my rank in that league) among a total FPL population of 5.3M -- we are in an echo chamber here that might not be that significant to FPL overall. If you want to know more about how casuals and dead teams are faring, I'm happy to share updates seeing as I am like Rick or the rest of the gang in the apocalypse smearing zombie blood all over themselves so that the walkers don't sniff them out. In essence, we are The Walking Dead, wandering from gameweek to gameweek trying to find safe harbor.

Thanks for this excellent hot topic.

I want to look at one particular angle on this, which has always bothered me about the price changes.

Let’s get back to first principles. FPL set prices for every player. They do a pretty good job. But some players are underpriced, and everyone wants them, some are overpriced.

Now in theory, the price changes should be used to correct this as a season progresses: those players in demand should see their price rise. Overpriced players should see their price fall. In a perfect market, every player should be owned equally.

Now, to date, the price change system has only relied on the flow of transfers.

But what if they have also started looking at the stock of ownership?

An example to illustrate. Many people have sold Lukaku. But he is still in over half of teams. He is in demand. If anything, his price should be higher, not lower.

In contrast, only 3 per cent of people want Sanchez. People think he is not worth it at that price. So his price should keep falling until he is attractive to potential buyers.

Is it possible they have started looking at stock of ownership as well as flows as a moderating effect on prices?

Play the game, not the prices.

Much love,
LR.

:*

100 percent agree it’s bullshit

+42.

Why don't all of us get together and collectively question @OfficialFPL on Twitter? We could use a hashtag like #fplfixed and hopefully we'd get their attention and at least get some sort of response? Surely they don't want the attention.

Most upvotes I’ve ever seen in one post..