Newgen Renaissance?!

Or not, but the title is certain to draw some attention... As the latest Miller build was installed yesterday morning, I got a pleasant surprise when I did my routine survey of the newgens. For the past week or so, I hadn't noticed anyone remotely decent appearing and all of a sudden, there were like 20 or more five star newgens in the Game World, all 15 or 16 years old and almost without any exception with superb stats.

It seemed like SI were making up for a barren week of barely no decent newgens by showering us with lovely new talents. The abundance of players would ensure that almost every team would be able to sign one or more of these precious young talents.

At that moment, when witnessing the abundance of youthful talent, the mercantile part of my brain kicked into overdrive. I was figuring out how many of these gems I could snap up without facing bankruptcy. In the end, I decided to stay away from anything South American or European, since most people have focussed their scouting there. I opted for two Koreans, a Japanese and two Ivorian newgens, gambling on the fact that most people had not developed their scouting skills sufficient to see these gems.

Sticking 10k bids on the lot of them meant I had not much left, but I really wanted them and I couldn't see how many other users had made bids for them. Sticking a 10k bid on a five star newgen is a calculated gamble in Miller, where some newgens go for much much higher wages, though these guys are mostly European or South American.

I decided to invest my remaining cash into some other guys who I thought would fit my academy teams rather nicely, before logging of to do some work around the house and prepare for the evening quiz in Miller. I was very content with the new situation, even if it did look a bit peculiar that SI pumped so many newgens at once into Miller, instead of gradually releasing them to ensure a more fair distribution.

As I subconsiously feared, this whole situation was too good to be true and during a chat in the lobby, SI's Rob Cooper burst my bubble by stating there was a problem with the newgens that would have to be fixed. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one who was a bit disappointed. When the new 2333 build had installed and I logged back in, I found the following message waiting for me...

Hello folks,

As you may have noticed over the last couple of days some extremely rubbish, and some extremely good youngsters have been generated, with little or no players in between. This is down to a bug in the player regeneration code which has now been fixed. However, in the interests of keeping the game world balanced, and so ensuring that this world is as close to th live worlds as possible (to ensure fair testing) we have rset the player's PAs to where they should have been before.

Those players who were on trial will remain on trial, but all bids on players have been removed. Those players who have been signed on full contracts remain on full contracts because, by a bizarre twist of fate, they are all at least as good now after the fix has gone in, as they were before, so congratulations to you guys who have snagged a bargain!

To everyone else, there are now plenty of regens available to buy with reasonable PAs, and plenty more incoming in the coming days, happy shopping!

Cheers,

Rob
Chief player Progression Breaker

Deep down, I had expected this. Naturally, that didn't stop the more opportunistic side of me from sobbing and being jealous at the few managers who had managed to snare one of these top players, but that's just human emotions.

As I pondered the situation further, I realised that SI had probably done the right thing. As they said themselves, Miller was designed to be a realistic test environment for the 1.2 build. The realism would be compromised if they had allowed the new situation to run its course.

Alternatively, I could already see the casual weekend managers going into a frenzy when it turned out this was a one-time wonder and they had missed it. The amount of angry mails towards the poor mods (Andrew, Jeremy, Simon, Alec and myself) would have probably swamped us with quite a bit of work, explaining what went down and all.

All in all, the short-lived newgen Renaissance was nice for as long as it lasted, but it was probably unrealistic and would have distorted the balance of Miller. SI took the right actions by fixing the newgen code and removing the bids of the other players.

Looking at the bright side of it all, at least they fixed the code so we have new talents to fight over every day... I wonder if the new code in 1.2 will make the wages drop or go up even higher... I suppose that's something for another day...