Hamlet wrote:Apart from this (spurious) logic, you haven't offered any argument as to why these price changes reflect the whole season (not that I can see anyhow).
Oh, the logic is straightforward enough. I'll put it as simply as possible:
Guardian Fantasy Football's first official set of player prices went online before the season began.
GFF's second official set of player prices, with many price changes, went online on Thursday, 11 Sept.
Therefore, the price changes on 11 Sept. must reflect the whole season. What else could they reflect? Q.E.D.
A pause to let this sink in...
You asked for an argument. I'll do my best.
First, when the Guardian posts a new and official set of player prices, surely this reflects all the buying and selling that took place during the whole period since their last official set of player prices. Not some lesser period within that time frame, as would be necessary if the 11 Sept. prices were truly to reflect not the whole season but just the latest week. The 4 Sept. prices were obviously not intended to be official, as they were almost immediately removed. The burden of refuting this is on you.
Very well. On 4 Sept. The Guardian accidentally leaked some inside information that looked like their private running totals of changes in player values. (Is that really what it was? More below - much more.) Those who happened to see this information - the original prices were restored within a day - thought they had a sneak preview of the players' new values to be officially announced on 11 Sept. Some of us, including me, no doubt unfairly, used this "information" to buy and sell players that looked like having big price moves.
On 11 Sept. GFF published their authoritative, "real" new player values and price changes. These were sometimes quite different from the 4 Sept. numbers. Steven Gerrard's original price of £10.0 appeared on 4 Sept. to have dropped to £9.0, yet on 11 Sept. his official value was £9.5. Could he possibly have risen £0.5 in one week, reversing a heavy selling trend, without any major news or EPL action? I suspect these and other price moves didn't actually happen. In other words, the 4 Sept. numbers were not the genuine article.
I believe that what appeared on 4 Sept. may have been a trial run of GFF's market/price algorithm to test whether it produced the kind of results they wanted. And it didn't. They told The Saint in an e-mail that weekly price adjustments would be "minor," but Gerrard's drop from £10.0 to £9.0 was
not minor at all. To prevent such extreme fluctuations, they may have decided to revise or replace their formulas to get "better" results, such as reducing Gerrard's drop from £1.0 to £0.5.
This is only a guess, of course, and I don't have enough of the 4 Sept. numbers to test it any further. But if I'm right, then the 4 Sept. prices were not arrived at by the same formulas as the 11 Sept. prices, and so they were not valid. However, both price sets were based on the same database, of our buying and selling of players, so the 4 and 11 Sept. numbers did reflect the same
trends. Gerrard's actual price drop, though not a full £1.0, was still unusually big, well worth spending a transfer to avoid. Those who acted on the 4 Sept. values may have netted less than the numbers seemed to promise, but we probably did well enough anyway. I'm not complaining.
Finally, how did these numbers get online? Guessing again, maybe GFF's automated routines for calculating new player values include one that posts the results online immediately, and during the trial run they didn't think to turn it off. Such a routine would have the advantage of allowing the player values to be calculated at literally the last minute. And this is the most plausible explanation I can think of for the 4 Sept. numbers getting online at all. If it's true.
Anyway, now we will have new real numbers every week and can look for patterns and trends in them, and can set all this aside.
, but with 4 to play.
. . . and that's 5 syllables 