The key to making a good team? Have good players. You can't train them all by yourself, so you'll need to pick up quite a few on the transfer list. Open the Player Market, a tab of the Market, to search the listed players: set a minimum and maximum level for up to four skills (supporters up to eight), and narrow the list further by age, height, salary, potential, game shape, experience, position, nationality or injuries. Then search to see the subset of the listed players matching your criteria; if you don't enter any restrictions, the entire list will be returned. You can save up to five searches to run again later, and the Bids tab keeps track of the auctions you are in.
The transfer list works as a simple, first-price auction. That is, whatever value you enter as your bid, that's what you'll pay if you win the auction. You can also set an auto-bid: a private ceiling up to which the auction raises your bid for you, one step at a time, whenever a rival bids. Nobody else is told it exists, and if you win you pay only the price the bidding reached. Be mindful of your available funds when bidding; once you bid on a player, those funds are deducted from your available balance for as long as you are the high bidder, even though you might not end up winning the auction. The bank doesn't want you defaulting on your bid, so you can't use that money for other purposes. But don't worry - if someone else outbids you, you'll get your money back immediately.
When selling a player, some of the purchase price is used to pay agent fees and other taxes on the sale. The fees and taxes for a sale are determined by two factors: the amount of time that the player has been on your team, and the total number of sales your team has made in the previous 14 weeks. The fees are lowest when you have owned the player for a long time, and when you have made few sales in the preceding weeks. When you list a player from his page, the listing shows the sales tax that applies to him right now. You cannot offer a player for sale until he has been on your team for at least 4 days.
We know that transmission delays can happen for a few seconds at the very end of an auction. Therefore, whenever a user places a bid on a player, the time remaining in an auction is extended so that three minutes must pass with no new bids before the auction is over.
Now, we weren't born yesterday. We know that some people are going to try to transfer money from friends by purchasing atrocious players from them at exorbitant prices. We have some algorithms that check purchase prices for any suspect behavior, and users who keep other players honest. If you see someone you think is trying to transfer funds in this way, please report them with Report Cheaters in Settings. It makes the game more fun for everyone when the playing field is level.
Please note that once a player has been confirmed to be listed, he cannot be removed from the transfer list. Also, once a bid for a player has been confirmed, it cannot be retracted. A listing runs for three days; supporters can choose a longer one, up to seven.
When you fire a player earning at least $2,500 a week, he goes on the transfer list as a free agent, with a starting price of ten times his salary (never more than $500,000); cheaper players simply leave the game, and either way you get nothing for him. A free agent nobody bids on will begrudgingly accept retirement. Clubs abandoned by their managers keep their players while the bots run them. When a club is reset, for a new manager or after a bankruptcy, its squad leaves the game, except the players already on the transfer list, who keep their auction, and those called up by their national team, who are listed like fired players.
Transfer Price Estimate
On each of your own player pages, on the pages of every player on the transfer list, and on those of the players called up to a national team you manage, you will find a section called Transfer Price Estimate. This estimate is based upon the sales of similar players over this season and the last, and should give you a rough idea of how much money a given player will sell for; when too few similar players have been sold, it says so. Because no two BuzzerBeater players are alike, and because the transfer market is always changing, the accuracy of the estimates will vary greatly. Even when it works well, remember that the estimate is merely a measure of the current transfer market, and not an indication of a player's value on the court.
Player Acquisition Restrictions
Player acquisition is restricted based on team world ranking. This means that highly skilled (and paid) players will refuse to move to low ranked teams and will not even accept bids from such teams. Players are sometimes very picky about where they will transfer to (even though they aren't overly strict about that).
The salary limit is calculated as a function of your team's world rank against the player's salary. When your rank is too low, the auction on the player's page and the bid dialog show your world rank, the rank you would need to beat and the highest salary you can take on.
The restriction has a very important anti-cheating and anti-farming role, making the game playing field more level for everyone.
Server downtime
Server downtime is almost never planned. In cases when it is planned, the transfers are delayed. In other cases it is impossible do so because we don't know when they will happen. Unplanned means that they are unpredictable.
When placing a player on the TL, we advise the lowest acceptable value is put as a starting price. This will insure that the player is never sold for less. Since crashes are unpredictable and virtually unpreventable (although we work very hard on avoiding them), setting a lower value is considered risky. In these cases, the seller is accepting a small possibility of a server crash with hopes of getting buyers into a bid war and selling the player for much more than the lowest acceptable value. Therefore, the responsibility lies with the seller.
It is important to note that sales finished during server downtime are never retroactively undone.
Trade deadlines
The last competitions of the season each have a trade deadline: the playoffs, BuzzerBeater's Best and BuzzerBeater Madness. A player who joins your club after one of them cannot play that competition for you this season, and a player you sell stops being bound by the ones he missed with you. The Market lists the upcoming deadlines, so check them before a long auction carries your new signing past one.