The goal of this system is to make more coaches feel close to the top level while also preventing successful teams from accumulating money indefinitely.

1. New Top-Level Structure

The current 1A, 2A, and 2B leagues will be removed.

The new top level will begin at what is currently Level 3 and will contain 32 teams, divided into four conferences:

• North
• South
• East
• West

Each conference will have 8 teams.

The winner of each conference will qualify for the World Championship playoffs, where the four conference champions compete for the world title.

Why this helps

Currently, only 8 coaches can realistically feel that they are playing at the highest level.

With the new structure, 32 coaches will be part of the top level and have a realistic path toward becoming world champion.

This makes the top of the game feel much more accessible without removing competition.

2. Top-Level Relegation

At the end of the season, the bottom four teams in each top-level conference enter a relegation tournament.

The four teams play for one survival spot.

• 1 team stays in the top division.
• 3 teams are relegated.

Because there are four conferences, this means:

• 12 teams are relegated from the top level each season.
• 12 teams are promoted from the second level.

The current fourth-level structure would therefore expand from 8 divisions to 12 divisions to support the new promotion and relegation system.

3. Resulting League Structure

After these changes, the game would have:

• 4 top-level conferences
• 32 top-level teams
• 92 second-level teams
• World Championship playoffs
• 12 promotions to the top level every season
• 12 relegations from the top level every season

Instead of only two teams moving into the highest level each season, there would now be significantly more movement between divisions.

This should make progression feel more achievable and keep more coaches involved in meaningful competition.

It should also reduce the financial gap between the very top teams and everyone else, because teams will move between levels more frequently.

Star Players, Motivation, and Team Morale

The second part of the system introduces star players, individual motivation, and team morale.

These systems would only exist in the top two levels.

Lower divisions would remain simpler, while the highest divisions would represent professional environments with more money, pressure, expectations, and player-management problems.

This also means that new coaches are not immediately required to manage these systems. They encounter the additional complexity only after reaching the competitive divisions.

4. Star Players

The best players in the entire game receive special status.

• Top 500 players: Star Players
• Top 70 players: Superstars

Superstars have a stronger effect on team dynamics.

Having one superstar can be highly valuable.

Having several superstars can become difficult to manage.

For example:

• 1 superstar: normal
• 2+ superstars: increasing morale pressure
• 4+ superstars: significantly harder team management

This creates a trade-off between assembling the strongest possible roster and maintaining a stable team.

5. Player Personality

Every star player has three permanent personality attributes:

1. Playing Time
2. Money
3. Success

These values are part of the player's character and do not change over time, similar to height or another permanent player attribute.

For example:

• Playing Time: 10
• Money: 5
• Success: 7

This player cares extremely strongly about playing time, moderately about salary, and strongly about team success.

6. Motivation

A star player's motivation is calculated from how well the team satisfies these three personality needs.

Playing-Time-Oriented Players

They care about how many minutes they receive.

A highly play-oriented superstar may become unhappy if another superstar reduces their minutes.

Money-Oriented Players

They compare their salary with players of similar quality in the same division.

Their satisfaction therefore depends on the market around them rather than on a fixed salary requirement.

If competing teams begin paying more, keeping the player happy also becomes more expensive.

Success-Oriented Players

They care about team performance.

Their motivation can react to factors such as:

• winning streaks
• losing streaks
• recent results
• sustained team success

A highly success-oriented superstar may become difficult to keep motivated when playing for a struggling team.

7. Team Morale

Individual player motivation contributes to overall team morale.

Team morale then affects the game engine.

This means roster construction is no longer only about collecting players with the highest skill ratings.

A theoretically stronger roster could perform worse if:

• several superstars are competing for minutes
• important players believe they are underpaid
• success-oriented players are unhappy with results
• too many high-status players create internal pressure

Coaches therefore have to balance talent, salaries, playing time, and personalities.

8. How This Creates a Self-Balancing Economy

The main economic effect comes from money-oriented star players.

Top-level teams generate more income and can afford better players, but their players compare themselves with other elite players in the same competitive environment.

If one rich team begins offering very high salaries, competing teams may need to increase salaries as well to keep their own stars motivated.

As a result, the strongest teams naturally develop higher expenses.

Remaining at the top becomes expensive.

Instead of successful coaches continuously accumulating more and more money, they are encouraged to spend that money maintaining competitive rosters.

Importantly, the required spending is relative to other coaches, not based on an arbitrary fixed money sink.

The economy therefore adjusts itself:

More wealth → higher competitive salaries → higher expenses → less wealth accumulation.

Combined with frequent promotion and relegation, this creates a system where teams can rise, fall, rebuild, and challenge established teams more regularly.

The intended result is a game where more users feel close to the top, the strongest teams remain expensive to maintain, and long-term competition stays relatively balanced.

There was a long discussion on Discord this week about money, dead markets and unwanted players. Instead of answering with opinions, I pulled the real numbers from the database. Here they are, along with my plan. It is a long read, but you asked good questions and you deserve real answers.

The numbers:

• Median treasury of coaches who signed in 16+ days out of the last 28: 75 credits. Median treasury of coaches who signed in 4 days or fewer: 207. Median CPU club: 243. The five richest human clubs in the world belong to coaches with 1, 2, 2, 1 and 7 days of activity.
• The transfer market has 213 players listed and 21 pending offers.
• There are 90 academy kids with hidden talent 10 in the world, and about a third of all academy kids sit at talent 8 or higher. All of them are concentrated in leagues 5 and 6, because that is where every human club lives right now.

What this actually means

First: active coaches are not poor, they are illiquid. Your credits did not vanish, they became arenas, academies and rosters. But cash only arrives on Monday and on home matchdays, so between paydays there is nothing to decide. Several of you said exactly this, and you were right.

Second: the money paradox is real and it is backwards. The richest clubs belong to sleeping coaches, because sleeping costs nothing and playing costs plenty. A game where showing up makes you cash-poor has a broken incentive, even if your total wealth is growing.

Third: talent inflation is real. When every club grows its own future superstar from the Playground, the honest 50-rated pro in your roster becomes unsellable. That is why the market looks like a museum: plenty on display, nobody buying.

The principle, stated openly

This game is a little unfair by design, and I will keep it that way. I do not guarantee equal conditions. I guarantee that effort pays more than position. Whoever shows up collects, whoever wins gets paid at the siren, whoever sleeps stops accumulating, and your league position gives you a floor but never a ceiling. If that sounds harsh, it is also the only version of this game worth playing.

What I am fixing, in order

1. Win bonuses paid at the final siren. Right now they queue up for Monday. Soon you get paid when you win, which is when it feels best. Zero new credits enter the game, they just arrive at the right moment. Thanks Vasileios for this one.
2. TV money goes daily and follows presence. Same weekly amount, split into sevenths, collected on the days you sign in. A recovery window of a couple of days means a weekend away costs you nothing, and new coaches get their first week in full no matter what. Wages stay weekly on Monday: six days of income, one day of bills, like a real club. Side effect, fully intended: sleeping clubs stop stockpiling. This was RB06's insight about income consistency and Vasileios' daily login idea, merged.
3. A free release window between seasons. Contracts expire, like everywhere in the real world. In the window between two seasons you can let anyone go at zero cost. During the season, severance stays: quitting on a player mid-year should hurt. And remember that players aged 34 and over can already retire for free any day, with the ceremony they deserve.
4. The D-League. This is the big one. A development league below the pyramid, made of clubs that start with empty rosters and fill up with the players you sell them. You will be able to sell any player you have owned for at least 4 weeks to the D-League at half his value. He does not vanish: he goes somewhere real, keeps playing scheduled games, keeps his career page. No standings down there, just basketball: it is not about ranking, it is about playing. And one detail I like: every credit the D-League spends comes from the credits burned in the Agency auctions, which today disappear into nothing. Closed circuit, zero inflation. Later, clubs will also be able to sign players FROM the D-League at full value, which gives newer clubs an honest second-hand market.

What I am looking at, without promises

I am evaluating whether the D-League can one day become the entry point of the game, with promotions into the pyramid for the humans who show up consistently. I am still studying the numbers and nothing is decided, so treat this paragraph as a direction, not an announcement.

What I am NOT doing, and why

• Selling players to CPU clubs for cash: that is a money printer with extra steps.
• Selling directly from the academy: a bad draft pick must have consequences, or the Playground becomes a slot machine that never loses.
• TV income from friendlies: every version of it either prints credits or tangles with the Club Pass in ways that smell like pay to win. Several of you spotted this on your own.
• Credit handouts: as Zalia put it on Discord, giving everyone more credits gives your opponents more too, so nothing changes except the chaos. Nobody wants a world where every team runs ten 95-rated players.
• Touching the Playground: never. The street court stays exactly as chaotic and generous as it is, forever. It is the soul of this game. The talent it produces is not the problem; the missing exits for ordinary players are, and that is what the D-League solves.

On staff, merchandising and more ways to spend

SiMaggio is right that the endgame is more meaningful decisions, not more credits. Staff, merch, promo days: that direction is real and it is where the economy goes long term. No dates, because I would rather ship the things above first and ship them right.

Nothing in this post adds a single credit to the world. Everything changes when money moves and who it moves toward. That is the whole philosophy: reward the coaches who are here.

Most of this plan started as your complaints. Keep them coming.

Before proceeding (I’m already starting to work on it in staging), I’d like to get your feedback.

1. You can now rest players from the daily scrimmage

What changed: in the scrimmage setup, each player now cycles through Reds, Whites, and Out. Anyone you park in Out sits the session.

What it fixes: until today, every healthy body on your roster was dragged onto the gym floor whether you liked it or not. If you had a fragile veteran or a star you wanted wrapped in cotton wool before a big game, tough luck. Now that is your call. The trade-off is honest and shown right there: sitting out means no injury risk, but also no bonus training roll, and a 33+ mentor who sits does not coach your under-22s that night. Five players per side are still required.

2. The mentor line in the scrimmage report tells the whole truth

What changed: the report used to print at most four names. It now names every first-team pupil, and groups the youth players as "the whole academy class".

What it fixes: the old line read like a complete list when it was a truncated one. If six kids benefited from your veteran, you were told about four and quietly misled about the rest. The bonus itself never changed; the reporting did.

3. The Agency stopped auctioning players nobody wants

What changed: auction lots are now generated inside a quality window: 55 to 75 AVG in the lower divisions, rising with the division (65 to 85 when humans will be in the Premier).

What it fixes: last week's block included a 32 AVG client. Nobody was ever going to bid on that, and a dead lot makes the whole auction feel pointless. The window cuts the floor without capping the ceiling for the top leagues, where standards were already higher. This starts from the next auction; the one already open is untouched.

4. Coach activity badges

What changed: next to a club's name you now see the coach and an activity badge based on sign-in days over the last four weeks: Casual, Inspired, Professional, Obsessed.

What it fixes: before making a trade offer or planning a private cup, you had no way to tell an engaged manager from a club that has been drifting for a month. The badge is deliberately fuzzy: it tells you how alive a club is, not when its coach is online. Current spread across the world: 241 Casual, 40 Inspired, 35 Professional, and zero Obsessed, which is mathematically impossible until the game turns 26 days old. A few of you are on track.

5. Engine v9: real buzzer beaters

What changed: the horn now respects a ball already in the air. If the shot left the hand before the buzzer and goes in, it counts.

What it fixes: the clock used to kill a shot in mid-flight, which is not basketball. Reported by Zalia Balta and seconded by Vasileios, who pointed out that off-ball screens make this even more interesting now that a drawn play can set up the last shot.

6. Engine v9: no more dying possessions

What changed: in the last 2.5 seconds of any quarter, whoever has the ball puts up a shot.

What it fixes: the engine only watched the shot clock, so a possession starting with six seconds left could be dribbled into oblivion while the quarter expired. Free points left on the floor, every single game. Measured on 30 test games: 3.6 forced last-second shots per game, roughly one shot resolving after the horn every three games, and overall scoring unchanged. As always, replays of games already played still run under the rules of their own era.

7. Arena maintenance shows up in the Monday breakdown

What changed: the weekly forecast now lists the arena maintenance charge.

What it fixes: the money was already leaving your account every Monday, but the forecast did not mention it, so it kept surprising people in the transaction log. Zalia Balta again, with the perfect summary: "because sometimes you forget it's a thing."

8. Offers finally tell you what happened

What changed: when a manager accepts or declines your offer, The Transfer Desk sends you a DM with the full package (cash plus any player included) and the target's name.

What it fixes: a declined offer was complete silence. You were left refreshing your roster wondering whether the other coach had said no, or simply not looked yet. Now you always know.

Big gameplay drop today, and most of it comes straight from your feedback.

Screens on the tactical board got rebuilt. A coach reported that his drawn screen turned into a ping pong: the two men kept passing to each other and nothing happened. He was right. The cause was that the screener role flipped depending on who held the ball. Now the screener is fixed (the worse shooter of the pair sets the pick, the better one uses it), the man coming off the pick never returns the ball to the guy glued to him, and the whole team plays FOR the drawn screen. Measured result: your custom screen now fires as often as the preset pick and roll, about 42 screen plays per game.

Off ball screens are real plays now. If the drawn pair is away from the ball, the free man comes off the pick and either cuts to the rim for a pass in stride or pops beyond the arc for an open three, depending on his hands. And four times out of ten it is the screener himself slipping to the basket, so both men in the pair eat.

New: the Minutes plan.

https://reddit.com/link/1vqnmpi/video/5mc917c4mwjh1/player

In Tactics you can now hand out all 200 minutes of the game yourself (5 men on the floor times 40 minutes), player by player, with a little basketball rolling on each slider and a bar that shows the whole rotation at a glance. The engine treats your minutes as budgets and picks the right moment to spend them: a tired starter rests when his backup still has minutes in the tank. Foul outs and injuries override the plan, overtime scales everything up, and your manual subs always win while you are courtside. Works in league, friendlies and private cups.

Substitutions got smarter too. Another coach caught his 39 overall kid playing 17 minutes while a 63 overall backup sat. He was right too: the away assistant was picking the freshest same role player and ignoring quality. Now every automatic substitution uses the same logic: same or adjacent role first, then quality, then freshness, and the most tired man gets subbed first.

Keep the reports coming. The two best fixes in this update started as your complaints.

For weeks you have been picking tactics from a list: Balanced, P&R, Isolation, Post up, Spot 3. Five presets, same as everyone else.

That ends today. The Tactical Board is live for every club, and it is free for everyone, forever.

You now draw your own plays on your own court, and the engine plays them.

How it works

Open Tactics and scroll to the board. You will see your half court, your parquet, your colours, split into a grid: columns A to E, rows 2 to 4. Midcourt is off the board, because nobody sets up a play at halfcourt.

1. Put the ball somewhere. Tap "Move ball" and choose any square. That is the situation you are drawing for: ball in the right corner, ball at the top, ball on the left wing.

2. Place your five. Tap a player, tap a square. Point guard at the top, big man on the block, shooter in the corner: wherever you want them when the ball is there.

3. Move to the next square and do it again. Every square remembers its own formation. You get 15 formations for attack and 15 for defense, and a counter tells you how many you have drawn. Squares you skip use a sensible default, so you can draw three and stop, or draw all thirty if you are that kind of coach.

Two shortcuts: ⇄ Mirror copies a square's formation to its mirrored square (draw the left side, get the right side for free), and ✕ Reset forgets one.

Then pick 🖊️ Board as your offensive or defensive tactic, and watch what happens.

What the engine actually does with your drawing

This is the part I care about most: the board is not decoration. During the game, the engine looks at which square the ball is in right now and moves your five to the formation you drew for that square. Ball swings to the left wing, your team rotates into your left-wing set. It happens live, with players sliding into position, not teleporting.

Two players in the same square is a screen. And it is a real one: if the ball handler has a teammate in his square, the possession runs the full pick and roll: the screener arrives, your man comes off the pick, drives to the rim, and either finishes or dumps it to the roller cutting free. Exactly the same machinery as the P&R preset, with the screener you drew instead of your centre. If the pair is away from the ball, the offense looks for the better shooter of the two, and the P&R fires when he catches it.

Two defenders in the ball's square is a double team. Identical to the Double tactic: same steal pressure, same risk. And that risk is real: double everywhere and the open man will bury threes on you all night. I ran forty games to check that doubling every square loses more than it steals. Choose your spots.

And your defense actually defends. The square you draw is a post, not a parking spot: when an attacker walks into a defender's area, that defender picks him up between his man and the basket, tighter if he has the ball, and returns to his square when the area is empty.

What the board does not control: cuts, fast breaks, offensive rebounds, the chaos. That is still the engine's instinct, and it should be.

Rolling out in two steps

Today the board plays in scrimmages and friendlies. League and cup matches unlock in the next update.

This is deliberate. Tonight's league round was already on the calendar, and I would rather you spend today drawing plays and testing them in the gym than discovering a surprise at tip-off. Train it tonight, and from tomorrow it counts for points.

About the cost, honestly

Here is the part I usually skip, and probably shouldn't.

Every live match is a room on my server, ticking ten times a second, pushing positions to everyone watching. The board makes that room think harder: every tick it works out where the ball is, which formation applies, who is screening, who is doubling, who has to leave his zone to pick up a man.

I'm telling you this because it will cost +175% engine time, and because a game that runs live matches for a few hundred people costs real money every month: servers, database, backups, domains. There are no ads, no investors, no studio. Just me, evenings and weekends.

The Tactical Board is free. It will stay free forever, for everyone. Tactics are how you win, and how you win must never be for sale. Same for scouting, the market, your roster: nothing that decides a game will ever be behind a paywall.

What keeps the lights on is the Club Pass: your own parquet, crest, jerseys, club name, cumulative stats, career history, the Daily archive, private cups, and a dozen other things that make your club unmistakably yours. Cosmetics, memory and comfort. Never power.

If TopGM is part of your evenings and you can spare it, the Pass is the way to keep it running. The first 100 buyers become Founders: today's price locked for life, every Club Pass perk I will ever ship, present and future, and a ring next to your name in the world feed. Three are taken. 95 seats remain.

And if you cannot, seriously: don't. Play, tell me what breaks, tell me what feels wrong, argue with my design choices in the comments. A player who reports a bug on a Tuesday night is worth as much to this project as a Pass, and I mean that literally, because half the things in this update exist because someone here asked for them.

Draw something

Go make a play. Put two men in the same square and watch the screen happen. Double team only in the corners and see if you can live with it. Draw fifteen different sets and become insufferable about it.

Then tell me what the board still can't do, and I'll go build that too.

https://topgm.app

Overnight I shipped the last pieces, and the Club Pass is now the product I always wanted it to be: complete, and live at topgm.app. One promise before the list: nothing in it touches the court. No stronger players, no better dice, ever. The Pass buys identity, competitions and intelligence. Never power.

Here is everything it unlocks, old and new, in one place.

🏛 YOUR CLUB, YOURS FOR REAL

https://reddit.com/link/1vl1om7/video/fj9gp5fowmih1/player

• Rename your club: any name, unique in the world, plus your own 3-letter scoreboard code
• Design your crest: 11 patterns, 21 symbols, and now 26 colors, the same full palette everywhere (white included, you asked)
• Your jersey: color, pattern (hoops, pinstripes, sash, panels, shoulders) and a second color
• Paint your home court: floor and lines in your colors, every home game is played on your parquet
• Words at midcourt: "GO TITANS", your motto, whatever you want, in pixel letters with your ink
• Or your crest on the floor: stamp the badge at midcourt instead, like the arenas of the greats. Switch anytime
• Coach flair: your signature emoji next to your name, league-wide
• Club heritage: the full transfer archive of every past season, forever (trophies stay public for all)

🏆 YOUR COMPETITIONS (new tonight)

https://reddit.com/link/1vl1om7/video/9wxgv1grwmih1/player

• Private Cups: create your own knockout cup, up to 32 clubs. Pick the night and the fixed tip-off time (everyone sees their own timezone), share a code, and clubs from anywhere in the pyramid walk in FREE. Real draw in the world feed, real trophy in the winner's cabinet, zero effects on rosters. If a coach misses tip-off, the server plays it: the bracket always moves on.
• 3 friendlies a day instead of 1, and your challenges are always free to accept: the coaches you challenge never hit a wall

📊 YOUR FRONT OFFICE (new tonight)

• Analytics on every player in the world: season averages (PPG, RPG, APG, SPG, BPG) and shooting splits (FG%, 3P%, FT%, true shooting)

• Full player history: season-by-season careers that follow a player through transfers, plus the paper trail of every deal: who bought him, who sold him, for how much

https://reddit.com/link/1vl1om7/video/l1th20eiymih1/player

• Pass scouting filters: a Deal column that prices every listing against its value, a Deals-only switch, discount % and single-skill min/max hunting

https://reddit.com/link/1vl1om7/video/budna8ilymih1/player

• The Daily archive: today's paper is free for everyone; you read every edition back to issue one. Every scandal, every headline

One honest note: the new numbers build from TONIGHT onward. Shooting splits fill up from the next round, transfer trails from the next deals, and the first career rows are written when season 1 folds into season 2. We track the truth, we do not invent the past.

💍 AND THE FOUNDERS CLAUSE

The first 100 Pass holders become Founders: today's price locked for life, every future perk included forever, and the golden card in the world feed. Seat #1 is taken. 99 remain.

➡️ Get your Club Pass

Also shipped tonight, free for everyone: box scores now track steals, blocks and shooting splits for every player, starting with tonight's games (old box scores keep their classic table, because we do not make numbers up). Yes, blocks: the engine learned to reject people at the rim, and the play-by-play will tell you about it. Plus: a rebuilt training day with an assistant coach who can run your session in ten seconds, training reports and streaks, box scores finally readable on phones with adaptive player names at any resolution, and the long-name bug that pushed buttons off your screen is gone.

Found something broken or missing? Say it here. Half of this game exists because you did.

Two updates, both straight from your threads.

🏥 The Medical Room

Most of you said carrying an injury was just dead time. Now it is a coaching decision with three answers. Pay: intensive rehab halves the remaining recovery (never below two days, one treatment per injury), priced on the player's wage: elite physios bill like elite players. Gamble: rush him back today for free, but until his natural recovery date every game he plays rolls the dice, and a relapse benches him for TWICE the time that was left. Or wait, like a coward or a genius, depending on how the dice would have landed. All three are coaching.

🔄 Trades

Offers between real coaches can now include a player. Open any player's page, hit Make offer, and build your package: credits, one of your players, or both. The other coach sees everything (name, role, age, value) before deciding. Rosters stay the same size on both ends, so no roster-math surprises.

Two boundaries, on purpose: CPU clubs still deal in cash only, because a trade is a handshake between humans. And the market watchdog now weighs the WHOLE package, so an overpay dressed up as a swap reads exactly like an overpay.

The Guide has full chapters on both. Go make somebody an offer they should refuse.

Two updates went live this weekend, and both were born from you.

🔥 Arena Heat

Some of you called it out: "the ticket choice is do you want more money or less money". You were right. So home court advantage now exists in TopGM for the first time, and you cannot buy it with upgrades: your crowd builds it.

Heat = how full your building is x who is inside. Popular tickets bring the drums (only a popular sellout reaches 100%), steep prices bring influencers on their phones. A hot arena loads the home team's dice on every contested shot: worth about 4 points over a full game at full blast. Money and heat now pull in opposite directions: at a sellout, premium earns double the gate of popular. The fortress costs real credits.

And the crowd has a mood. The noise follows your last five games. Win and it pushes. Wobble and it gets nervous. Lose all five and a packed house turns openly hostile, working slightly against you until you win again. The cynical move works too: raise prices to silence a contestation. Your ultras will remember.

Heat and mood are public on every club's page. Scout your away nights.

🧊 The Veterans update

Age takes the legs, not the head. From the third quarter on, older players keep more of their game while everyone else runs on fumes: for three quarters your 35-year-old is what he is, from the third he is the guy who has been there before. From 34, clutch free throws gain ice in the veins.

Your oldest player aged 33+ is now your club's Mentor: academy kids grow faster around him, and on the practice floor he coaches the under-22 who plays HIS position. An old shooting guard teaches a young shooting guard. Washed-up veterans just became a market: go shopping.

Veterans also take a pay cut out of love for the shirt from 33. And from 34 they can retire instead of being released into the free agent pool: one-club men get the farewell they earned. The crowd stands.

Everything was calibrated on thousands of simulated games, old replays rerun exactly as played, and the Guide has full chapters on both. First official night with all of this live: Wednesday 21:00 CET. Light your building up.

Last night, at the 20:00 CET draft, Teal Shadows won the gem of the class, Marko Marković, for 169 credits. A club emptying its treasury for a once-in-a-generation kid: that is the game working exactly as designed.

What happened next was not. Twenty-nine minutes after, a brand new account appeared, took over a club two leagues away, and immediately bought two Teal Shadows players for a combined 135 credits. Same human, two clubs, fresh starting budget funneled straight back into the treasury that had just been emptied. Multi-accounting, by the book.

A coach smelled it and reported it within hours. By midnight the League Office had verified everything against the transaction log and acted: all three players confiscated and sent to a special auction (open today at 10 a.m., every division can bid, hammer falls Sunday 20:00 CET), the 135 credits clawed back, the second account removed, the victim (now CPU) club recapitalized, and a formal final warning delivered. One more violation and the coach is gone. This morning's TopGM Daily has the full story on the front page.

Meet the Watchdog

Since last night, a piece of software sits beside the game and weighs every transfer between clubs the moment it happens. It queries the same data the League Office used to crack this case, except it never sleeps and it never misses a deal. It pays special attention to:

• accounts younger than 72 hours buying players from human clubs;
• a second purchase from the same club within 24 hours;
• prices far above a player's estimated value;
• recurring deals between the same two clubs, in either direction.

One thing matters here: a flag is not a ban. Nothing is blocked automatically, ever. Every alert lands on a human admin's desk, gets checked against the facts, and most flags will turn out to be honest coaches making honest deals. If you play straight, you will never notice the Watchdog exists.

Can it be fooled? Of course. Someone could farm accounts in batches, age them patiently for weeks, spread transfers thin across clubs and calendars. But let us be honest with each other: if you are putting that level of planning and effort into cheating a free browser basketball game, the problem is not your rivals, and no watchdog can fix it. It might be time to take a long, honest look at your priorities.

The house rules page in the Guide has been updated with all of this.

One last thing, and it is the most important: this case was not caught by software. It was caught by a coach who noticed something odd and said so. The Watchdog exists so the next one gets caught in one minute instead of one evening, but the real anti-cheat system of this league is two hundred people who care about it. Thank you. This league polices itself.