The Divine Trick
 

Maybe you guys here have heard something about this too via the HT forums as currently, after the HT masters, the divine trick has become a very hot and debatable topic in the community.

For those that have not heard of it, this basicly means buying a load of divine players just before an important match, then selling them again before the economic update occurs, so that you do not need to pay their huge salaries while almost certainly ensuring victory in your match. Since divines are relatively cheap on the market due to their wage, the losses on agent fees is still small and usually only consists of 300K or so.

Now, on the HT forums a very vocal group of people has risen complaining that the HTs should take immediate action and that this phenomenon is ruining the game for a large group of people in hattrick, as relegation/promotion matches, or national cup battles, are being won or lost solely because of this trade in divine players.

As some might have noticed at the HT forum, I do not agree with this being a big problem, but since so many people seem to take it seriously, I was wondering whether anyone here has ever come into contact with this trick, or even used it himself?

To me, it seems like a marginal issue as only the top flight seems to suffer from this, where people have loads of money to burn, the pressure to win matches becomes bigger because of the community noticing your performances and the fame that teams hope to achieve by competing succesfully on the highest levels.

Have you ever played against teams using this tactic, or seen it being used in lower divisions? If so, do you think it should be fixed by the HTs on short notice (risking implementation bugs affecting everyone)?

I know a VI side who brought in a supernatural playmaker for their playoff game to ensure they won promotion since they were in a difficult VI.

Basically I don't think it is a massive issue however I feel that they should ensure that wages are paid on all players that the team owned during the week rather than just who is in the team on the financial update.

There are two problems that I've seen labelled as divine:

That you can buy players with money you don't have. The Latvian cup final became a question of how many early bids the finalists could get and then they brought divines with that extra money to play in the cup final whilst they could also play the players that they were selling as the deadlines finished after the match. Perhaps this is justified as being a reasonably skillful thing to arrange.

The other thing is that the 5 logins rule theoretically allows a bankrupt side to last for 34 weeks (see Barentin). So they can potentially ensure that they win two season's worth of trophies without having any money. They can also train divine players for a national team until they run out of logins. This should really be fixed.

Never seen anything like it. But than in my league you are happy just to get by.

When I get my passable leadership coach plus 10M in cash next season I'll look into it ;)