Never miss a big story in Plymouth again with our daily newsletters Sign me up! Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

According to FPL experts Fantasy Football Fix, the gamemakers at Fantasy Premier League have brand new parameters for price changes this season.

And these alterations could seriously affect the way that FPL managers play the game in 2017/18 - although it remains to be seen what difference they will make long-term.

In fact, Fantasy Football Fix even suspect that the new price change thresholds might be part of a short-term plan to encourage more managers to play FPL and stick around for longer rather than give up early

So far in 2017/18 price changes have not exactly worked as they have done in the past.

In fact, many of the reliable sources for accurate price change information were left a little stumped in the early part of the campaign.

Players were rising in price a lot later than they should have been (if at all) considering how many new owners they were earning. The same was the case for those expected to fall in cost - it simply wasn't happening as quickly as normal.

You can read all about what factors influence a change in an FPL player's price HERE.

With price changes not appearing to follow the rules of previous seasons in the first month of 2017/18, our suspicions were raised about a possible alteration behind the scenes at FPL.

So we spoke to Adam, one of the brains behind Fantasy Football Fix's impressive price change predictor tool, about what exactly has been going on with player values this season.

Not surprisingly, he and his colleagues were already on the case and had been working on pinning down the exact details of the changes.

(Image: Getty Images)

He explained that there are certain numerical thresholds that need to be hit before an FPL asset can change in price.

For a rise, there is a specific number of transfers in (excluding Wildcard transfers) needed to trigger the change, whereas for falls a specified percentage of owners have to sell the player for him to lose value.

Those numbers are, of course, connected to how many people are actively playing the game to avoid disproportionate transfer market fluctuations later in the campaign when more managers have "given up", so to speak.

But Adam said that the exact numbers required to trigger changes ended up being much higher this season than was initially predicted.

“At the start of the season we have nothing to go on so we basically assume that things are working as they were at the start of the previous season," Adam told the Herald.

"What we do know is that these rise and fall thresholds are proportional to the number of players playing FPL.

“Which makes perfect sense.

(Image: Getty Images)

"They do actually they change the rise and fall threshold throughout the season depending on the number of active teams.

"So at the end of the season you’d expect the rise and fall thresholds to be around half what they were at the beginning of the season.

"This season we’ve got nearly five million players on the game and last season it was around four million.

"So we’ve got about 20% more people playing FPL this year.

"What the gamemakers will do is change those rise and fall thresholds depending on the number of players.

"Naively you would have expected the rise threshold by a factor of 1.2 from last season.

"That’s what we set things at initially and what we found was that assets were still needing more transfers than we expected before they rose in price.

"So by this point now we realised that we weren’t getting as many price changes as we had expected."

To give an idea of just how different the transfer market has been in the first four Gameweeks of this season to last, Adam laid out some telling figures.

"As of Tuesday 12 September we've had 46 rises and 284 falls," he said.

"This time last year we'd had 58 rises and 340 falls.

"On top of that, the average team value in the top 1,000 right now is £100.8m.

"This time last season it was £101.1m for players in that bracket.

"That’s a difference of £0.3m.

"So overall team value is definitely lower but it’s not a massive amount."

(Image: Getty Images)

Thankfully for those who rely on the service they provide, Fantasy Football Fix have now got their heads around the changes that the Premier League game-runners have made to FPL.

After several weeks of monitoring the fluctuations in the transfer market they have a much clearer idea of how things will work in 2017/18.

"Now that we are four weeks in we’ve got enough to data to work out the new thresholds," Adam said.

"What we’re finding is that they are different from last year and that’s even factoring in the extra number of managers.

"FPL have gone above and beyond what we thought those extra players would trigger.

“It’s more than just the extra players in the game.

Top points scorers on FPL so far this season

"It looks like things have changed for falls as well as for rises.

"The fall threshold has certainly increased over what we expected for falls as well as rises."

That's across the board both for rises and falls as well as the required number for a second or third price rise in a Gameweek.

The amount of new owners needed to see a player change price more than once in between Gameweeks increases exponentially and that principle has remained the same this season.

But because the numbers have increased by so much, Adam reckons that multiple price changes in FPL are becoming much rarer.

"It's hard to tell at this stage because we've only had two double price rises so far," he said.

“But I will be surprised if there are any triple price rises this season.

"The thresholds have gone up by so much that you’d need so many transfers before a triple price rise happened.

"As I said, I’d be very surprised if it happened."

(Image: Getty Images)

Monitoring the timing and likelihood of price changes has long been seen as a way of seriously boosting your overall score on Fantasy Premier League.

The top level managers pay very close attention to this sort of data to make the most informed choices about their FPL teams.

After all, if you can consistently build your team value over the course of a season, you put yourself in a better position to make more difference with your second Wildcard, for example.

But Adam suspects that the new FPL price change thresholds might remove some of the advantage tracking the transfer market in as much detail.

That's not to say that price prediction tools have become obsolete; far from it. It's simply a case that with fewer transfer market fluctuations the more casual players are now less likely to be caught out.

"I do think it will have an impact on how people play the game," Adam said.

"Overall I think we’re going to be looking at a slightly reduced role in team value this season.

"It remains to be seen really whether that affects strategy or not.

"But it could mean that you’re not so rushed in making transfers because the price changes are not so aggressive this year.

“You can maybe wait until a little later in the week before making your changes this season.

“That is especially helpful for some with the Champions League now started up again."

(Image: Getty Images)

Considering that conclusion, Adam also thinks that fewer elite level managers could be taking points hits when they make their transfers in 2017/18.

In FPL you are entitled to one free transfer every week (you can have a maximum of two if you opted not to use your one from the previous week) and making any more than your allowance will cost your four FPL points for each one.

“It is also possible that there is less value in taking points hits early on this season," Adam said.

“Last season it could be advantageous to take transfer hits to gain team value.

“In the short term you lost points by taking a hit but long-term if you had a higher team value to bring in better players towards the end of the season it helped you out.

"With these changes there could be less value in that strategy now as well.

“But, as I said, it does remain to be seen though what difference it makes because it’s still very early on."

Thinking a little deeper, Adam has gone as far as to suggest that these new thresholds could even be a short-term ploy cooked up by the supremos over at the Premier League.

By the end of last season just 40% of managers who created teams in August were still playing the game. I think we all have friends who give up caring as early as October, after all! That is something FPL are believed to be tackling.

“Another possibility is that this could be a short-term change from FPL," he said.

"If you think about it, what would their motivation be for making these alterations to price change algorithm?

"It could be that they saw a huge drop off in the amount of people playing the game last season and they’ve thought let’s make it slightly less aggressive.

"So that these players are less put off when they login and find out that they can’t actually afford the player they want.

“It could be that they relax that in a few weeks’ time."

(Image: Getty Images)

Ultimately, what these changes continue to prove is that there is serious value for FPL managers in having a website like Fantasy Football Fix to help track transfer market fluctuations.

There is so much data flying around behind the scenes of Fantasy Premier League; more than the average player of the game could keep up with on his own.

"It’s a bit of a moving target really," Adam said of constantly monitoring price changes.

"We are constantly having to do what we can to reverse engineer what it is they are doing.

“They could easily go back to last season’s thresholds at any stage over the next few weeks.

“We just don’t know yet.

“You can monitor the rise and falls and how many effective transfers were required to trigger those price changes and then you can work out the thresholds from those numbers really.

"It’s a constant process of updating those thresholds, really.

"Hopefully stuff like this will help people understand how you can use price changes to your advantage."