(S24) - PT 5 - Trade Ya

[Nictox]

The Dotts trading cards is such a great concept. I really like the idea of having each player have a card that showcases their stats and even use a cool picture. I know the group is young, but honestly the best thing the they can do right now is to make a Fair Rub series. I am apart of the Fair Rubs club and think it would be a great way to honor the founders of offensive line. For many seasons offensive linemen were not appreciated enough and would take any old big guy off the streets to put them in a game. Now a days it is a trained position with one goal in mind. Pancakes. Which leads me to my first card. The Pancake Card. It should be a super rare card with a picture of a giant stack of pancakes on the front, with information about the Fair Rubs on the back. Like who founded it and who got it going. The emblem for the Fair Rubs series should be a stack of pancakes. I can picture this in my head with all it's glory. I may be biased in my reasoning but I believe the league should start with it's most looked over group of people.

[210]

[Cincyfan96]

I've not yet dipped into my wallet to purchase Dotts cards, but I adore their existence and I think they are a terrific idea! With any project like this, there are bound to be countless requests for more and more cards and packs to be developed in order to fulfill everyone's desire to get exactly the card they were looking for or to be on a card that is epic! While every request cannot be met, for example, going back and creating every rookie card for all of league history would be insanity and take absolutely forever, there are certain ways to expand reasonably in order to have some more really cool opportunities for cards. One that I think would be worth pursuing would be DSFL awards cards. While I think it would be awesome to have every DSFL award get its own card, the more feasible options I believe would be MVP, DPOTY, and OPOTY getting their own cards each year. Imagine pulling the 2029 Franklin Armstrong DSFL MVP card or the 2027 Thorian Skarsgard's DSFL DPOTY card. These would be truly memorable and exciting trophies to have in one's collection and, I believe, would be even more exciting than pulling a legend's rookie card. I understand there will be lots of requests for expansion and that not all of them are doable, but to add 66 cards and make 3 more each season seems plausible for such an amazing collection to be born. Best of luck to all Dotts buyers and traders, and thanks to Mith and many others for making this possible!

[slate]

Ultimately, as much as I love the execution and quality of Dotts in many ways, I do not believe that Dotts will work as an effective solution to the problem it was intended for. The issue that Dotts targets is that players often settle for small team-friendly contracts rather than test free agency, which reduces league competitive equity as well as the excitement of the free agency period. While it would seem that taking money out of the system would be an effective way to increase the value of team contracts, I believe there are several limitations to this implementation:

1. It is a product that appeals primarily to heavily-entrenched users who already have lots of money and therefore little need of larger contracts.

2. It is lower on users' hierarchy of needs than equipment or weekly training, so users will first make sure they can afford these necessities before spending excess money on Dotts packs.

3. The packs are too expensive in relation to contract salaries. Players seeking competitive market-rate contracts compared to team-friendly ones will probably see an increase of perhaps $2-3M per season on average. This is not enough to maintain a full subscription to Dotts service (which costs $3.5M a week), or even 1 pack a week for the entire season + offseason. Meanwhile, a single media piece of moderate length is a comparable amount of payment to this salary increase, and arguably less time-intensive than negotiating new contracts and talking with other teams. That $2-3M number is arguable, but even if it is larger for some users once again those users are likely high earners already and have the money to spare.

In my eyes, the main issue that prevents a more exciting free agency process is that players' and teams' interests are too closely aligned. Users get invested in their team and want them to win, and seeing their team have more success because they take a smaller contract is often worth more to them than the few millions of dollars per season they could get if they took a market-rate contract. In my mind, particularly because of point #2 above, Dotts will not do enough to change the incentive structure to create the desired environment. A real solution will need to give players real incentives to accrue contract money even if it means their team might perform worse, and to make it worthwhile to leave a team they are personally invested in.

[SchoolboyShue]

PBE

[Muford]

http://probaseballexperience.jcink.net/i...ntry216681

welfare

[Cheech65]

I think that the implementation of Dotts cards was handled as well as it could have, and I commend the team behind it on a job well done. That said, the PT wants to know what I think can be added. Off the bat, I think that making a card for every award ever given (yes that includes positional and retired awards) is a great place to start. And why not? More cards = More packs sold. As I'm sure many have mentioned, I think that trading these trading cards is the next big step, and I'm sure that it's in the works. On top of that, clarifying duplicate cards in the collection screen on the site would be nice, as it just seems like I've lost out on cards due to drawing duplicates. I have no problem with having 3 of the same card, as long as the system knows that I have them, and all 3 copes are available to be traded away.

On a more creative note, I also have ideas for new series.  I think a Boom or Bust series could be created to highlight players who came out of obscurity, whether they be draft steals or just quietly active users. Another possible series could be Alternates, where top tier players can get their render with an official alternate color scheme for their team. Similarly, a Throwback series could be put in place, where players wear their DSFL jersey. All of these seem feasible to me, but I'd imagine that they'd be done only for players of a certain tier. All the more incentive to improve I suppose.

[crow19]

With no experience with Dotts as of yet, I am interested in how to fix the economy of the league. The league needs a progressive cost of training. In real life, as an athlete progresses in their sports career, improving from star, to superstar, to elite, requires more and more effort. Currently in the ISFL, training your player is a linear process. The cost of improving your player through training and equipment is constant over time. This is to say that improving your player from 200 to 205 tpe costs the same as going from 1400 to 1405 tpe. I think a reasonable person would believe that the improvement of an athlete is logarithmic growth, improvements will come quickly at first then gains decrease over time. To drain money from the league and to make it more realistic the cost of training and equipment should be conditional on the tpe of your player i.e. as the tpe of your player increases, the cost of training and equipment should increase. I doubt this will happen because it hurts those that are most involved in the league, but I counter this with the fact that those who are most involved hold the jobs and get money more than new users. Another counter to this point of view is that players experience regression later in their careers; however, this does not fix any issues with money and it is a separate process that deals with players aging rather than players improving their attributes. I hope that this is considered as a realistic solution to the league’s economy where more experienced players can hoard their wealth.

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[Beefstu409]

I plan to (when I have more experience in the league) make this a deeper suggestion post.

The problem with the economy today is that you can basically become Jeff Bezos and then money does not matter.  Everyone hypothetically should be taking team friendly deals.  This issue is because cash is essentially potential TPE with a wait limit on it.  However earning cash is immediate relative to spending it.  Which brings me to how to fix it. What we need to fix the economy is two currencies.  Money how it is currently spent and earned (outside of contracts) would become Development Points.  The translation would be 1:1 with how it's used and how it works today.  So if we say $100,000 = 1 Development Point, then weekly training would be 5 DPs for +3TPE or 10 DPs for +5TPE.  Contracts would continue to work as they had.  You'll earn money based on your deal with the team.  Money is not spent on anything in this system and cannot be lost.  Instead it's more of a leaderboard for users/players.  Imagine that you could see a literal leaderboard of who has earned the most money.  Both the players who earn the most and the users who earn the most.  This provides some incentive to sign contracts worth as much as possible since you don't just have unlimited money from writing media.  Beyond this, there would be incentives to earn some amount of dollars.  At set points (maybe it's $10 million, $100 million, $500 million) you would unlock achievements that you can display either on your profile, discord, and/or the forum.  I suspect with project Omnibus this would be much more interesting as it could live on your player page.  

[277 Words]

[jdourtled]

One of the most expensive card series, whether it be hockey, baseball, basketball, football, etc. is the signature card. The biggest issue with signature cards would come down to whether they decide to go down the road of player signatures, or user signatures, and there's a pretty simple answer. Do both. There are a lot of great players who aren't necessarily all that well known as a user, and vice versa. Deciding what users/players get these special cards will probably end in a bunch of drama (but what doesn't nowadays amiright) but the only restriction I can think of is if a user gets a player signature card, they can't also get a user version, this'll hopefully lower the amount of people who cry favoritism (though we all know it won't). In an ideal world, they user/player themselves would write their own signature and send it to a Dotts person, but obviously there could be availability/accessibility that'd cause Dotts to write the signature themselves, or just move on to a different user/player.

My most chaotic systematic idea is to have an ebay-esque system where players can put their unwanted/duplicate cards up for sale and people can either bid on them, or buy them straight up, obviously there'd need to be regulations put in place to make sure people aren't exploiting the system to just give other people free money.

[Lightnoir]

Okay, two things. First, if I were to implement a special series of anything like that into Dotts it would be a S22 Defensive Back set. This class (which I'm a part of) was loaded with talent, and the retiring of Thubba Bumper reminded me of that. Who wouldn't want a premium Booker or Cross (Unpack Eriksen for the whole subset)? Or a Zamir Kehla vintage Quinn Hughes? I think there's enough players here to justify its own set. Second, I fully believe Dotts needs a secondary Dotts-exclusive currency that you can trash your unwanted (duplicate or otherwise) cards to receive. You would be able to spend this currency to buy and sell cards on a secondary market. Every card tier could have a value that has to be matched or near matched for a trade to go through, that way you wouldn't be able to just move a ton of value in cards from one account to another. Most people want specific cards, and a way to guarantee you get the cards you want would bring tons more people into the service in my opinion. The economy might take a bit of an initial hit, but I think overall it'll increase engagement in Dotts in the long run and result in far more money exiting the economy. Especially since the secondary currency won't have value outside of Dotts, so people are encouraged to stay in that sphere and convert their ISFL money into Dotts currency.

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