*More Rule Change Words

[br0_0ker]

Spec, really good article and really well thought out.  I feel very similar about the salary cap being the problem and you have a descent solution, although bright minds may need to tweak things.  But I also want to respond to Bro-oker. 

i think the biggest problem the challenge of making a free agency competitive or making roster construction more challenging is the need to balance competitive teams and user retention.

I agree with this, you don't want to hurt user retention because someone wants to play with their friends, but can't due to roster construction.  But also, you don't want to hurt user retention by having a bunch of haves vs have nots.  A new user gets drafted to a bad team and it may hurt their activity if they see that team has no realistic chance of a quick rebuild.  If those top teams are forced to cut high tpe players or give up draft picks, it will force more good users to go to worse off teams, which speeds up rebuilds and gives more hope as it evens the competitive balance of the league.  I know plenty of good users who may like hanging out with their friends, but if forced to, would still love this league if they were on a different team, and will probably make more friends.  Hell, I have been on multiple teams and have never shared a team with many users that I really like.

Idk, I think players forcing their way onto teams they have a history with is part of the problem anyway, as it gives that team an unfair advantage getting a player to drop to them that deserves to be a higher draft pick.

so, i ultimately agree with the premise superteams should not exist. and users forcing their way to certain teams is a problem, i feel i've been pretty vocal about this in the past. but i think in this particular case, it's 2 problems that are related to one another, one of economy and one of culture/relationships. on one side, there should be some element that compels users to go to the neediest teams (irl this is simply by giving them more money), and on another we should seek not to push users to inactivity. do we need to look at the league like NASCAR? where every team has a TPE/bank cap that can't be broken? in a way, we already have that in the salary cap, just that hard TPE is translated to cap dollars, and since everyone takes a minimum contract, it's just about how efficiently teams are able to handle their operation. so HO lowering the salary cap is addressing this issue, in effect. im not sure how you cap social interaction or relationship building though.

i do think users bear some responsibility in this issue, this isn't something we should look to HO to implement some magic solution and the rest of us bury our heads in the sand. the fact that the salary cap cannot compel some users to act in a way that promotes league competitiveness means their bank account must be very very large, since maxing on a single player takes somewhere north of $200M last time i did the math. so you have to ask the question of these users, people who are contributing in the most ways either through media or league jobs (or randomly winning lotteries cough cough) both 1) should they know better than to create superteams? or 2) should we let the people who contribute in the most ways be able to choose to do things like pick their team preference? i guess with 2) you also have to ask, what defines a power user or someone that maxes? is it only people that have a history or (and purely hypothetical stream of consciousness here) do we count new users who trend to max earning? or someone with a large bank account? i think if it's just the last one that's a problem (since contract money cannot compel these users to seek higher value contracts), should we have a maximum user bank per team? and that forces teams to consider taking new users that will basically be living paycheck to paycheck and might ask for larger contracts because of it, but also would disincentivize activity in the form of less media or graphics, probably.