S25 Expansion

[woelkers]

Dewalt and Woeklers are some of my favorite people since I've joined the league.

Well, you gave it your best shot.

[Memento Mori]

Ho picked some great people. Dewalt and Woeklers are some of my favorite people since I've joined the league. No doubt in their abilities at all. I am a little disappointed that with all the excitement around expansion, that HO played so safe. It would of been cool to take a chance on some fresh blood. Like last expansion have one tenured pair and a relatively new, but qualified pair. I'm sure people would have changed their approach if they knew Gm Exp was so important. @Tylus and @DarknessRising would have been a very interesting pick, that hope gets an opportunity down the line.

Congrats to those chosen, excited to see the branding.

Good job by Ho been transparent. i love that you guys are actively engaging in this thread. Your guy's reasoning is completely understandable and necessary to ensure long term success, albeit a bit boring.

Hopefully those not chosen are not discouraged. There will def be more opportunities down the line with how fast the league is growing.

Well said.

[timeconsumer]

Hey

Guys

Look

At

This

Example

Of

How

Not

To

Quote

Shit

[Thiath]

Just make it a prerequisite that you have to have GM or HO experience for one of the members, waste a lot less of peoples time if you know you're going to only hire people with those credentials anyway. Just a thought. Congrats again to the people who got selected, they were definitely deserving!

I actually have to agree with this wholeheartedly. Imagine putting in all the time, effort, and creativity into making an awesome expansion bid. You're putting yourself out there, you're working extra time to make it happen. Then you come here and find out you never even had a chance because you don't have experience despite it not being mentioned anywhere that there are prerequisites. It makes it feel like it doesn't matter what your bid is. They pick the GMs first, the actual bid second. Not saying this is what happened, but it is hard to not see it that way.

Don't get me wrong, I love both picks. I honestly do think these are two of the strongest applications there could have possibly been. Great GMs, great people. That doesn't make it more fair to the people who never really had a chance but weren't told that.

Hi

[Jo3fish5]

I’m just gonna go ahead and assume me and faded were the ones that were inexperienced and highly ranked

because yay optimism

[slothfacekilla]

Hey

Guys

Lookyou talking aabout

At
what are 

[Colabear]

Are we able to see what their bids looked like? Going tinto this bidding process me and eph had no way to know what was to go into the bid. Eph made a nice to the point document as to why we should be chosen but then until the announcement yesterday heard nothing. We kind of presumed there would be a little interview process where we would share our plans for the team (ie expansion draft plans, draft plans, how we're going to handle other things). We had all this planned up but we had no idea what this whole process was like. Knowing we finished 4th in Voting hurts a little more knowing that if we knew we had to add that type of information into the bid it could've bumped us up to the top 2. I'd just like to see what a winning bid looks like for future reference and I think it would also help other people when expansion comes around again. This was the first time I was on this end of expansion and really had no idea what had to go into a bid.

Intended to respond on this at the time and it slipped off my radar but wanted to give you a response cause there were some good points raised.

Regarding sharing, I think it would be good to share examples of good bids ahead of future expansion. If people want to share their bids they are of course welcome to - since we didn't state they were going to be public, I'm not comfortable sharing them on behalf of the bids. Also some include detailed strategy stuff that they might not want to be shared at this time.

We could definitely do a better job of being clearer in future - we ended up having to catch up a bit more than we'd like timing wise for this draft cause things just tend to take longer than you expect.

Related to that - interviews would definitely be ideal and maybe in a future expansion we can get our shit together in time to allow for that. However they do have a lot of logistical challenges. Just the 5 current ISFL HO members are spread across 4 different time zones with up to 9 hours time difference. That's before you factor in availability between jobs and real life obligations. So everything ends up often having a long time delay if you actually want back and forth (in my experience this is even still an issue when people in the same time zone are online). This is also for 18 different bids from 32 different people. So you can quickly see what a big time sink this could become.