(S24) - PT 5 - Trade Ya

[xTri]

PBE PT

[katarn22]

With the addition of Dotts, it feels like 3rd grade all over again. Everyone is ripping packs open to see what cards they got and showing off their best pulls. I for one am no exception. While my Dotts luck has not been the best compared to others, I am certifiably addicted to these cards. The subscription service makes it so easy to have a pack delivered every single day and I love it (though my bank account does not). The team has done an excellent job. Regarding the cards themselves, I think this is a great start, but there is always room for improvement. One set of Dotts cards I would love to see would be the inclusion of "historical players". These would be players who may or may not have had the best stats on the field, but in some way were impactful on shaping the ISFL. As a new user, I know very little about how we got to be in S24 of the ISFL. These cards could have the player on the front, and on the back a brief summary of the mark they left on the league. This would be great for new and veteran users alike. On that same note, another idea would be to simply add card backs. Maybe just a table containing the players stats for the season that the card is from, or a few sentences if it is in a special series. If the creators didn't want to do backs for all cards as that is certainly a large undertaking, maybe just for certain rare cards. Regardless, Dotts has been awesome thus far and I can't wait to see what the team has in store next.

[PMoney]

[The_Kidd]

Okay, I was going to attempt to bs about the Dotts cards, but I need to save my money for training because there's only so much media I can write each season. Plus, I can't find a job around here. If my career represented my job luck, I'd be an undisputed pro-bowler for the Las Vegas Legion, or better yet, the bot teams of Norfolk and Kansas City ---- I make noise but I don't really exist. That's a topic for another day though, let's get to the real work.

Alright, I'm still relatively young, but I've learned a lot in the world. One thing, stream-of-consciousness, ideology, mantra, whatever term is apropos for the following is: "Wealth is the ultimate fail-safe". When things, or people, go wrong in society, usually those flush with cash, assets, and wealth are able to absolve themselves of many petty offenses that breed abhorrent habits and behaviors. They are insulated by the abundance of money on hand to ward off the moral police. However, it's not about rich people getting off easy, it's about a general societal trend on all levels where bad behaviors are often ignored in place of being paid off.

A lot of business practices key in on exploiting people for not being prepared, timely, responsible, or any quality of the like. Overnight shipping, ATM surchages, overdraft fees, reservation fees, "convenience" fees, late penalties, all of these fees and charges simply masquerade as an extension of service as a conduit to further siphon pockets of customers in unfortunate situations or who practice bad habits.

How does this translate to the ISFL? Well, let's say deep down, I'm OCD to getting my point tasks and transactions finished for my updates and it somewhat boils my blood to see some players completely miss point tasks altogether, especially when they blame others for not reminding them every day every week. So, how can we work on this? I understand some people have real life issues and packed schedules and shouldn't be punished, but I think to drain more money, we should allow late submissions for point tasks(up to when the grader locks the thread) and everyone that submits late will face a monetary penalty. We'd be offering an extension of our service to allow players to go get that TPE, build their player, and get good and stay active. For those that are just being lazy, maybe seeing their bank account automatically withdrawn will urge them to get with it, or whipped like Rotz would say.

For those with the big money, a repeat offender penalty may need to be implemented as well. What would could do, is at the end of the season, create a pool for the highest TPE earners of the season and a pool of highest prediction earners and either split the collected fine money with a fixed amount of a selected rank of those earners or a randomly selected group of those earners. Give the ones with bad habits a bailout and reward those that maintain the high activity.

[Roezam]

So I have no experience in trading cards so I’m not going to touch that really outside of maybe add some of the DSFL studs as a separate special series. I think Dotts is a great way to take money out of the economy but I also think that it was rushed. I know it is a lot of effort to make all the graphics and all the players but for something like this to be successful it has to be fleshed out in my opinion, like in real life. That means getting damn near every single ISFL player including bots if there are some. That would make the super cool cards even rarer which is important in card collecting things. As for other ways to take money out of the system I think it works best alongside something like Dotts. I haven’t been in the league long enough to know that people take minimum contracts all the time but if so lower the salary cap. Make teams choose who they want and not let them get everyone on minimum salary. This could also be done by raising TPE salary minimums similar to how NFL has veteran contract minimums that go up I think every year the player is in the league. You could also do it like that instead of TPE. This could also make people more active if they know that by year 5 they’re going to cost more money and they might not be worth their TPE. All in all Dotts can work, just need to flesh it out, salary cap can be played with, or player salaries can be switched to years in league vs TPE to make people incentivized to improve players more.

[Number 82]

Dotts is pretty cool and I've enjoyed seeing the cards that people have pulled so far. The Awards series really nice and it would be pretty cool to have a few more series to build upon the current sets that have been released. I think things like a Pro Bowl series would be a nice addition as give more of an opportunity for people to get cards other than their base set given that not everyone will win an Award or be able to take home an Ultimus during their career. Something else that could possibly work as a series could be a League Leaders series. This could be something that could work for career leaders or leaders for statistical categories for each particular season. Just an opportunity to get more cards out there and to tie in a bit of history with Dotts.

Something else that could possibly work as a series could be something of Franchise Greats, just to highlight some players who may not have been hall of famers but were contributors to a team. Would probably be a bit limiting to the newer franchises but this could be something nice to have down the line. Another possible set could be Headliners where performances, Performance of the Year candidates over the season would be highlighted with a card and stat line.

It would additional work but something that could be nice might be having different base templates for each season (maybe from Season 25 onwards). While improving your player will net a different tiers as you accumulate TPE, it might be nice to have different templates to differentiate between each season and to kinda be sort of a refresh to the base set. In addition to the base set may be a subset of limited base cards with something like a holofoil type deal/ variant on the base design that is limited to so only like 25 cards will ever be pulled. Not sure on how you would go about doing limited sets but I'm sure there's someone who can or has already figured it out.

[Troen]

This past week saw the premiere of Dotts, the ISFL’s official trading card series. The cards are still in their infancy but there is a lot of room to grow, especially with new cards and special packs. In 200 words or more, write about any number of additions you would make to the current catalog. This can be anything from a Fair Rubs Club series, older awards, special Ultimini winning teams, or even Gimmy Jarappolo’s religion. What other systematic changes would you make to improve the Dotts experience?

My suggestions for changes tot he Dotts cards really depend on what the goal of the program is. I haven't followed any of the presumed planning/discussion about implementation, so I will speculate. From past suggestions on things to change about the league, it seemed like a lot of people wanted more to do with money. So, I'd assume that a likely reason for the card series is to act as an optional money sink but one that has minimal or no effect on in-sim performance. Drawing on lessons from abusive game patterns, the optimal way to draw out more money is probably to create different limited series with exclusive cards that can only be gotten at that point in time. For example, having an Ultimus winning series of cards which can only be gotten in the offseason after the Ultimus in question. Including those people with the biggest bank accounts as chase cards could be another way to help drive demand.
While possibly effective, I could see strategies like that could also get people to rebel against the cards as too exploitative. I also assume that the goal of the league is not to act like an exploitative game company, and so maximizing short term cash drain is not the primary goal. So, to that end, I think it's important to have a system that will be sustainable. Ensuring that new cards keep entering circulation to give long-time participants needs to be balanced against the possibility of giving players starting to collect 5 or 10 seasons down the line a chance to get the cards they want. Options like throwback packs or offering cards as an additional bonus for activities (maybe instead of bonus media week pay?) could help as well.

[zaynzk]

ISFL now has trading cards, while I really enjoy this concept there are definitely a few problems for newer users like myself, I like most of the people here have spent my hard earned money on these packs to realize, I have no idea who any of these players are, I don’t know if my Forrest Gump card is worth more than my CJ Riley card, and at this moment there is no market to trade cards or do anything. Obviously things like trading and selling cards is likely a natural progression of dotts, and I feel like this and the other issues such as it not working on most browsers and the weirdness of stacking cards are both hopefully going to be fixed sometime soon. However ignoring my harsh comments I generally love the idea of trading cards, and hope down the line they can add things like limited edition cards, stats on the back of the cards, and obviously the most important thing for myself personally, S25 draft cards, who doesn’t want a card with their own face on it or just one with someone you have played with, I know I would love to have a Guy Fields card or a Zoe Watts one, and even a few worth competitors, like Felix Archstone or Jimi DeSoto.

219 words

[Asked Madden]

I am officially addicted to Dotts. Told myself I'd open 1 pack to see the quality. Packed an ultimus card and I haven't stopped since. It's definitely not without its faults though and improvements can certainly be made.
The first I'm sure is in the pipeline so I won't linger on it but these are trading cards, trading cards! What's the point in having a trading card that cannot be traded? Trading needs to be implemented as soon as possible alongside the ability to stack duplicates. The only thing worse than packing a dupe, is packing a dupe and seeing it dissappear (goodbye second silver Ruff Ruff you were a good boy).
Other things I would like to see, Draft day cards for the top 2 or 3 rounds. These guys will be in bronze/silver tier for a while so it would be nice for them to get a good looking card right from the off.
I would like to see a place where you can highlight your best 5 cards. Like some form of cabinet, where if someone looks at your Dotts profile they see you flex them.
Final thing I'd like to see is the ability to search for a card and see who has it, how rare it is etc. Just to get a feeling for how good the pack was.
Other than that, get it working on chrome. Using my phone I have to use the pre loaded spyware browser literally called "browser" to feed my habit so please continue to work.

[roastfuego]

To improve the Dotts experience I think we have to go to the digital market. That is right I am talking DUT (Dotts Ultimate Team). Let me take the cards that I have selected and put them in a roster and be able to go head to head with other users around the league. I am talking exclusive rights deals with the ISFL to hold a monopoly on the ISFL tag so we can essentially create a copy and paste every where with very minimalistic changes but people will continue to purchase our product as we are the only one's creating the type of content they want.

Another feature we should add is the ability to buy a bunch of packs at one time and then have a cool down, up to a week. In this example, I am able to purchase 7 packs on a Monday, open all the packs at once in a big pack opening and then have to have a cool down until the next week to purchase more packs. This allows those who lack patience such as myself to be able to open multiple packs at once and get some nice cards, while also not making the packs and collection just for those who have a ton of cash (since the one week cool down)