(S24) - PT 5 - Trade Ya

[Thor]

SHL CW Task affiliation (username: Feeler)

[AL_GRINGO]

PBE Welfare

[Swanty]

On the topic of taking money out of the economy, I'm not sure that is going to do a whole lot to increase the value of contracts. It will always be much easier to make money from media than your contract.

One proposal that I would put forward for consideration would be to make media/Twitter/graphics payouts be a multiplier of whatever your salary is. So every single way of making money in the league is dependent on whatever contract you've signed. You would still be able to make far more money from media than your contract, but the actual amount of it is dependent on how hard you negotiated. That would incentivise every player to challenge their team to give them a good contract, and really make GMs sweat in terms of budget caps!

On the other side of the coin is the availability of things to spend money on. On this, I have three ideas:

Buying another player
This would allow only the top earners the option to purchase a second player, allowing them to run two characters at the same time. Consideration would have to be made for how the user tags along with the player. I would propose that the second player is treated like a bot player, in that the user does not follow the player and join locker rooms etc, but simply has the ability to manage and update them.

The price would need to be high enough that the player pool doesn't double overnight, something like $50m feels about right. You could potentially then offer the ability to create a 3rd/4th player with a doubling cost each time ($100m, $200m). Once these players retire, the user would then need to pay again if they wanted a second player again.

Not only would these one-off payments take money out of the economy for very little cost, but the user would need to purchase equipment / training multiple times.

Holding off regression
We know why regression exists, but it must be tough for some users to say goodbye to their star players. Perhaps a way to incetivise veterans to part with their money is the ability to give their guys one more year. Each year at the point of regression, players could have the option to pay $10m to push back their regression % to whatever the value is one season earlier. So for example, instead of regressing 20% in their 7th season, a player could pay $10m to avoid it. Then in their 8th season, they could pay another $10 million to regress by 20% instead of 25%.

This would allow very wealthy players to prolong their careers by around two seasons, but at the cost of $70m or so, potentially helping with a HoF push. This would be a low impact way to take a significant amount of money out of the economy from the top earners.

Cosmetic Items
Another proposal would be to introduce the ability to purchase items that don't affect the balance of the game, but provide a cosmetic benefit. Some ideas off the top of my head:

• $3m to rent your team's endzone for a week, changing the image to whatever you want
  
• $5m to change your team's colors in the sim for a week
  
• $5m to add a custom emote to Discord / forum for the duration of a season
  
• $5m for a custom role / colour in Discord / forum
  

[TheCC]

I think that the Dotts premiere has been really good overall. It’s been a lot of fun to see people showing each other their cards in locker rooms. It’s also been cool to see our own cards when people pull them, at least for those of us that currently have cards in circulation. This has been mentioned a number of times already, but I feel like I have to say that the ability to trade cards would be cool. They are called “the ISFL’s official trading cards”, after all. One thing that would be cool, but much harder for devs to implement would be something like an auction house for these cards. I’m picturing something similar to the auction house in NBA 2K’s My Team cards. As a dev myself though, it doesn’t sound like a fun or easy project to take on. I think that another thing that could be cool to add would be making cards for DSFL award winners. Also, there are currently cards for ISFL award winners, but nothing about Pro Bowls. As someone that was nominated for an award and didn’t win, but did make the Pro Bowl, I would especially like if my card had some indication of me being a 1 time Pro Bowler on it. That’s all I can think of for now!

[UberBJ]

Dotts are awesome. Dotts are more important than Weekly Training, it is known. But Dotts could be even better.

I think a cool series to introduce would be special edition Rookie cards showing the round/pick they were taken to commemorate that special moment. I know rookie cards are pretty awesome in real life as the prospects turn into legends later on, so maybe make them a limited release for the month of the draft or something. You could even do some half varients where if you drawn an imaginary diagonal line across the card, the top half is the DSFL team colors, and the bottom is the ISFL team colors. This would help display the moment and transition of the draft. Plus it gives send downs a fun reminder of where their destiny lies.

I'm hesitant to suggest this, mostly due to concern of money laundering, but having a marketplace for ultra obscure cards and league money could be interesting if implemented correctly. My only fear there is that it would be exploited by bad actors. I think you would have to attach a static or variable value to cards to make that work and not to make Dotts Packs an easy money return. Like maybe make an Ultimus Series YKW card cost 100k, but a bronze standard would be like 5k. Idk, just an idea.

I know it's been mentioned, but trading would be super fun and could create a cool micro-economy within the Dotts community, without involving money. I think it should be put in 100% if the time and effort isnt too great to facilitate it.

[Bwestfield]

Money is crazy to think about in the ISFL. There is so much of it. Lots of players choose a light contract to be on the team they like the most which in turn hurts parity a bit. Right now they are using trading cards to pull money out of the economy to make it more valuable. The casino tried as well and I think they are about even. So with the casino you have something fun that involves money that doesn't necessarily hurt the economy at all. The main source of income for most players is graphics and media. I know at one point graphics had a limit on how many you could submit in a week to stop it from getting out of hand. Now media seems to be the biggest culprit with players writing anthologies about a certain topic. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though as it adds a lot of perspective in players thoughts about what is going on around the league and new insights that some may not have thought about. If you want to stop all the best players from being on the same team you'll need to either adjust the cap for each team or lower the minimum salaries per TPE tier. Teams should have a good blend of players, young and old, new and experienced. If we're worried about the league economy, look no further than the TPE tiers.

[Net]

PBE

[Jangorhino]

I understand that the trading cards are very cool in concept, and were also created as another way to get money out of the ISFL economy, but personally, they fall 100% flat. For the first reason, why would I ever buy cards and own them when I can see the cards posted on the forums, in locker rooms, and apparently on the Dotts website. All I personally care about Dotts is being able to see the cards. Is there any mechanic to stop me from downloading that picture and adding it as a signature? Not that I’m aware of, it’s 100% not in the rules right now, and quite frankly, I don’t know if it should be. Are we really going to police someone’s Dotts catalogue to know if they own a card to use it? Secondly, even if I was going to purchase Dotts cards, there are currently over 250 active players in the league. Right now, you cannot buy enough packs and enough cards to get a card per active player. This means that if you wanted to get everyone’s card at every TPE level they would have throughout their career, this is completely impossible right now. What’s the point of something collectable if you literally have no way to collect them all. The last big issue I have is that they are offering duplicate cards within a pack or even within a season. So now, out of your 250 cards, you might get duplicates, making it further impossible for a player to get all of the cards each season. For me, Dotts is a complete failure and there is literally no way I’m spending my league money on it. If you created it with the intention of removing money from the economy, you failed in the desires of some of the richest players. TL;DR - you need to offer more of an incentive to buy than you already have, you need to allow more packs per day/per season/per week (because why would you limit me if your entire goal is getting money out of the league economy).

opinions are like assholes, imo this is an asshole opinon

[Nokazoa]

I have a PT pass but I'm reading through these. Some of yall have shitty takes.

[Mavfatha]

We're trying to take money out of the economy? I have a significantly harder time making money here than in other leagues so this does not entirely make sense to me to be honest. I was making serious money from HO, contract, and Twitter for quite a few seasons and I still do not have a significant bank stored up where I could "coast" like I can in PBE at this point. To me the biggest "problem" so to speak is just attachments to our teams and not wanting to leave, so even though some of us could use the money we would rather take a team-friendly deal so that we can stay on the team we are familiar with and then hope they bring in some free agents with the extra money to make the team better and a better locker room to be a part of. I do not realistically think there is a way to take away from this attachment to your team except for the folks that do not really care to begin with and want to roleplay as an expensive free agent. Raising the minimums would somewhat help just because teams would stop being able to afford players, but then you get people complaining that they cannot afford to sign players that want to be there or active folks could get stuck as a free agent.