There are a few additions I would make to the Dotts catalogue
- DSFL Heroes: Adding the entire Developmental Simulation Football League would not be a worthwhile venture for the cards but a limited range of players would be great. Getting DSFL teams to pick the one or two players from each team in the set would be great. You would see players like Chris Ramos or Sim Snowbow who will/would never make the ISFL get cards they deserve.
- Removal of Doubles: I don’t know if it is possible to do this with the coding and stuff within the website but removing the chance of getting doubles would go really well in improving the Dotts experience.
- Position Switch Series: Looking at high TPE players that have swapped positions and making a card based on that which includes teams, old position and the new position. Players could include Laszlo Forty-Two, Dexter Banks, Brave Ulysses and more. Maybe you can call them ‘Out of Position’ cards.
- Number 1 Draft Pick Series: Players picked first overall in the ISFL draft. Including position and team and season.
- Draft Steals Series: Picking players that are draft steals and making a series cards on them including position, team and draft season.
As far as Dotts go, I think the graphics being done on them and the info/different types of cards out there is pretty cool. I also like that there are historic players that are out there to collect. With that being said, Dotts is really just a way to look at graphics of the players since obviously we can’t actually have trading cards. So for that reason, this isn’t something that is really appealing to me (and many others on the site). I don’t see the appeal of spending any money on buying them since it is no different than going through graphics or even just looking at signatures. Also I think something many card collectors look forward to is the cards potentially having value down the road. Like if you pull a solid rookie card and that athlete turns out to be the next Barry Sanders, who knows what that card would be worth. With Dotts, there isn’t really any benefit like that around. Maybe if there were a virtual card beckett or something like that to monetize the cards and you could sell them back somewhere that could be cool. But then again, that would also not solve the whole taking money out of circulation problem. Basically, I think that they look great just I don’t really get what the actual benefit of buying them would be.
Some financial training programs can assist the rookies and even the average players to learn how to negotiate a contract beyond the minimum wage. When a rookie is drafted, he should understand that he still has some, albeit minor, bargaining power with the team. After excelling at bargaining techniques, he may get a contract beyond the minimum wage. The financial advisors can also help the rookies for sustainable finance management. Since a football player on average cannot last more than three years in the league, and many can get severely injured within 10 games, the players need fabulous financial advices to learn how to make enough money out of 10 games, for the rest of his life, such as lifelong disability cares. There are possibilities other than just artful negotiating and careful financial planning. An obvious answer is to increase the minimum wage across the league, although the new wage threshold will become the new common practices for the players to grip. The league can also consider some salary cap on the star player of each team and the minimum salary cost of each team, like '89 percent spread rule’ for the $118.2M/y over four years. When the highest salary of a player is controlled and the total cost cannot be lower than a certain portion, a lot of average players can benefit. The collective bargaining agreement might also help as the players form a union to obtain a better deal collectively, although the fundamental inequality among the players seems less resolved by CBA. Ultimately, the league should make the pie larger, by securing larger television contracts with major networks and selling more tickets. The league contributes to the US economy by about 2%, and some benefits should trickle down to the average players and the rookies.
League economy will never be able to be balanced when the league is trying to incentivize everything because that is what precisely provides people the ability to make up however much money they want elsewhere -- be it through league jobs, media, graphics, or twitter. An inherent flaw of wanting to fix salary issues is that it detracts from the need to then generate content elsewhere. So, fixing the salary issue is going to simultaneously cut content creation. Really, the only way to make salary something hotly debating between players and teams is to make it the primary method of income for league activities and to allow teams a high enough salary cap to pay people amounts large enough to make it worth it. If I am going to need to write a bunch of articles or do other work to afford equipment and training anyway, I am *not* going to bother fighting about salary that much because at the end of the day I am fighting over needing to write 1 or 2 articles vs 3 or 4. Negligible in the grand scheme of things.
All-in-all, for Dotts to be successful, we need to be able to *do* something with the cards. A few people before me talked about creating stats for the cards and doing some sort of "Ultimate Team" kind of game. Perhaps people could compete (like in fantasy) and be awarded TPE for that. But to be honest, I think income needs to be addressed moreso than outflow because creating ways for money to flow out requires programs to be managed which requires people to run them which they have to be compensated for. Not to mention, even if you create super successful things that people want to throw their money at, it won't fix the economy if they will easily make it back by just cranking out twitter posts, media posts, and have their league job money flowing in, etc.
Fixing the economy comes with great risk..... but it needs to first start with HO determining priorities, because if they are alright with disincentivizing content creation a bit, then inflow into the economy should be fixed first. Maybe that means capping non-salary income per season which could help spread the work around for league jobs and limit burnout but there are obvious risks to that. Maybe that means having people choose 1 or 2 forms of non-salary income -- jobs, media, graphics, or twitter. But as long as income is endless (which frankly... it should somewhat be because people should be compensated for their time), we need to be weary of creating new outflows of cash because it won't necessarily fix anything if the inflow rises with it.
Yo fuck dotts. All my homies hate dotts! I'm kidding, you guys are awesome and I appreciate the amount of work the entire team has put into creating these cards. I have only bought 3 packs for a few reasons. The first reason that comes to mind is that the price is the same as the lower tier weekly training and that's too damn high. I'll circle back to this point. The second reason is that the last pack i got had 5 bronze players. Not current either, 5 shitty old players from user that didnt stick around. Making and delivering these cards was a colossal waste of everyone's time. Nobody wants this shit and i see other peopls pull out multiple rare cards in 1 pack and i see that I just waisted my money. I camt think of a single reason anyone would give half a flying fuck about some defensive tackle from season 5 that stopped updating after 2 seasons. The Third and perhaps the biggest reason that I won't be buying mors cards is that they're useless as is. No trading, no games, no duplicates, no selling, nothing. I cant help but think that time would have been better spent setting up a trade market for the cards so that they hold at least some value. The best idea I've heard for use of the cards is b the ultimate team idea that 37th chamber was working om a while back. Maybe that would add at least some value to cards of players belonging to ancient IA users. I highly encourage reaching out to him to see what he has to offer.
As far as I can tell the introduction of Dotts has been a smashing success the league and has done it's intended job of taking currency out of the league unlike the casino, which is hemorrhaging money back into the hands of users but still the casino works make huge salaries lol. There are a few series that I feel could be a good fit for Dotts, the first of which is a series involving some of the performance's of the year that have both the players and their stats on the cards so you can highlight some of the best games of a player's career. The second series that could benefit Dotts includes GM cards for the history of the league, which some might find interesting and ultimately wouldn't take too much effort to make and implement into circulation. A third series that could work is an autograph series of cards whereas some of the top players in the league have a card that has a signature on the card to make them even more rare and desirable for people to collect and possibly trade in the future. Speaking of trading, this is the only way to keep the interest in Dotts long term as people will eventually get bored if the cards just sit in their collections but trading would ultimately take Dotts to a whole other level. Another suggestion for Dotts would include something of a loyalty program where if you buy packs for consecutive days like 7, 28, 50, etc. They will be eligible for various free swag such as free packs, chance to choose a card they want, or other positive things.
So my personal opinion is I do not care all that much about Dotts cards. The premise is not all that enticing to me but I do think it is a fun thing the league has added for its users. In terms of suggestions one I had was the possibility of specific card packs. For example, maybe I am looking for a specific card of a player who once played on the Orange County Otters. There could be an orange county pack or a conference specific pack that would increase my odds of hitting the card I want. Obviously these packs would have to be at an increased price which may help take more money out of the league. Another suggestion may be game or moment specific cards. So for example a WR card for the specific game that the individual receiving record was broken. The card could have the teams score and date of the game on it to make it more unique. My third and final suggestion would be to have non player cards such as GMs. The GMs also help shape this league so having cards that memorialize them and the specific championship teams they built could be a cool feature for Dotts. They may not even have to be full cards, but rather have the GM on a "trade card" where the GM picture is in the middle and the two halves of the trade are on each side respectively.