*Leagueonomics - Exploring a Cross-League Exchange Rate

[Crunk]

Intro

What's up, ISFL! Crunk here - I'm that GM HOFer/sim engine voodoo practitioner/former author of your least favourite power rankings/guy you haven't heard of before (depending on when you joined the league). I'm the proud user of 3 retired players and 4 active ones across 4 active (1 defunct) sim leagues. I feel the need to list my credentials here, because this covers the super serious topic of sim league economics. I'm not the most knowledgeable about this stuff, really - I can only imagine the groans coming out of your average SHL old timer if they read this - but I have been around the block enough to know a little.

(Also, for those unfamiliar with me, I'll probably be using some hyperbole to make my points at times, and more than likely write some inflammatory stuff in a throwaway manner. Take the style with a pinch of salt. Thanks.)

I'm here to do a pretty rudimentary analysis of league economics in the three large, established, free-to-play money-based leagues, the International Simulation Football League, the Pro Baseball Experience and the Simulation Hockey League.

Why these three in particular? Well, they are three leagues with a pretty high crossover in their user base (though I feel that crossover could be higher) and they all share similar philosophies around league money (no paying to win, thank you) and methods of earning league funds. In nerd terms - their economic models are similar. Also, they happen to be the three that I have active players in. My sincerest apologies to whichever basketball league people are trying to make viable these days, and a huge shout out to the Simulation Soccer League who have a system that places less importance on the league dollar there. Interesting model.

What these leagues also have in common is a class of superusers - the holders of multiple jobs who do an disproportionate amount of work to keep the league running smoothly. These users are frequently so invested in their chosen league that they don't participate in the others. They know they don't have the time to earn enough money in another cash league to make a good player, so why bother? It's often not a lack of interest holding these people back, it's a lack of time, and given that point tasks can be affiliate linked between leagues, it is obviously money that is the main issue. And this isn't just for them - I am sure multiple other cross leaguers would love the freedom to transfer a few million for equipment from one league to the other in a pinch, rather than being forced to spew out some media quickly.

My solution to this - you may have guessed it from the title - a cross-league exchange rate system. I'm not the first to have this idea - far from it. It's something you see mentioned occasionally with little urgency or follow up. Well, here are some thoughts in that direction.

The problem is that sim league currencies have different values, so clearly they could not be exchanged 1 for 1. We'd need some kind of exchange rate mechanism to facilitate such a process, and for that we need to look at the relative values of the currencies in relation to each other. That, in my uninformed yet ambitious opinion, can be split into two parts - spending power, and ease of acquisition. I'll call them "Cost of Max Earning" and "Earning" for ease of presentation.


Cost of Max Earning

Let's start with the easy side of the equation. Using the time frame of a single, typical season (8 weeks for the ISFL and SHL, 7 weeks for PBE), I'll be using the cost of max earning, and define that as the cost of buying equipment and a season's worth of trainings. There are multiple barriers to doing this completely accurately across the span of a career - restrictions on equipment and training levels bought by rookies exist - so for the sake of simplicity (read: laziness) I'll use the cost of max earning from your second season onwards in any given league.

And here they are:



Now clearly, there is some utility in earning more than the above amounts, but it is diminished. All leagues allow you to save up for future seasons, they all allow you to gamble like a degenerate, and in the SHL and PBE you can commission signatures from others. But I'm going to classify high rolling and looking fly as unimportant here. We're all here to earn TPE and have players that succeed.

"Gee, Crunk, I didn't know that max earning in the SHL was so easy! That PBE must be really tough to keep up in!"

Thanks, expositional voice of my own creation, for making the exact mistake that leads me nicely onto the next section.


Earning

Oh boy, here we go. League money is earned in different ways, but I think for the sake of this article I will classify them into three groups:

• Contracts
  
• Low Effort Earnings
  
• High Effort Earnings
  

Each of these comes with their own... challenges. But here we go. I will be assuming the earnings of a max earner who is fairly active. You'll see what that means as this unfolds.

Contracts

Okay, so - given that I decided earlier that the purpose of this is to facilitate max earning, I am going to use the average contract for a max earner in all three leagues, per season, from their rookie season until three seasons after regression (a typical length of time for someone to fight the TPE vampire). I will also be assuming that the contract is a minimum contract, because taking the minimum is pretty much the norm in sim leagues. You pretty much only chase the money if you're trying a career as an experiment or to make a point about the realism of sim league economies. Or you're too lazy to write media and don't care if your team wins. Given adjustment clauses and the PBE frontloading system, this is pretty hard to calculate exactly, so I'm going to lean on the fact that I have/have had minimum max earning contracts in all these leagues. I'm not showing my working entirely here, but these are based on my contracts and I hope that others would agree that these look about right.



The percentages at the bottom of the table are the proportion of the previously calculated max earning amounts covered by contracts. The PBE with a nice, user-friendly 28%, with the SHL not far behind. The ISFL is the obvious outlier here, with a very stingy 15.8%. I hadn't quite realised this level of disparity previously.

Defensive side note - Yes, I know you don't have to accept minimum contracts. I didn't have to in the other leagues either, but still made more, relatively speaking.


Low Effort Earnings

I'm going to roll three income streams into one here:

PT Money - In the PBE, the JPT earns you $300K, but its only available 4 weeks of the season. It's completely incidental and a byproduct of earning TPE, so it fits here. So does the $500K earned in the Wiki task in the ISFL, so that's included too.
Fantasy Money - 2 of the 3 leagues offer TPE for fantasy participation, so let's assume your theoretical max earning user plays fantasy in all 3 leagues, as a minimum. I'll also assume they, like me, aren't very good at it. No PBE prize money here.
Daily Engagement - ISFL has Gen Chat, SHL has Chirper, but PBE Twitter, I am reliably informed, has just died. Oh well, I am going to assume that Hummus and friends find a decent low effort replacement for the $750K per week that just disappeared into the ether. Fuck Elon Musk.

I posted 7 messages in ISFL Gen Chat this week to find out exactly what this would pay, and it came out at the princely sum of $200K, which is considerably lower than the $750K PBE pays and even the $600K that the SHL pays for similar - but I am reliably informed that a more typical payout for users who partake in ISFL General chat is $500K. It demands a bit more effort than the other two, but is still roughly comparable. I suppose. I still don't like it.

Numbers are below:



Well this is interesting. The ISFL, where your contract covers the least of your costs, is also the league that typically gives you the least for low effort tasks - though it has a higher earning potential in its weekly engagement (time to start spamming gen chat, my friends). The SHL, however, is much more forgiving on its users.


High Effort Earnings

So, with our costs of max earning not entirely covered yet, the intrepid max earning sim leaguer has to resort to doing more stuff. There are two real options here - league jobs and content creation. Let's see how each league rewards these.

League Jobs

So, there are too many different league jobs and league specific tasks for me to list and consider them all. As you have probably gathered by now, I'm not dealing in exact numbers here - I'm not doing rocket science in this article (though I am aiming for something with a bit more credibility than homeopathy or body language analysis.) With that in mind, I'm going to choose five decently paying jobs that exist in all 3 leagues, and list a typical salary for them (taken from averages of recent payouts). The five jobs I picked were the first 5 that came to mind, probably because I have done 4 of them in various places. Whatever, let's take a look:



So, there's a pretty decent balance between the leagues here in that a league job can be expected to cover about half of your max earning costs in a given season. The ISFL seems slightly high on this count - wait, I can hear that expositional voice of my own creation approaching...

"But Crunk, we have to offer high salaries to fill the jobs!"

I disagree, expositional voice. The other leagues seem to fill jobs offering a bit less, relatively. Maybe there could be another reason for this? (Spoiler: I think there is, and you won't have to wait long.)

Content Creation

I know I'm overexplaining these categories somewhat - mainly so the word count and therefore payment for this article will be reflective of the amount of research that went into it (some) - but I'm going to make the outlandish statement here that the two main forms of content creation are media and graphics. Don't @ me. For the sake of using these though, I am going to have to standardise the submissions.

For the media, we'll go with the "keen rookie classic" - a 5,000 word article paid off the main media scale, not including any discretionary bonuses (because the grader might have had a bad day).

As far as graphics go, let's say you submit two signatures a week. PBE pays at a flat rate, but the ISFL and SHL both have quality to consider. I'm not a great GFX guy, but I'm going to use the metric of "a graphic that I could knock up in about 45 minutes". This would be a 2/5 in the SHL or a 3/7 in the ISFL, based on personal experience.

Again, the numbers:



Oh no. Well, let's scrap the whole idea. The PBE and SHL are pretty balanced in terms of what they offer content creators - it's a slightly financially worse option than contributing to the functioning of the league, for a bit less effort - but the ISFL offers you more than a HO member (who doubles as an updater) would earn... if you submit two 3/7 signatures a week. Balance is, at this point, officially out of the window. If the ISFL in its current form was a country, it would be Zimbabwe - GFX is a money printer. There is absolutely no question that this would have to change in order to justify a sim league exchange rate. You can't have one league with this kind of mechanism. Did I mention that the SHL and PBE limit the number of submissions per week? ISFL, with their incredibly generous pay scale, do not. Wow.

And yes, I know, PBE and SHL allow peer to peer graphics transactions, but these jobs are finite by definition and they only come from other users. The money isn't being created out of nothing like in the Inflation Simulation Football League. So I'm not even factoring that in. This is for a 3/7 graphics creator - nobody is P2Ping them shit. Imagine how much you can make in the ISFL if you can actually do graphics well.

So with the project currently dead in the water, let's change the scope up a bit. Let's pretend the ISFL did something insane like limiting graphics earnings to 10M a season. (While opening up P2P, like the other leagues, but just like those, we will not count those transactions here.)



Well, that looks a bit more even. If anything, PBE's content creation looks a little bit cheap in its payouts, to be honest. But then, PBE offers more in the way of passive income streams to compensate. Direct all complaints to Joe.

So let's assume that our max earning user chooses exactly one of these income streams, and take an average across all possibilities for the High-Effort Earnings.



Well, that's kind of to be expected. The ISFL, which gives the least away for free, rewards high effort users the most, in a relative sense (even when including my giganerf to the photoshop money tree - the numbers are insane without that nerf.) All around, the leagues are similar with this one small tweak.

Just for fun, let's view all three types of earning together.



Well well well. The ISFL is the hardest league to earn money in, and the SHL is the easiest, by my very approximate calculations. That isn't a sentence I expected to write here. I am not sure why.


Exchange Rate Calculations

So, I have the cost of max earning, and the average amount earned by a decently active user in each league (obligatory ISFL GFX caveat). To find out how much money is worth - I guess I just split the difference.



OK, those numbers are kind of funky, but if you do a little bit of rounding and appropriate division you get these exchange rates

1 $SHL = 1.2 $ISFL
1 $ISFL = 1.2 $PBE
1 $SHL = 1.44 $PBE

or, for the hard of maths-ing:

$1,000,000 in SHL = $1,200,000 in ISFL
$1,000,000 in ISFL = $1,200,000 in PBE
$1,000,000 in SHL = $1,440,000 in PBE

That worked out kind of nicely, I think. If something like a league money exchange were to happen, I would recommend limiting it to multiples of the above amounts, as the numbers get awkward in the other direction. (694444 bucks, anyone? ugh)

What about the practicalities?

Well, it would require... a banker from each league communicating, a bit of additional code in the ISFL and SHL banks... and not much more.

If a commissioner was worried about their league being flooded with dirty foreign sim league cash, you could place seasonal limits on transfers, or even make it peer-to-peer to keep the total amount of money in your economy the same (though I would recommend enforcing the exchange rates above to avoid this being abused).

However, I can't imagine another commissioner agreeing to this while the ISFL graphics payouts are in their current state, as I have argued above.

If there's an actual appetite for this, though, it wouldn't be too much of a project, given what these leagues have achieved in the past.


Conclusions

I think a sim league currency exchange is both possible and practical, based on the above. It could boost activity in all leagues. Dear commissioners, let infinite / Hummus / [insert prominent SHL user] have a max earning player in a second league without doing much more sim league work. They've earned it.

-----------------------------------

Footnotes on League Economies

ISFL

Graphics, though. What's that about? It's not like the other leagues have bare forums or anything. I nearly stopped writing this media to churn out a few signatures, which would take me less time and pay me more. Bizarre.

GFX aside, offers the least money for similar activity levels, but that's mostly in contracts and low effort earnings - I'd probably advocate for adding a million to every contract minimum and $23m to the cap as a part-fix. Mid-earners are people too.


PBE

Seems to be the middle of the road league in terms of average-user economics. OK. Definitely needs to sort a Twitter replacement quickly, or all users will start to feel the pinch. Also, could probably offer a bit more for content creators, to make it a viable option for those not wanting a league job.


SHL

The most generous league, financially, to the theoretical average active user. There is lots of scope for mid-earning without a job/content creation habit, and a bit of profit if you do have one. Nice one.

-----------------------------------

Disclaimers/Apologies

• All opinions above are my own.
  
• If anyone did this before me and better, sorry. I don't read much media these days. I was a grader here once, so blame grading PTSD.
  
• If I've fucked up the numbers somewhere, my bad. I've done enough averaging and rounding that hopefully it doesn't affect my final results too much.
  
• I am deeply sorry for not tagging user katarn22 where I mentioned mid-earners.
  
• Fuck Elon Musk again.
  

[zaynzk]

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

[Modern_Duke]

Should have just posted a screenshot of this article as gfx

[Aleris]

LF Sugar Daddy to fund my max earning in 4 sim leagues. I have feet pics

[Hordle]

Ban graphics

[ztarwarz]

So it's not just my imagination that it's weird swoosh already has more money than I do.

[wizard_literal]

Science!

[Baron1898]

Seriously why are graphics so comparatively lucrative

[Sebster]

econ 201 with professor crunk is now in session

[Tylertokesome04]

Media Articles drive community engagement and discussion in the forums and in the discord servers, they should be compensated properly for what they bring to the community.