(S43) PT #1 - New Season, New Suggestions?

[Piercewise1]

Everything related to first-creation rookies could use an audit, just to make sure that information is still correct and links work, etc. I will highlight a few things I noticed from my first time through the process:

Rookie Point Task, Part 1, item 5: instructions emphasize to link your graded post, but multiple sources informed me that you don’t need to wait for a grade. Also, it might be a good idea to clarify that this first article is different that the “2x media bonus” for first-gen players and cross-reference that post

The “World Football Championship” is still mentioned in the Rookie Guide but based on the dates on that subforum it doesn’t appear to be active?

I didn’t see anything about the Discord media payout; would be great to get a mention in Rookie Point Task, Part 2, item 2 which still says “until we find a replacement [for Twitter]”

There’s a strong meta around attributes that isn’t obvious to new players, other than an emphasis on Speed – I nearly dumped a bunch of TPE into Agility before being told it wouldn’t be useful, and I would have been upset as a new user to have to spend most of my early money fixing my TPE allocation so soon after player creation just to make my player viable. I understand not wanted to be overly restrictive, but you could at least point people to an updated guide for player creation.

[3lewsers]

SHL Affiliate PT

[bernardhibou]

To boost viewership of streamed matches (for which we are all very grateful), how about implementing something like 'most valuable fan' for the best/most prolific cheering either in the YT chat or game day channel on the main isfl discord?  It could be either allocated to an individual or a team, and we could track the winners at the end of the season to see who the most 'passionate' fans are.  The reward could be either backloaded to end-of-season TPE to encourage sustained cheering, but it could also be a small cash earner for the winning fan (someone better than me at maths can think about what a reasonable amount might be over the course of a regular season/playoffs).  Depending on how far we want to go, we could even look into making custom cheering emojis for discord, which could be a nice thing to offer as a task for the graphically-inclined (with an appropriate award of course).

As with the football academy idea, this may not have legs, but just thought I'd put it out there!

[LANEFROST]

I believe having a player of the week would be beneficial for the league. Maybe an offensive, defensive, special teams, and rookie of the week. I think it would be a cool incentive to get and an honor to be awarded it. We could also do Dotts cards for them. It would be awesome if we could do an ISFL and DSFL one as well. The honor would give another incentive to earn and make players want to stay in the league. Another award we could do would be player of the month. People already earn this from the sim but having this as a league award would be amazing. Having Dotts cards for them would also be an amazing award. Another one would be a Quarterback of the Year Award or an Offensive Specialist of the Year Award. These are just a couple of awards that would give more incentive into the league and help the league grow.

[KaleSalad]

SHL affiliate

[JoeSteel]

As someone who's new to the league, I don't really have much opinion about what changes are A) necessary or 2) productive. But I did just create a player on the baseball simulation league and enjoyed the helper they had to build a player! If I understood the players it would've been perfect! But we already have the archetypes and attributes written out so that should help clear up confusion for people new to football. Overall, the sliders and different pages made the entire task seem a lot less daunting than ours, and I know much more about the NFL than I do any baseball leagues.
I'd also like to suggest a music player for streams! I know YouTube has poll option for chat, so ideally we could have a pool of songs to choose from and then we vote on what's next. It could be done via forum votes as well! Or even make it a prize for certain players/teams that they could choose the pool of music for when they're on screen!

[110radio]

I have already brought this up in the #suggestions channel, and I am going to continue to do so until it gets some steam. But my first New-Season-New-Suggestion is an exhibition match Birthday Bowl! We host an exhibition game once a month for anyone that wishes to participate, you are only allowed to participate in one Birthday Bowl per year (ideally in the month of your birth, but any single month is fine if you aren't comfortable sharing that info). In that match your player is given max stats, and we have a sweet color rush birthday decorated field (could even be themed - August we have a Mega Man birthday party, September its Bluey, October is whatever theme...and so on). Some alternates to that as well, as suggested by Wiz, could be Max stat at offense and Defense is set to 1 across the board, or vice versa, we could even flip flop the stats at the half or come up with some other fun way to mess with the sim. I think that would be a lot of fun to watch and a neat way to get our community involved!

I eagerly await for someone from HO to contact me regarding this magnificent idea.

[Akoustique]

Lots of good suggestions right away in the prompt itself. The thought of live play-by-play commentary during the Ultimus is huge, but comes with a bunch of logistical nightmares. One big thing that I thought would have been a great suggestion was the idea of a combined claim, which, apparently, is already in the works! The fact that HO is taking a lot of these suggestions to heart is very encouraging. One thing I think that would be huge is having some sort of weekly highlight/SportsCenter-esque show. Many people already do this as a podcast idea, but to have a league-sponsored Youtube show with predictions, highlights and all that, including video editors and the like, would be huge, and I would actually gladly volunteer my video editing "skills" to that sort of thing. And of course, the first thought people have is "we can't even find streamers, how are we going to find a YouTube team?"
I think a YouTube team would have a lot less on their plate to handle with this. Get two, maybe three people who love doing podcast work to record their voices. Have one or two video editors, and a dedicated graphics person to put the video together, and one of the editors can set the upload premiere on Youtube for that week. Rinse and repeat throughout the season. Anyways, just my two cents! HO, reach out if you need an editor lmao

[Jimi64]

I've always found that, ironically, the weakest part of this league is actually the sim that the whole thing is based around. I would guess that the majority of users don't watch the live games, at least that's what I can tell based on the numbers of live viewers stated on youtube. One idea that I had to potentially boost viewership as well as to promote some community engagement was to allow users to make an introduction video to the day of games. Almost like a "and you're watching Disney channel" type thing except it'd be a user in the league, like me, saying "My name is Jimi64, my player is Eliot Bukowski, a kicker for the Orange County Otters, and you're watching the International Simulation Football League" and then I shotgun a beer. Users could send in their videos in the beginning of the season for approval. I know many users probably wouldn't be comfortable showing their face, but there could be other ways to introduce the stream too that they could come up with. I think this would make people want to tune in to the stream in order to see who would be doing the intro and what they'd come up with for it. They may be more likely to keep the stream up and wait for their team to play, watching other games in the meantime.

[Rusfan]

I made this suggestion earlier in general chat and I’d like to expand on it a bit here. Every season we have an ISFL and DSFL draft to welcome new players into the league and those drafts are both exactly as long as the draft class is. If you have a 50-man class, you will have 50 picks in the draft. This is the obvious solution to the question of how to find every player a team, but what if it wasn’t the only one? I think there is another way that both helps weed out IA players that would never come back anyways and add more player agency to those that might fall but still be worthy of finding a team. The NFLs UDFA system would work fantastically on a smaller scale here. Say we take the final 10 slots of any draft class, and instead of them just going to whatever team has the pick, they would go into a version of FA where it would work just like FA for regular players.