Season 40 Newsletter!

Swanty

Hello ISFLers!

Coming to you with the first of what will hopefully be monthly newsletters going forward.

It's great to be back in Head Office, and I want to start off with a big big thank you to @'Laser', firstly for stepping up when I needed to step down from the commissioner role in July last year and secondly for doing a fantastic job at the helm over this time! Laser is most definitely one of the biggest contributors in league history and I'm glad he'll be sticking around to enjoy the league in a well-deserved reduced capacity.

SEASON 40 AND THE S41 CLASS

We're well into the business end of season 40 and there's been some pretty exciting action so far. We've seen some records shattered at the ISFL level with a tight run for playoff spots in the ASFC on the cards. And in the DSFL we're seeing a lot of parity and some great football with all eight rosters rejuvenated by the 4th largest class of rookies the league has ever seen!

I'd be remiss if we didn't expand on how excited we are about this S41 class. The recruitment team did a fantastic job with the r/NFL post this year, and the rookie mentors and DSFL GMs have been incredible at getting our newest users approved and engaged. While the S36 season had just 2 more players than S41, that class had 40% of the players never update past 50 TPE. That figure is at 27% and falling for the S41 class. So it's probably fair to say this is the biggest crop of engaged users we've had in almost 3 real life years! I'm sure rookies and GMs alike are super excited about the upcoming S41 ISFL Draft!

Here's a chart of how many creates the ISFL has had by season:

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DOLLARS FOR DISCORD

A month ago, we expanded the league's Discord payment scheme in an attempt to both provide a stable income for users and to bring the ISFL community together, especially users who might not share a locker room. We upped the XP per message, introduced the scheme to the rookie server and changed the payout from seasonally to weekly. With 3 full weeks of payment under our belt, here's the key stats around how users have been paid so far:

[Image: image.png?width=744&height=191]

Overall, we're really happy with how it's gone so far. I know there simply isn't a one size fits all replacement for Twitter that will satisfy everyone, but it's encouraging to see a higher proportion of users receiving a steady income, and engagement between users outside of locker rooms much higher than it ever could have been on Twitter. It would be nice if the median were a little higher but we don't have the ability to modify the XP curve that MEE6 provides to achieve this without inflating even more the payouts for those at the top end. The only thing we could do is modify the $ value to pay out more for lower levels and less for higher levels, but I think users being able to easily predict how much they'll be paid out by taking their current MEE6 level and adding 5 zeroes to the end makes the system easy to understand.

As always, we're keen to hear your feedback on how you think it's going so far! And if you haven't already, please do check out the #role-select channel at the top of the ISFL server. There are a lot of different channels hidden behind roles to unlock!

FIRST FREE TRAINING

If you're reading this, chances are you've been around long enough to take advantage of the 'First Free Training' offer, which gives brand new users their first +5 TPE training for free by posting in the relevant thread.

Now that we've moved to the new banking portal, we ran into some issues where we couldn't prevent users from purchasing a regular weekly training in the same week they would claim the free one. So to solve that issue, and to simplify things even further for new users, we decided to integrate the two and retire the forum thread.

But rather than have users purchase a $0 value one-time version of the weekly training, we have simplified the process even further, starting off brand new users with $1M in their bank account. That way we don't have to offer a single free version of an existing $1M product. Instead, users can simply use this first million to get their first +5 training.

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT HEAD

We’d like to welcome @TeyonSchavari as our new Community Engagement Head! Teyon was the founding member of the CM team and brings a ton of experience moderating the ISFL Discord server as well as a lot of fantastic ideas on how we can provide a more engaging platform for our users to enjoy.

OFFSEASON SURVEY

First and foremost, thank you to all 243 of you who completed the survey! We sincerely appreciate the time and effort you put into giving feedback as we read every single response to better the league. Below, we'll summarize some key findings from the survey and if we can, how we plan to act on them.

A metric to monitor for the overall health of the league is "Do you plan to recreate when your current player's career is over?". As a league, we strive to build an environment that the community enjoys and wants to stay a part of, so we were pleased to see that over 66% of users answered yes, 33% answered unsure, and 1% answered no. We also noticed that over half the users who responded unsure, created in the past two seasons, and recreating may seem like a decision far in the future to consider, especially for new users.

League satisfaction: 5.53 out of 7
Likelihood to refer the league to a friend: 5.21 out of 7
Team locker room enjoyment: 6.11 out of 7
Desire to stay on current team: 6.06 out of 7
Too many league servers: 4.14 out of 7
Overwhelming amount of servers when scouted: 3.69 out of 7
New bank approval: 4.59 out of 5

It's safe to say that the new automated banking system has been met with outstanding approval. Any additional feedback was also passed along to the banking team and some of those changes have already been implemented, detailed below!

After carefully reading each response, grievances with the sim came up often. We would like to reiterate that the sim team will be taking the responses from the sim team survey and putting their efforts towards a potential sim balance patch in the future. More information can be found here.

We appreciate the honesty and thoughtfulness of each response we received and have also reached out to some users to further discuss the feedback we received. You may be hearing from us soon if you haven't already, or alternatively, feel free to reach out to any member of HO if there is anything you would like to discuss!

BANK PORTAL IMPROVEMENTS

Thanks to your feedback from the offseason newsletter, we've managed to make some key improvements to the banking system over the last few weeks, including:
* Take users straight to their user page instead of the bank home page
* Added a link after purchasing something to go back to your user page
* Revamped bulk transaction page
* Fixed issue that allowed spending under $-2M
* Fixed the timezone issue that was allowing multiple weekly training purchases
* Name/username changes and position/archetype switches now purchasable through a dropdown

There's still some more improvements to be worked through, but let us or @Raven know if you have any other suggestions.

That's all for this edition. If you have any questions, feel free to post below or reach out to a member of Head Office!