Righteo, so a few days ago I had a discussion in the Pro Baseball Experience with one of the users over there about the three different money leagues and what was the easiest to play. They are someone in which the Pro Baseball Experience is their main league and they play in the International Simulation Football League as a second league. They had some comments about if this or that was easier in each league but none of that is really important. The thing was his impression of these leagues was flipped to mine but the International Simulation Football League was my first and then I moved to the Pro Baseball Experience and then the Simulation Hockey League third. So I wasn’t sure if this was just my perception of the leagues or what was true. So I went and was looking at info and putting this spreadsheet together to see what the differences are with how money is earned between these three leagues.
So this spreadsheet is fairly straight forward. I have the three leagues and at the top is a figure for what it should cost to max earn for one season. This is the highest level of “equipment” and the highest level of training every week. Obviously some seasons might be a bit more if there are holidays/expansion or what not extending the season out.
SPREADSHEET
A few notes on the figures, most of these figures are what the pay is for a whole season. A few though are what pay is per item like if you are on a card designing team. There are also a few jobs that are paid per work done, for these I have tried to talk to people in charge and get what an average job payout is per season. So in practice a few of these numbers might move around a little bit but honestly at the point of finishing that spreadsheet I was pretty happy with it. It also took me about 5 hours of spreadsheet work to get all this and track down people for info that wasn't readily available so if there was able to be a bonus for that I would not say no.
Playing Contracts
So let’s get to it. I’m going to start with the absolute easiest way to make money, contracts. These are pretty much automatic and the more TPE you have, the more money you get. With these money numbers here I was just assuming the minimum you are allowed to take because that is what the majority of people do. Obviously you are free to try and bargain for more but these are the amounts starting out, half way through and the highest minimum you can take.
All of the three leagues start out in a pretty similar spot percentage wise but I guess that isn’t surprising as the closer you get to zero the closer your percentage will get. When we get up towards the higher end of contracts we see a fairly sizable difference. Both the PBE and SHL are on the higher side of a percentage here with a 10 million dollar contract handing you 40% of your max earning season just for managing to breathe. SHL isn’t too far behind with a 6 million dollar deal giving you 34%. ISFL is lagging behind here with a maxxed minimum contract only giving you 23% of a max earning season.
Written Media
We have a couple of things here in which I really think the ISFL stands out in making it easier to earn money and this is written media and graphics. As you can see if you write one thousand, two thousand five hundred or five thousand words it works out as a better percentage of money back for your effort in the ISFL. I think this works out for the league also as there is always very much written media. I am not active enough in the SHL to properly know how much media they have but the ISFL always seems to have more media happening than in the PBE. Maybe this is one of the reasons why. Forty three percent of a season paid for in the ISFL is absolutely an insane amount. If you can line that up with a 2x media bonus you can almost cover a whole season with one admittedly big media.
Graphics
Graphics is something I love talking about and is how I have made most of my money in sim leagues. There is no surprise that SHL is the harshest on graphics and I have instead had to write media for money here and mainly just replied on twitter.
So in the ISFL I have submitted my fair share of sigs in the past and have generally got a fair chunk of 5/7 and a few 6/7 scores. I’m not the world’s greatest designer but I think I have a decent level and usually think those kinds of scores are fair enough. They will usually take me at least an hour, maybe closer to two for the 6/7 scores so there is a fair bit of time put into these. A 5/7 though in the ISFL is going to pay me 3 million dollars now which is roughly 14% of a max earning season. I think that is fairly good whereas if we say a similar level graphic in the SHL was a 3/5 that would only earn me 0.75 million which would be around 4% of a max earning season. So as far as graphics grading goes looking at the chart the SHL is clearly a lot harder to earn a living amount with just graphics especially when it’s fairly known that the SHL graphics grading is fairly brutal. If I was to be doing graphics in SHL I would want to only be doing player to player transactions.
Now speaking of player to player transactions we come to the PBE. I am talking a bit separately about the PBE here because really it’s the most different. The rules there are you can submit four graphics a week and they don’t get graded. Unless you are blatantly cheating the system and it’s noticed you will get 600k for each of those graphis for up to 2.4 million a week which all in all isn’t too bad. If you stuck with that you would get around 17 million a season which isn’t going to fully cover a season but it’s not bad.
The main way to earn money with graphics in the PBE though is the player to player transactions. When I first started the league, this was the first league with this in and I hated it because not many people answer your sig shop with a request. In the ISFL all graphics are league paid so heaps of people pile into a new sig shop to help people out and even if they don’t you can just make graphics for anyone. I opened a PBE sig shop though and almost no one cared. Soon enough though I found a niche that people wanted in the PBE and player to player transactions have worked out very well for me so if you are comfortable with graphics it is definitely a way to make a lot of money. Three million is a fairly common player to player figure but the max amount in most situations is 5 million so that can add up very quickly.
Podcasts
Ok the graph is a little misleading on this one but I wasn’t sure how else to show this cause it does vary depending on the number of hosts. But no matter what way you cut this one the PBE wins by a long fucking way.
ISFL and SHL have a set payout depending on time spent on the podcast and that is split between the hosts on the podcast. In the PBE there is a set payout depending on time and that is just given to all the hosts. So if you have a one person podcast that goes for an hour you get four million. If you are on a podcast with three others then you all get that four million. For real this is maybe the best way to earn money in any sim league and a lot more people should be using this.
Twitter
Twitter is one of my favourite ways to earn some money in sim leagues. It’s never huge money but the effort isn't huge either. You can play in one of these leagues and if you wanted to just do weekly PTs and buy training then twitter might be the perfect thing. You could do that and so you are doing everything except equipment and it will only take you 15 minutes a week including earning enough money for training through twitter. It is also a great way to have some fun interactions.
As far as the three leagues go they all have a fairly similar payout amount here so not much to discuss there but just do it.
Dotts/Cards
So I have started this media with all the ways anyone can earn money and have been saving the jobs for last. This one is kind of inbetween. I am unsure how it is in the SHL but in the ISFL they are always looking for people to help make cards. Basically if you have the ability, anyone can have a job here so it is much more open than other jobs which always require someone to step down.
If you put in any amount of effort over at Dotts you can make good money and you would be able to fully fund a career and do nothing but making cards. I was unable to get on to anyone who works on the cards in the SHL as no one replied to me so I am unsure about their pay for cards. If you are good at it though I imagine it is worth it.
With the end of that we are starting to get into harder to earn money jobs. What better spot to start with these than going right to the top and let’s discuss head office jobs. I will just squeeze in one thing here though. If you are in the ISFL and looking for work the wiki team is always wanting people and you get paid based on how much you do. If you can’t get a job, hit them up and you will get work.
Head Office
This one is beyond interesting to me. Starting with the commish pay we look at the ISFL which along with a player contract of about any level completely covers all your fees every season. Commish pay alone is 93% of a season paid for. I actually like this because I think the person running the league should be spending most of their time doing that and not having to write media or worry about earning money as much. No problems at all if we pay them that much.
PBE is not far behind here paying 72% of a season and pretty much along with a max earning career and contract is going to cover all your fees. A little less money but still a good pay day.
SHL seems to be a long way behind here. I have heard rumour that the SHL HO in the past was an unpaid position which A) astounds me and B) would kinda fit in with this if they haven’t been paid that long and this is where it stands now.
Stepping down to just the general head office jobs, in the ISFL and PBE there is a bit of a step down in pay but the SHL stays at a fairly similar level which is another difference between the three leagues.
Over to the dev league / minors / juniors we see more interesting things. ISFL still pays really well with both commish and head office members being paid similar to their ISFL counterparts but just a little less which is not surprising. Over at the PBE though the commish of the minors gets paid a lot less and the head office members get paid the same as the commish. Juniors in the SHL get paid exactly the same as their top level head office counterparts.
As for interns, the PBE does not use these at all and the ISFL pays a good bit better than the SHL. SHL also has international games so there is another avenue for some money earning that just isn’t in the other leagues.
General Managers
This is another top end usually sought after job that there isn’t many to go around. More than head office for sure. So the interesting thing here is the PBE. They pay their top level general managers a massive 48% of their season and minor league general managers aren’t far behind with 40%. Compare this to the ISFL and SHL which both pay fairly similar at 32% and 34% respectively it makes it a fairly more lucrative job as far as money goes.
I don’t mind the extra money at all for this. Much like head office, general managers are a huge part of the league running well so if they are paid well and have to spend less time focusing on grinding money that is a win for me.
One extra thing the SHL has over the other two leagues is the international games again. These managers though, much like the head office, do not get paid much at all but it is at least another job that someone can do.
Other Jobs
From here I am going to talk a bit more broadly about jobs and maybe pull out a few worth chatting about at the end. But in general most leagues pay pretty similar across the board of their jobs so we don’t need to go into every job individually.
The ISFL pays out most jobs 32% for their job heads and 28% for the general workers or assistants.
PBE for the same things roughly pays 28% and 24%.
SHL for the same stuff pays out from like 40ish% down to around 20% or so. They have a bit more variation in their pays which makes it a bit hard to nail down and give a percentage as easy as the other leagues. All in all though it seems to be worth it if you are able to do so.
Graphics Grading
Ok the graphics grading in the SHL is one job I definitely have to talk about as it is the best paying job in all of sim leagues. This pay goes up and down based on number of graphics graded but talking to the head of this department and getting some rough numbers this is a good estimate at roughly what they earn. The head of the department has been earning about 110% of a sim league season. Knowing the SHL they take graphics very seriously and expect a high level of work so the grading definitely isn’t an easy task plus doing a lot of the admin but along with the head, the graders themselves have been earning around the 100% mark themselves. ISFL does not pay near this level and PBE does not have graded graphics as we have covered before.
Simmers
This is a really well paying job across all three leagues and thinking about it, that makes sense. Much like head office and the general managers this is one job that the people need to nail every day of the week or the league would just not run well. These people definitely deserve to be paid well.
One last comment on jobs, and this seems to be mainly an ISFL thing, but a fair few of the jobs there come with a PT pass which is very nice if you have one. It doesn’t help much if you are in other leagues cause you can’t affiliate post them but they can still be a nice thing to have. I didn’t note which jobs have those because it’s not super relevant to the pay scales but it is something there that is a bit more “pay” essentially.
That is about all I have at this point. All in all I think my assumptions I had before I put all this together are pretty close to spot on. Maybe whatever league you play first you will find it easiest because you are more involved in that league and you might find it easier to find jobs and such. But I think all things equal the ISFL is the easiest league to earn money in followed by the PBE and then lastly the SHL.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
So this spreadsheet is fairly straight forward. I have the three leagues and at the top is a figure for what it should cost to max earn for one season. This is the highest level of “equipment” and the highest level of training every week. Obviously some seasons might be a bit more if there are holidays/expansion or what not extending the season out.
SPREADSHEET
A few notes on the figures, most of these figures are what the pay is for a whole season. A few though are what pay is per item like if you are on a card designing team. There are also a few jobs that are paid per work done, for these I have tried to talk to people in charge and get what an average job payout is per season. So in practice a few of these numbers might move around a little bit but honestly at the point of finishing that spreadsheet I was pretty happy with it. It also took me about 5 hours of spreadsheet work to get all this and track down people for info that wasn't readily available so if there was able to be a bonus for that I would not say no.
Playing Contracts
So let’s get to it. I’m going to start with the absolute easiest way to make money, contracts. These are pretty much automatic and the more TPE you have, the more money you get. With these money numbers here I was just assuming the minimum you are allowed to take because that is what the majority of people do. Obviously you are free to try and bargain for more but these are the amounts starting out, half way through and the highest minimum you can take.
All of the three leagues start out in a pretty similar spot percentage wise but I guess that isn’t surprising as the closer you get to zero the closer your percentage will get. When we get up towards the higher end of contracts we see a fairly sizable difference. Both the PBE and SHL are on the higher side of a percentage here with a 10 million dollar contract handing you 40% of your max earning season just for managing to breathe. SHL isn’t too far behind with a 6 million dollar deal giving you 34%. ISFL is lagging behind here with a maxxed minimum contract only giving you 23% of a max earning season.
Written Media
We have a couple of things here in which I really think the ISFL stands out in making it easier to earn money and this is written media and graphics. As you can see if you write one thousand, two thousand five hundred or five thousand words it works out as a better percentage of money back for your effort in the ISFL. I think this works out for the league also as there is always very much written media. I am not active enough in the SHL to properly know how much media they have but the ISFL always seems to have more media happening than in the PBE. Maybe this is one of the reasons why. Forty three percent of a season paid for in the ISFL is absolutely an insane amount. If you can line that up with a 2x media bonus you can almost cover a whole season with one admittedly big media.
Graphics
Graphics is something I love talking about and is how I have made most of my money in sim leagues. There is no surprise that SHL is the harshest on graphics and I have instead had to write media for money here and mainly just replied on twitter.
So in the ISFL I have submitted my fair share of sigs in the past and have generally got a fair chunk of 5/7 and a few 6/7 scores. I’m not the world’s greatest designer but I think I have a decent level and usually think those kinds of scores are fair enough. They will usually take me at least an hour, maybe closer to two for the 6/7 scores so there is a fair bit of time put into these. A 5/7 though in the ISFL is going to pay me 3 million dollars now which is roughly 14% of a max earning season. I think that is fairly good whereas if we say a similar level graphic in the SHL was a 3/5 that would only earn me 0.75 million which would be around 4% of a max earning season. So as far as graphics grading goes looking at the chart the SHL is clearly a lot harder to earn a living amount with just graphics especially when it’s fairly known that the SHL graphics grading is fairly brutal. If I was to be doing graphics in SHL I would want to only be doing player to player transactions.
Now speaking of player to player transactions we come to the PBE. I am talking a bit separately about the PBE here because really it’s the most different. The rules there are you can submit four graphics a week and they don’t get graded. Unless you are blatantly cheating the system and it’s noticed you will get 600k for each of those graphis for up to 2.4 million a week which all in all isn’t too bad. If you stuck with that you would get around 17 million a season which isn’t going to fully cover a season but it’s not bad.
The main way to earn money with graphics in the PBE though is the player to player transactions. When I first started the league, this was the first league with this in and I hated it because not many people answer your sig shop with a request. In the ISFL all graphics are league paid so heaps of people pile into a new sig shop to help people out and even if they don’t you can just make graphics for anyone. I opened a PBE sig shop though and almost no one cared. Soon enough though I found a niche that people wanted in the PBE and player to player transactions have worked out very well for me so if you are comfortable with graphics it is definitely a way to make a lot of money. Three million is a fairly common player to player figure but the max amount in most situations is 5 million so that can add up very quickly.
Podcasts
Ok the graph is a little misleading on this one but I wasn’t sure how else to show this cause it does vary depending on the number of hosts. But no matter what way you cut this one the PBE wins by a long fucking way.
ISFL and SHL have a set payout depending on time spent on the podcast and that is split between the hosts on the podcast. In the PBE there is a set payout depending on time and that is just given to all the hosts. So if you have a one person podcast that goes for an hour you get four million. If you are on a podcast with three others then you all get that four million. For real this is maybe the best way to earn money in any sim league and a lot more people should be using this.
Twitter is one of my favourite ways to earn some money in sim leagues. It’s never huge money but the effort isn't huge either. You can play in one of these leagues and if you wanted to just do weekly PTs and buy training then twitter might be the perfect thing. You could do that and so you are doing everything except equipment and it will only take you 15 minutes a week including earning enough money for training through twitter. It is also a great way to have some fun interactions.
As far as the three leagues go they all have a fairly similar payout amount here so not much to discuss there but just do it.
Dotts/Cards
So I have started this media with all the ways anyone can earn money and have been saving the jobs for last. This one is kind of inbetween. I am unsure how it is in the SHL but in the ISFL they are always looking for people to help make cards. Basically if you have the ability, anyone can have a job here so it is much more open than other jobs which always require someone to step down.
If you put in any amount of effort over at Dotts you can make good money and you would be able to fully fund a career and do nothing but making cards. I was unable to get on to anyone who works on the cards in the SHL as no one replied to me so I am unsure about their pay for cards. If you are good at it though I imagine it is worth it.
With the end of that we are starting to get into harder to earn money jobs. What better spot to start with these than going right to the top and let’s discuss head office jobs. I will just squeeze in one thing here though. If you are in the ISFL and looking for work the wiki team is always wanting people and you get paid based on how much you do. If you can’t get a job, hit them up and you will get work.
Head Office
This one is beyond interesting to me. Starting with the commish pay we look at the ISFL which along with a player contract of about any level completely covers all your fees every season. Commish pay alone is 93% of a season paid for. I actually like this because I think the person running the league should be spending most of their time doing that and not having to write media or worry about earning money as much. No problems at all if we pay them that much.
PBE is not far behind here paying 72% of a season and pretty much along with a max earning career and contract is going to cover all your fees. A little less money but still a good pay day.
SHL seems to be a long way behind here. I have heard rumour that the SHL HO in the past was an unpaid position which A) astounds me and B) would kinda fit in with this if they haven’t been paid that long and this is where it stands now.
Stepping down to just the general head office jobs, in the ISFL and PBE there is a bit of a step down in pay but the SHL stays at a fairly similar level which is another difference between the three leagues.
Over to the dev league / minors / juniors we see more interesting things. ISFL still pays really well with both commish and head office members being paid similar to their ISFL counterparts but just a little less which is not surprising. Over at the PBE though the commish of the minors gets paid a lot less and the head office members get paid the same as the commish. Juniors in the SHL get paid exactly the same as their top level head office counterparts.
As for interns, the PBE does not use these at all and the ISFL pays a good bit better than the SHL. SHL also has international games so there is another avenue for some money earning that just isn’t in the other leagues.
General Managers
This is another top end usually sought after job that there isn’t many to go around. More than head office for sure. So the interesting thing here is the PBE. They pay their top level general managers a massive 48% of their season and minor league general managers aren’t far behind with 40%. Compare this to the ISFL and SHL which both pay fairly similar at 32% and 34% respectively it makes it a fairly more lucrative job as far as money goes.
I don’t mind the extra money at all for this. Much like head office, general managers are a huge part of the league running well so if they are paid well and have to spend less time focusing on grinding money that is a win for me.
One extra thing the SHL has over the other two leagues is the international games again. These managers though, much like the head office, do not get paid much at all but it is at least another job that someone can do.
Other Jobs
From here I am going to talk a bit more broadly about jobs and maybe pull out a few worth chatting about at the end. But in general most leagues pay pretty similar across the board of their jobs so we don’t need to go into every job individually.
The ISFL pays out most jobs 32% for their job heads and 28% for the general workers or assistants.
PBE for the same things roughly pays 28% and 24%.
SHL for the same stuff pays out from like 40ish% down to around 20% or so. They have a bit more variation in their pays which makes it a bit hard to nail down and give a percentage as easy as the other leagues. All in all though it seems to be worth it if you are able to do so.
Graphics Grading
Ok the graphics grading in the SHL is one job I definitely have to talk about as it is the best paying job in all of sim leagues. This pay goes up and down based on number of graphics graded but talking to the head of this department and getting some rough numbers this is a good estimate at roughly what they earn. The head of the department has been earning about 110% of a sim league season. Knowing the SHL they take graphics very seriously and expect a high level of work so the grading definitely isn’t an easy task plus doing a lot of the admin but along with the head, the graders themselves have been earning around the 100% mark themselves. ISFL does not pay near this level and PBE does not have graded graphics as we have covered before.
Simmers
This is a really well paying job across all three leagues and thinking about it, that makes sense. Much like head office and the general managers this is one job that the people need to nail every day of the week or the league would just not run well. These people definitely deserve to be paid well.
One last comment on jobs, and this seems to be mainly an ISFL thing, but a fair few of the jobs there come with a PT pass which is very nice if you have one. It doesn’t help much if you are in other leagues cause you can’t affiliate post them but they can still be a nice thing to have. I didn’t note which jobs have those because it’s not super relevant to the pay scales but it is something there that is a bit more “pay” essentially.
That is about all I have at this point. All in all I think my assumptions I had before I put all this together are pretty close to spot on. Maybe whatever league you play first you will find it easiest because you are more involved in that league and you might find it easier to find jobs and such. But I think all things equal the ISFL is the easiest league to earn money in followed by the PBE and then lastly the SHL.
Thanks for taking the time to read.
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