When have you encountered luck in your everyday life?

[slate]

2) Change pillars of DSFL team management

b) Loosen inactive rules
Active players must still start over inactives, but you are allowed to keep inactive players on your roster at a penalty of 25% lost TPE every season

I like loosening inactive rules a lot as a way to address this issue. I think there are probably a decent amount of users who hang around for a bit, stop paying attention, and when they come back they can't find any stats for their player anywhere. I imagine that keeping them on a roster and having stats to show them when they check in on their player would help retention to some extent.

I would propose a slightly different take on it - teams can keep IA players on their roster that still have DSFL eligibility as long as they haven't yet reached the 250 TPE cap.

This rule would maintain emphasis on the developmental aspect, as someone who has reached 250 TPE has basically developed as much as they can in the DSFL. And it would hopefully reduce complaints about competitive advantages since any team that rosters a bunch of IAs in this way isn't keeping an IA superteam of 250 TPE all-stars. It would come with less rules baggage of needing to apply regression and the feel-bad of coming back to your player having less TPE than you remember.

3) If all else fails, pull the trigger on moving to a new sim engine
For all of the griping people do about DDSPF16, the fact is that it is perfectly fine for our league. Yes, the sim logic is...wonky and everyone has already datamined optimal builds and all of that junk. However, moving to a new sim engine (DDSPF21, for example) would breathe some new life into the league. We wouldn't know optimal strats or player builds, and it might keep people engaged who have gotten sick of seeing the things retrospace111 is referencing.

This please.

I strongly believe that sim testing is bad for the health of the league. For as many new users as there are like me who want to try and develop new ways to improve on sim testing, I believe there are at least as many who get somewhat disillusioned with the league when they learned how "solved" game planning and builds and everything are.

I do think that moving to a new sim engine only means that this process of optimizing will get reset and that eventually we'll be back to where we are now, but the new life it will give the league in the short- to medium-term would be huge.