When have you encountered luck in your everyday life?

[Memento Mori]

The league should have expanded by 4 teams in s25, because it's only going to get worse from here.

The league needs to expand to many more teams soon before it becomes impossible to build a good team.

This league could easily support 16-18 teams, and something's got to change soon.

Strong disagree on expanding by 4 teams in S25.

I think keeping the DSFL with a healthy competition is essential to retaining players during their first season, the only way we could have gone up by 4 last offseason was either contracting two DSFL teams or loosening the IA rules in DSFL.

We need sustainable expansion, not boom expansions that could lead to DSFL contractions or potential future ISFL contractions if the level of recruitment isn't sustained.

Two teams was a safe decision, but the correct one.

I have to disagree, because of the section that I've bolded.

Let's look at the number of users required to sustain each ISFL team. On offence you roughly need 1 QB, 2 RBs, 4 WRs/TEs (1 TE and 3 WR or 2 TE and 2 WR depending on if you want to play a TE at WR in some formations) and 2 OTs. That's 9 players, additional players are depth pieces or play interior OL, which is only viable at higher TPE due to the permitted weight of interior OL bots. On defence, you need 11 players. You could make a case for a 12th if you wanted to play 3-4 on running downs but didn't want to play one of your CBs at LB and one of your safeties at the vacant CB spot. 20 per team gives a full active lineup on both sides of the ball.

The last five activity checks have been completed by 317, 329, 341, 344 and 344 users. We have enough active users to sustain about 16-17 teams.

I just took a look at the TPE tracker, and there are roughly 92 additional users who are not active according to the rulebook definition, but have players who are either on an ISFL roster or who were recently on an ISFL roster. For example, guys like slm and scorycory who most of us would intuitively consider active are not active according to the rulebook. So the "real" number of users we have is around 410-430. That's enough to sustain more than 20 teams.

The reason I bring up the number of users currently in the league is because I think it makes the case that the level of recruitment doesn't need to be sustained in order to guard against future ISFL contractions. If we expanded to 16 teams and began recruiting zero people each offseason, then we could continue to sustain 16 teams as long as 25% of the league didn't quit. If we expanded to 16 teams and recruited even a small number of people each offseason, we would be able to continue to sustain 16 teams.

You are correct that I and others are viewing this from a very ISFL-centric viewpoint and the DSFL is important, but not expanding the ISFL so that we don't need to contract the DSFL (which is, consciously or unconsciously, what HO chose to do) makes the ISFL worse, because it makes the teams similar in quality and the league very luck-based as a result. The ASFC last season is a great example of that. A conference of six teams being comprised of four 9-7 teams, an 8-8 team and a 7-9 team is a problem.

Being ultra-conservative with ISFL expansion so as not to harm the DSFL may improve retention for DSFL players and for newer users, but an unfulfilling and luck-based ISFL will reduce retention overall and mean that more users choose not to recreate at the end of their ISFL careers. There's no point making the DSFL great and welcoming and immersive and enjoyable if after they leave the DSFL they move up into a league which is less great, immersive and enjoyable as a direct result. The DSFL needs to serve its purpose well and be a functional league in its own right, but the ISFL needs to come first and the ISFL needs to be as good as it can possibly be.