Today I want to talk about league economy. In recent seasons, there have been concerted efforts to, and I quote "remove money from the league economy" ... some of these work fairly well, like Dotts trading cards... others, not so much. As a general rule, if you want people to spend money, they need to have something to show for it. There needs to be something they want to buy. I think this is part of the problem with the current methods: plenty of people simply don't care for betting or trading cards. So I'm thinking about things that I would maybe want to buy. Some of these ideas have been floated in the past, some have not. I'm talking things like allowing members to buy PT passes, or something to delay regression, or even legal multis. I'm going to examine all these ideas, as well as a few others, and break down why they would or would not be good ideas.
Fair disclosure: as of the time of writing this, I'm probably in like... the 95th percentile, as far as bank goes. While I don't think I have any obvious biases in favour of the richer members of the league, it's also impossible for me to not be biased in some way about these options, considering I've not had to worry about my league earnings for about ten seasons now.
The first, and most obvious option for additional purchase options, in my opinion... is the PT pass. We already acknowledge that certain league jobs require enough of a time commitment that it's fair to reward these users with a means to earn the regular 3 TPE from point tasks, without actually having to take the time to do the point task. There is little to no downside to allowing users to purchase that privilege. A user who spends league cash to get a PT pass doesn't gain anything. Their TPE earning potential is the exact same amount as any other user. It also grants flexibility. Considering the overwhelming majority of cash is earned through media, all we'd really be doing is trading a short, but specific piece of media for a longer, more freeform one in most cases. Of course, you'd have to come up with some fair appraisal of time taken in a league job to warrant a PT pass, then translate to time spent writing an article... but I can't imagine many would find fault with something like 2m per week. Why 2m? Well, if you imagine that someone could simply write a 600 word article instead of doing a 250 word point task, that would be a payout of about 1m ... so charging 1m for the PT pass wouldn't remove cash from the economy. However, 2m is still an acceptable hit -- especially for those of us with nine figure balances -- when you just don't want to write a PT.
Another fairly easy to justify option would be the regression delay. Pay a large sum to offset regression by one season. Then resume as normal the following season, with the relevant hit for that year, plus a premium of say... 10%. I've already crunched the numbers on this and at best, you could use this option to prolong a career by one more season than would normally be possible. But, you'd have to pretty much max earn for 13 seasons, and then play out your final two seasons at sub 400 TPE levels... which is generally bad, and only of any real use if you're chasing a volume record. The alternative would be to prolong your "peak" and use the pass in the second or third year of regression to keep your TPE near or above 1k for an extra season. I don't think this is a massive advantage to the super rich because it really doesn't change that much. At best, you'd have a veteran playing at rookie/sophomore levels in a position like kicker, defensive line or wide receiver, because lower TPE won't be as much of a disadvantage there. This does violate the fairness rule in the sense that it allows certain players to amass more applied TPE ... but at best, a player exercising this option would either be really good for one extra season, but then flame out quicker. Without the premium, this option becomes more of a max earners' club option to make it even harder for everyone else to catch them. But with the premium... you have to decide whether the trade-off of an extra year at prime levels but retiring at year 12 is better than playing 14 seasons, but three of them at rookie/sophomore levels rather than the one or two a normal career would have had.
Legal multis are tricky, because while they would absolutely drain cash out of the economy -- they'd have to be exorbitantly expensive -- you'd also have the problem of potentially having three super users effectively fill all skill positions on offense for a team (for example), making them damn near impossible to beat. I'm not a fan of anything that might encourage "super teams" so I'm not sure this is a good idea. You'd have to have other restrictions in place, like if a team has a player with a multi, the multi has to be on the opposite side of the ball to their first player... and maybe even limit the amount of multis allowed on a single team. For me, it's not worth the hassle.
Another option would be additional tiers of equipment -- though this would again have to be exorbitant. If a new tier of equipment granting 50 TPE was introduced, for example, it would have to cost at least double the current highest tier to make this work in terms of removing cash from the economy. The knock on effects would be potentially more "waffle media" with people padding word count, and also potentially an increased importance on contract money... though the latter isn't particularly likely while it's still easy to make money from media/wiki etc. Increasing the number of available equipment tiers would put new users at a large disadvantage, however. This could be mitigated through rookie tasks perhaps -- add a couple more tasks and award an "equipment voucher" (redeemable for equipment of a specific tier) to users who complete all tasks maybe -- but there would still be a noticeable handicap. Perhaps not a good idea.
The notion of recreate TPE has been contentious for a while too, but perhaps this could be workable. What if, on retirement, users with a balance of at least a certain threshold, were given the option to keep their bank balance, or trade it in for a one-time bonus of 5% their max TPE (up to a max of say, 50 TPE) to be redeemed on their recreate after they play 1 season in the ISFL? The reason for the delay is so that a user with recreate TPE doesn't have a huge advantage over true rookies when it comes to rookie awards, or even in the DSFL -- where a quicker start could be the difference between winning the Ultimini and finishing bottom of a conference. You could even spread the TPE over multiple seasons with a max bonus of 10-15 per season, if maintaining some semblence of equality of growth is important. Economically, this could encourage users to write more media to reach the threshold, but also potentially lower the quality of media, or reduce a user's willingness to spend once regression hits. It's an option, but would probably need a lot of consideration to find the right balance.
The other idea I had was to allow users to create brands, for a fee, and transfer some of their balance to the brand. Then, brands could sign users with their balance, and that signing cash goes into a pot. Brands could then compete in an off-season tournament -- not necessarily a football bracket, either -- for bragging rights and so on, with all players on the winning team getting either a fraction of the money in the pot, or a TPE reward depending on the money in the pot. Now, this is easily the most work-intensive to set up... but it could be a lot of fun and a major boost to the media section. There are problems, of course. Like how winnings are determined, and finding ways to run the off-season tournaments etc (I kind of imagined it a bit like the Rucker, but for football at first; then I thought "what if sometimes it was a basketball tournament?" and so on... but never mind that). I can also imagine some would protest the potential TPE winnings -- though imo it would be no different to having TPE winnings for fantasy football -- so there would be some kinks to work out, probably. But it's an idea.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm way over the 800 word mark at this point, and this probably would have been a good media article... but hey, it's not like I need the money.
Fair disclosure: as of the time of writing this, I'm probably in like... the 95th percentile, as far as bank goes. While I don't think I have any obvious biases in favour of the richer members of the league, it's also impossible for me to not be biased in some way about these options, considering I've not had to worry about my league earnings for about ten seasons now.
The first, and most obvious option for additional purchase options, in my opinion... is the PT pass. We already acknowledge that certain league jobs require enough of a time commitment that it's fair to reward these users with a means to earn the regular 3 TPE from point tasks, without actually having to take the time to do the point task. There is little to no downside to allowing users to purchase that privilege. A user who spends league cash to get a PT pass doesn't gain anything. Their TPE earning potential is the exact same amount as any other user. It also grants flexibility. Considering the overwhelming majority of cash is earned through media, all we'd really be doing is trading a short, but specific piece of media for a longer, more freeform one in most cases. Of course, you'd have to come up with some fair appraisal of time taken in a league job to warrant a PT pass, then translate to time spent writing an article... but I can't imagine many would find fault with something like 2m per week. Why 2m? Well, if you imagine that someone could simply write a 600 word article instead of doing a 250 word point task, that would be a payout of about 1m ... so charging 1m for the PT pass wouldn't remove cash from the economy. However, 2m is still an acceptable hit -- especially for those of us with nine figure balances -- when you just don't want to write a PT.
Another fairly easy to justify option would be the regression delay. Pay a large sum to offset regression by one season. Then resume as normal the following season, with the relevant hit for that year, plus a premium of say... 10%. I've already crunched the numbers on this and at best, you could use this option to prolong a career by one more season than would normally be possible. But, you'd have to pretty much max earn for 13 seasons, and then play out your final two seasons at sub 400 TPE levels... which is generally bad, and only of any real use if you're chasing a volume record. The alternative would be to prolong your "peak" and use the pass in the second or third year of regression to keep your TPE near or above 1k for an extra season. I don't think this is a massive advantage to the super rich because it really doesn't change that much. At best, you'd have a veteran playing at rookie/sophomore levels in a position like kicker, defensive line or wide receiver, because lower TPE won't be as much of a disadvantage there. This does violate the fairness rule in the sense that it allows certain players to amass more applied TPE ... but at best, a player exercising this option would either be really good for one extra season, but then flame out quicker. Without the premium, this option becomes more of a max earners' club option to make it even harder for everyone else to catch them. But with the premium... you have to decide whether the trade-off of an extra year at prime levels but retiring at year 12 is better than playing 14 seasons, but three of them at rookie/sophomore levels rather than the one or two a normal career would have had.
Legal multis are tricky, because while they would absolutely drain cash out of the economy -- they'd have to be exorbitantly expensive -- you'd also have the problem of potentially having three super users effectively fill all skill positions on offense for a team (for example), making them damn near impossible to beat. I'm not a fan of anything that might encourage "super teams" so I'm not sure this is a good idea. You'd have to have other restrictions in place, like if a team has a player with a multi, the multi has to be on the opposite side of the ball to their first player... and maybe even limit the amount of multis allowed on a single team. For me, it's not worth the hassle.
Another option would be additional tiers of equipment -- though this would again have to be exorbitant. If a new tier of equipment granting 50 TPE was introduced, for example, it would have to cost at least double the current highest tier to make this work in terms of removing cash from the economy. The knock on effects would be potentially more "waffle media" with people padding word count, and also potentially an increased importance on contract money... though the latter isn't particularly likely while it's still easy to make money from media/wiki etc. Increasing the number of available equipment tiers would put new users at a large disadvantage, however. This could be mitigated through rookie tasks perhaps -- add a couple more tasks and award an "equipment voucher" (redeemable for equipment of a specific tier) to users who complete all tasks maybe -- but there would still be a noticeable handicap. Perhaps not a good idea.
The notion of recreate TPE has been contentious for a while too, but perhaps this could be workable. What if, on retirement, users with a balance of at least a certain threshold, were given the option to keep their bank balance, or trade it in for a one-time bonus of 5% their max TPE (up to a max of say, 50 TPE) to be redeemed on their recreate after they play 1 season in the ISFL? The reason for the delay is so that a user with recreate TPE doesn't have a huge advantage over true rookies when it comes to rookie awards, or even in the DSFL -- where a quicker start could be the difference between winning the Ultimini and finishing bottom of a conference. You could even spread the TPE over multiple seasons with a max bonus of 10-15 per season, if maintaining some semblence of equality of growth is important. Economically, this could encourage users to write more media to reach the threshold, but also potentially lower the quality of media, or reduce a user's willingness to spend once regression hits. It's an option, but would probably need a lot of consideration to find the right balance.
The other idea I had was to allow users to create brands, for a fee, and transfer some of their balance to the brand. Then, brands could sign users with their balance, and that signing cash goes into a pot. Brands could then compete in an off-season tournament -- not necessarily a football bracket, either -- for bragging rights and so on, with all players on the winning team getting either a fraction of the money in the pot, or a TPE reward depending on the money in the pot. Now, this is easily the most work-intensive to set up... but it could be a lot of fun and a major boost to the media section. There are problems, of course. Like how winnings are determined, and finding ways to run the off-season tournaments etc (I kind of imagined it a bit like the Rucker, but for football at first; then I thought "what if sometimes it was a basketball tournament?" and so on... but never mind that). I can also imagine some would protest the potential TPE winnings -- though imo it would be no different to having TPE winnings for fantasy football -- so there would be some kinks to work out, probably. But it's an idea.
Anyway, I'm sure I'm way over the 800 word mark at this point, and this probably would have been a good media article... but hey, it's not like I need the money.
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