S27 Trade Deadline Newsletter

[.Laser]

the decision was made to not expand this season.

Say sike right now

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Man it would really suck to be a casual player or a recent create right now. The league is ridiculously saturated and the new player builds are a whole other nail in the coffin for lower TPE players right now. Hoping this happens next season at the latest and we consider going more than 16.

I agree 100%. A max earner who signs up this coming offseason probably has to wait around four and a half months (season is about 8 weeks, 2 full offseason to offseason cycles and then one offseason to ISFL week 1 cycle is about 18 weeks) to make their ISFL debut as very few players are called up as true rookies now. If you're a casual earner, there's a chance you're sent down twice and then it's more than six months before your debut. 

Four to six months of doing point tasks and additional stuff like media/gfx/league jobs/twitter (which is essential if you want to max earn and therefore be called up sooner) is a huge time investment to ask of someone in order to see the payoff of their efforts. The DSFL is great but it's not the ISFL, and once you've passed the 250 cap you're watching numbers tick up rather than improving your player.

I get that max earners need to see the rewards of max earning, but I don't think the increasing feeling that 'only max earners can have great careers' (due to saturation, more time spent in the DSFL, builds becoming more expensive, etc.) is good for retention or the league as a whole.

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Disclaimer: I will not be applying for an expansion GM position due to my new role as Appeals head. Everything I say below is my own personal opinion and does not reflect that of anyone other than myself.

In doing my roster breakdowns, I am through 11 of 14 teams. I can see less than ten players in the DSFL being called up after one season and only 2-3 being called up immediately. There are probably 20-25 that will be called up after two seasons of being down. Some are looking at potentially 3 seasons of send down. This is not because of salary cap, but because the players ahead of them are all too high TPE to be replaced. This is causing some older users to retire early and cut short their careers, in some cases Hall of Fame careers, and younger users to be called up just for there to be a spot for them to play on the team that drafted them. This also often causes the team to lose roughly 300-400 TPE at that position until that younger player can develop. But now the younger player has missed two seasons of the beginning of his career, and will likely miss two or three seasons at the end of his career because he will have to do the same thing that the older player once did to him. Now this is not going to be every draftee. But it will be the majority at this stage unless something is done.

In my personal opinion, based on my research, this is causing users to lose interest and we are seeing a drop-off of active users, turning into more casual ones. It is gradual, but it is happening. Not expanding means that S29 would be the earliest we can expand. Because of the reasons I have described above, I feel that S29 is too late.

S21 and S22 are going to start retiring soon, and their retention will be a huge factor in whether or not we will expand. They are two of the biggest classes ever and the number of players that stay around will to an extent largely dictate our playerbase. If we expand now, we may lose two DSFL teams, but we will also extend the career of every player who would have retired for that younger player, and by correlation also extend that younger player's career. And to me personally, losing two DSFL teams for the long term health of the players of the league and therefore the league itself is a debate that needs to be taken very seriously. I am not certain which option I would choose.

The only alternative to expansion that I can see to help this is if sophomore DSFL players are permitted to apply an additional 75 (or another arbitrary number) TPE to keep them involved, much like the system the PBE employs. Players would have a good reason to earn more TPE other than the callup that seems ages and ages away, and it would make it so that users wouldn't feel like they were stagnating. It would also make the DSFL more competitive and reward excellent drafters even more than it already does.

I am not necessarily advocating that we expand or that this additional TPE alternative is applied. But we are reaching a point where something needs to be done, and I don't necessarily agree with the decision to not expand either.