Semi-reset after the season

[mattgslater]

Okay, a little background, first.

We play a semiannual season/tournament. We play a season of up to 14 games, then each coach picks his best team for a tournament. All but the top three tournament teams are disbanded and start over for the next season: the top three graduate to the Champions League.

What we ran into is that after the tournament, a few teams did okay or have some good-looking players but get disbanded, and the sucky or low-prog teams still have a couple guys worth keeping. Even the coaches who are happy to reset are sorry to see this guy or that guy go by the wayside.

So we came up with a "waiver wire" as a way of benefitting the middling coaches and helping the league maintain a sense of history. If your team is disbanded, you can hire some of your players back at full value or protect them so nobody else can have them. Others not hired or protected, plus cut players, go to the waiver wire, where any team of that race can hire or induce at full value plus a premium (20k + half improvement value, +30k to induce).

This has been fun, but it's had some unintended consequences. The best and worst coaches seem to be the ones who benefit the most so far, as a few coaches play a few matches with each of several teams, then disband them, keeping the doubles/+stat/15SPP guy and spamming the Waiver Wire with Block players for the newer coaches.

One problem we've run into is that teams can't afford to take their stars back on 1M GC, so the best guys on the wire are the 1-2-skill players.

So here's my idea.

Proposal: After the season, teams that play in the tournament but don't qualify for the Champions League may opt to rebuild rather than disbanding. Teams that don't play in the tournament may do this too, if the team's coach did not enter a tournament team. Each coach may rebuild only one team. The team gets 1M gold, plus 10,000 GC per FF point (to reward wins), plus the higher of Treasury/2 or healthy TV/20 (round up). The team then must rebuild using this gold, hiring rookie players from the team list or veteran players off last season's roster, plus TRRs, FF, and staff, at full value. Players off the original roster who are not hired go to the Waiver Wire.

So, last season's #4 team was FF8, TV 2.11M, with less than 220k in Treasury. FF8 adds 80k, and another 100k for TV, so the team would have an extra 180k to spend hiring players. If the team had 300k in Treasury, it would translate to an extra 40k in the new team. We had one team that only played a few matches and lost them all, with FF0 and TV 1.08M, with 70k in Treasury. He'd get an extra 40k, which isn't much until you consider he didn't have much to hire back. Seeing the season come to a close, he might be more likely to play a couple games to hoard cash for after the merciful reset.

My concern is that in addition to handicapping teams that did well the previous season, this might be a hazard for novice coaches new to the league, who will always either be up against an overdog or a better coach. I guess they could play against secondary teams, so that's maybe not such a huge concern. But I kind of like how the best coaches will tend to build on 1M, while the guys around the middle will be in the 1.2M range.

[mattgslater]

Hmmm... does it need a 1.25M cap to discourage hoarding?

Also, to discourage stockpiling, how about one of these two?
1) If your TV is over 1M at the start of the season, your Treasury is set to 0.
or
2) If your TV is over 1M, you cannot begin with any Treasury unless you bought back last season's Fan Factor.

[someone2040]

Our league used a straight salary cap of 1,500,000 (I don't think this included fan factor though), and if you had to get rid of one of your players with 3 or more skills (He moved onto the big league).

There was also a bonus of 50,000 gold if you beat a returning team with a Rookie team (Which, ended in my team 'somewhat' leap frogging to a good position, as after 3 wins I got my apothecary and 2 extra Pro Elf catchers).

Our league is still young (only just had it's 4th season), and this was the first experiment with perpetual league's. I'm not sure how I feel about this format, as I think it's kind've a downer to lose your best player pretty much. I don't intend to continue my Pro Elves this season, and with deaths/injuries in the finals it would make things somewhat easier to decide... but it's very hard to cut back a team when you've got 2 players with +AG and one with +STR in there, and all your positionals are equally important (my spp's were very well spread around).

I think that's an important thing to consider when doing perpetual with some kind've cap. Are people going to want to slice and dice their old team, or will they just want to start afresh anyway.