Suggestion: Interseason-Team Changes for Open League format

[Tim]

We have a quite open league with no fixed schedule, which leads to have some teams getting quite high in TR while others stay very low and fall back and are not competitive any more.

I don't like the appearance fee rules which could be used to level this a bit.
So i thought of the following rules to be bring a team into the next season after their last season/cup game:

1. Pick 4 players to keep in your team without any changes made to them. These are your personal superstars that you have long term contracts with and want to keep what ever happens.

2. Randomly determine another 4 players that want to stay in the team and offer a contract by themselves. Redraw all empty or already picked roster positions until you have 4 players in this category. However, you may not redraw a valid roster position just because you want to drop the player. You may still drop these players in step 4, but not reset them in step 3 (he wants to stay, so he's not offering replacement).

3. Of the remaining 8 roster positions, pick 4 players that will leave the team, but point you to a friend that shows some potential to replace them and is willing to take over the existing contract. Reset the player to the starting statistics of the player's position, erasing all SPP.

4. The rest of the team (4 players if all roster positions are filled) will leave the team without replacement. Of course you'll be free to fire any player you don't want to keep.

5. With all the new players, the team will not be as well trained as before. The team looses 2 RRs to a minimum of 2.

6. Some of the fans have cooled down during the off-season. You lose 50% rounded up of your FF exceeding 10. (i.e. 14 and 15 goes down to 12)

OK that's it ... here's some thoughts about the rule:

A team with max. 12 players, max. 2 RRs and max. 10 FF remains almost untouched by this rule (just 4 players lose the SPP and skills gained). -> approx. a drop of 3-4 in TR.

A big team with 16 players, 4+ RRs and 15 FF will lose 4 of the cheaper players and the SPP on another 4 players (but keep the best ones that form the character of the team), 2 RRs (ouch), and 3 points of FF. -> approx. a harsh drop of around 40 in TR.

However, this second team will most likely have some spare cash from the championship games, while the first team won't have alot in the treasury. So the first team will be able to buy some RRs and new players back. (This also keeps the championship teams from buring cash by freebooting starts and wizards ... they have to save for the next season).

My first thought was that expensive teams like dwarfs or Elves will be hurt more by losing 4 players than those with a cheap lineman type to discard. However, the teams with cheap linemen usually suffer ab it more from the RR loss, as they tend to have higher cost here. Expensive teams also gain an advantage by the possibility to reset players to starting stats for free, as all niggling injuries and stat decreases are lost as well.

What you think, would that a balanced way to put the league back closer together?

Tim.

[Munkey]

Sounds ok but I wouldn't have thought it would get too much popular support from coaches, no one likes having to retire players, especially for no good reason.

Some thoughts:

Teams with slow developing players may suffer, a dwarf team would probably end up losing Longbeards with 2-4 SPPs foe example, not enough for a skill but enough to get one quicker later and worth having at the speed these types of players develop.

Loss of RR seems a bit harsh, as they take ages to get hold of. After a few seasons all teams will likely get knocked down to 2. Fine if that's what you want but I think it will discourage coaches from buying them at all as they will end up only having extras for one season. Perhaps a roll required to keep each RR over 2?

Loss of FF seems a little unecessary as this moderates itself for the most part.

[Mirascael]

As far as RR are concerned you could possibly either Roll for each as suggested before or roll for them as follows:
6+ RRs: all lost automatically
5th: kept on 6
4th: kept on 5-6
3th: kept on 4-6
2nd: kept on 3-6
1st: kept on 2-6

Aditionally, you could also apply an ageing systems that checks for ageing after every 10 games of a player or so, with ageing probability progressively increasing (check out NEW CONCEPTS: AGEING / MVP for detailed information), thus affecting teams which played more games stronger than the occasionally played ones.

[ZanzerTem]

Why change anything? Make the high rated teams play each other, and let the lower rated teams play catch up. Place a cap on the handicap, such as 25 or 50 points (cant play the game if there is a difference that high).

Unfortunately, TR will always favor agility teams, and bruiser teams tend to lag behind. There is no real way to counter this.