2026-04-08, 07:39 AM - Word count:
Alright SSL, it’s PT time, but more importantly, it’s money time. It’s not new news that the SSL media money system has been overhauled to be more/less generous, based on how you wrote. This is better because users who write long, fantastic pieces are able to be actually rewarded for the dedication, work and effort they put into their work. Especially since we have a bonus structure, graders can give out money for shorter pieces that deserve a bit more than the per word payout structure doles out. However, it’s bad for users like me who used the SSL as their PT affiliate, using the fact that max earning in the SSL just requires posting a PT and then cross-linking that elsewhere. With a 1250$ payout per work, it comes to about a 800k decrease, for those of us who just wrote a 200 word piece for their PTs. Is it bad that that’s the case? Probably not! It’s good that people are being rewarded for top end writing, and every system has its tradeoffs. I’m here to talk about those tradeoffs for me, a user who is enjoying SSL and has no desire to contribute from a jobs perspective, but still wants to max earn. For me, it’s a nice little side league where I get to have a very healthy lead on the class TPE (30 TPE to second, although Sov has yet to buy seasonal equipment, so it’s an effective 12 TPE lead, provided Sov gets his bank up, he’s still missing about 5m for equipment and then more for stuff like traits and stuff).
So my big problem with SSL PTs and the updated media system as a downward pressure on me wanting to do stuff in the SSL is that the barrier to earning in the SSL is basically nullified. It’s not difficult to earn in any singular league, and earning in multiple leagues is kind of the same as earning in a single league. It’s not like ISFL + SSL + SHL + PBE is 4x the work of earning in one place, each league is like a third of the effort? I’m a bit skewed since I’m spending a ton of time in the ISFL, but generally it feels like that for me. I rotate between leagues for the amount of work I put in that season to build up a large bank balance, and then I can just coast in that league for the next half year or whatever.
The rotation of money earning in leagues was a huge part of me being able to join so many more leagues this time around, especially as secondary leagues. The last time I joined a bunch of leagues was when I first started out in the ISFL, like three years ago now. I found that I enjoyed the other leagues but I dove in too deep in each of these leagues, and that meant that I ran out of general ability to balance all of that, so I just kind of dropped those other leagues. For the SHL, I had only planned on a minor league (SMJHL) career only, so that wasn’t so bad, but for the PBE and SSL, that meant I kinda just went IA immediately. Now that I’ve got better balance, after having played PBE for a few seasons now, it was really good for me to plan out my schedule and workload around these leagues, and I had found a great cadence. I would do a bunch of graphics or stuff in the PBE or SHL or something, maybe I would do some media, but needing money and wanting to try graphics was a ton of fun, I ended up just working on stuff in my free time past me getting all my money because it was so enjoyable. I learned new software, new techniques, saw so much cool stuff other people were making, and even buying Pixelmator Pro for my Macbook since it was a one time paid solution for me having a few problems with PhotoPea and just wanting a tool I could use forever offline.
With having so many other leagues, and needing money in them, it was easy for me to justify the SSL as a secondary league because the PTs were enough to max earn, I didn’t need to add any more work and so the SSL is free, it joined my Monday morning rotation of doing all my league tasks across the board, and I was going to have a good player this time, and not miss out on TPE. I could make graphics for the PBE (please bring back the old grading system >:() or do work for the SHL and it’d all work out pretty well. It didn’t take me too much time, and I could go with the flow with that pretty easy. But the big problem is that now the SSL does not lend itself to that schedule, with the media change, I need to figure out something because now the SSL requires a bunch more time to max earn. A player needs about 7.5 million per season to earn, and my new SSL contract is for 2.5 million a season. So I need to figure out a 5 million per season to earn, and the new media payout structure of a flat 1250 dollars per word means I’m looking at something in the range of 4000 words a season. I’m not sure how many weeks there are in an SSL season, but if we say there are like, maybe 8 (which is my default from the ISFL), that means that if I wrote my standard 200 word article each time, that’s a 2 million base payout I’m going to get. Maybe we can say that that’s factored into the base amount of earning we’re getting, so I just need to find a 3 million pay source, which I think was about the amount I could get from just doing a single job and how writing a PT is actually going to net you more than 200 words per week, but I don’t really want to commit myself to a job here, I’ve got a busy IRL schedule at the moment and couldn’t commit to a specific scheduled job, which is why I really enjoyed being a batch media grader who processed a huge backlog.
Okay, so a three million deficit and 1250 dollars per word payout for media means about a 2500 word deficit to max earn, and I would like to max earn to make sure that Sov doesn’t catch me in TPE, not that I think he will, the SSL seems to be a lot weaker on the count of max earners which bodes well for me being the top earner in the class. So I need to write a couple long articles in the SSL to make up for the aforementioned 3 million deficit, assuming that I’m also writing PTs every week in the SSL, which is also another assumption we’ll have to get into later, and we will because of our incentives.
Before I could make a bunch of articles that I thought were like “structured” and self-contained like the bunch I made for what Magic: the Gathering deck your team was from a historical perspective (historical MTG decks, not SSL history) off of the SSL logos both minor and major league teams. It was great punching those out while I was really sick for a week, and I felt like they were their own articles that worked medium amount and I didn’t feel like I needed to pad the word count or anything, they would get paid out on their quality and so I could just dump some words out, but now, I almost have negative incentive to do that? This is a weird bit because the incentives are actually pretty close in actual outcome. Those articles, I’m not going to go back and read em, but they were probably around to 500 word count each which was what they amounted to pay out wise in the old system. However, now that we’re getting paid out per word, the incentive and style in these articles changes the texture of how I feel like I should write and what I need to do in order to maximize the value from the amount of time I’m putting into the league in order to max earn and minimize the actual amount of time I’m spending on the league from an earning perspective. The actual outcome for the writing hasn’t changed at all, the payout is about the same, and the effort I’d have to use in order to make another one of those is identical, but now I have an implicit pressure to pad word count because that’s what the outcome is based off of. My drive to write these things isn’t to have the most interesting or best piece of writing, it’s to max earn in the league. I’m not invested enough in the SSL to actually dive into stats and things in order to figure out what the best X or most interesting Y stat is from this season, especially with a shorter season that doesn’t feel like there are enough numbers in. So when the goal is only to make that bank account big, then just having that background knowledge that I’m going to really increase the worth of the time I spend on earning, which I want to minimize since earning money in a sim league where I just want to see number go up isn’t the most engaging thing for me personally, is to just pad words forever and ever in order to one shot the earning for a season, or for me, one shot the earning for the next season. So all of this is to say that the result of what these media changes have been for me is that I’m not going to write a bunch of short things that I was kind of interested in, like choosing a Magic deck for each SSL major and minor league team, which I was having fun with. The outcomes haven’t changed but the incentives have majorly changed, which has changed how I view the time I’m spending on media and how to extract the most per minute I spend on the league. In essence, the SSL has become the same as the SHL or PBE in terms of needing to spend time to earn, which I did not have as an expectation when I recreated here.
So, money is harder to get, money is linked to me just writing more words rather than better words, and a big part of my earning would be linked to me writing my PTs here every week, so we have another problem. The PTs in the SSL suck. It sucks because it’s a blank slate without any direction or reason. You have to decide what to write about, and that’s fine and good, but you don’t get any seed or something to go off of, which makes it even more of a chore to actually start on and do every week. I would do them here because it would fuel my max earning, but now that that’s removed, the incentive to do PTs here is much lessened. Doing PTs in other leagues with a varied and interesting source to write on (shoutout TubaDeus in the ISFL for killing it with the PT prompts) makes it a more varied and interesting experience. But with no direction here and a huge incentive to write your own thing rather than replying to something makes it something that is really quite a huge bother. I was okay with having the onus on me to provide literally everything PT wise every week when the rewards was that you got to have a maxed out player, but with even that removed, the incentive to write here is lessened, the goal is then to find out a simple hack or method to just get all the money you need to and then just link a more fun PT to the SSL so you don’t have to do all that work still for such a lessened payout. I think that’s my huge resistance and barrier after I saw that I could barely afford anything because I got paid out nothing for all the PTs that I wrote, which was in contrast to what I used to have. Writing an SSL PT is not fun because of all you have to do for it, it requires so much more than any other league, and then you still have to earn outside of it like every other league, but at least those leagues have more stats and numbers I’m interested in.
Okay, with those all as why I’m figuring out how to work around the SSL, I’ve got a couple more things, I’m very happy that I joined the SSL, it’s been a ton of fun, but now that this has happened, stuff like the lowering of the max career length is very exciting to me, because I’m feeling all this negative stuff towards having to earn money, knowing that I don’t have to max for like, the 3 years that players used to live for is great. I’d like to have a good player and lead the Liffey side to a championship, but I’ve got a much more bounded number of seasons I will be active for. It’ll probably be a year or so of earning, but that’s not a big deal. I might need to just bash out a bunch of graphics or something to build out my bank, but if I’m linking another league’s PTs here now, which is the plan, the SSL isn’t my Secondary Soccer League but instead is a very distant fourth behind the ISFL, the PBE, and the SHL, whereas it used to be about tied with the other non-ISFL leagues. And another thing is that the player bank system drives me, and some other users, to not recreate. It’s not a trivial amount of work to earn and play in a sim league, but to wipe out all that progress after your retirement is so annoying and so deleterious to any will or want to play more with that player. If I’m earning and contributing, maybe it’s jobs or just writing or whatever, why is that effort all erased after I make a new player? It used to be at least that the money was easy enough to earn and part of being an SSL citizen and doing PTs that it was annoying but whatever, but now that you need real effort to max earn, it’s actually super detrimental to me even considering a second player after this one. Sure this is maybe my fourth player(?) but I’m considering this my first real go in this league.
So in conclusion, we’ve got a ton of negative incentives now in this league to earn through doing PTs, the new grading system rewards users who wrote good long pieces, disadvantages others who wrote PTs here to affiliate, and puts a pressure on the writer to write a long piece rather than a good piece. Combined with the fact that writing at PT here is the worst of all the leagues I’m in, and that the bonus of writing here has been lessened, and with the knowledge that earning a dollar more than you want or need to over your career here is wasted with the bank reset, then you’re just in a place where the SSL is more of a chore to earn in than in the other leagues that are popular and large. I certainly feel that way and am looking for ways to just grow my bank and kick the SSL down in priority and do PTs that are more fun in other leagues to link them here.
I think there is a solution that is to bump up the baseline amount you get per article to make it closer to payouts from before, or maybe my perceived payouts from before. When the payment is just based off of work count rather than quality (other than that bonus structure), you don’t have incentive to really work on a many small, bite sized good things rather than one long, rambly thing of questionable quality. I would potentially just increase the word payout, or include a base payout for a media article over X words. I know that’s a thing that other leagues do, where an article automatically hits a X dollar amount bonus for Y words written, which means that your incentives aren’t just to make the worst long thing you can stomach and time box for. I would also do some 2x events, I haven’t seen any of those and that would be nice to just give people something they can write towards.
The SSL has been fun for me, but the media payout changes and earning system are quite bad, I would implement some amount of base payout per articles like I mentioned and also do a PT prompt instead of making everyone do their own thing and provide everything needed for a PT. I’m going to just stop doing SSL PTs and bash out some mid to mid minus graphics to build a bank because these changes have made me really never want to do any of this SSL PT stuff.
To any grader or media peep or to HO here or whatever, I do apologize if this is longer and meaner than I actually intended. Part of it is that this thing is rambling and long because the word count is what's important, and part of it is just frustration with the PT system giving absolutely zero to the user and making them do all the work themselves. Also, let bank carry over, it's really weird that it doesn't.
So my big problem with SSL PTs and the updated media system as a downward pressure on me wanting to do stuff in the SSL is that the barrier to earning in the SSL is basically nullified. It’s not difficult to earn in any singular league, and earning in multiple leagues is kind of the same as earning in a single league. It’s not like ISFL + SSL + SHL + PBE is 4x the work of earning in one place, each league is like a third of the effort? I’m a bit skewed since I’m spending a ton of time in the ISFL, but generally it feels like that for me. I rotate between leagues for the amount of work I put in that season to build up a large bank balance, and then I can just coast in that league for the next half year or whatever.
The rotation of money earning in leagues was a huge part of me being able to join so many more leagues this time around, especially as secondary leagues. The last time I joined a bunch of leagues was when I first started out in the ISFL, like three years ago now. I found that I enjoyed the other leagues but I dove in too deep in each of these leagues, and that meant that I ran out of general ability to balance all of that, so I just kind of dropped those other leagues. For the SHL, I had only planned on a minor league (SMJHL) career only, so that wasn’t so bad, but for the PBE and SSL, that meant I kinda just went IA immediately. Now that I’ve got better balance, after having played PBE for a few seasons now, it was really good for me to plan out my schedule and workload around these leagues, and I had found a great cadence. I would do a bunch of graphics or stuff in the PBE or SHL or something, maybe I would do some media, but needing money and wanting to try graphics was a ton of fun, I ended up just working on stuff in my free time past me getting all my money because it was so enjoyable. I learned new software, new techniques, saw so much cool stuff other people were making, and even buying Pixelmator Pro for my Macbook since it was a one time paid solution for me having a few problems with PhotoPea and just wanting a tool I could use forever offline.
With having so many other leagues, and needing money in them, it was easy for me to justify the SSL as a secondary league because the PTs were enough to max earn, I didn’t need to add any more work and so the SSL is free, it joined my Monday morning rotation of doing all my league tasks across the board, and I was going to have a good player this time, and not miss out on TPE. I could make graphics for the PBE (please bring back the old grading system >:() or do work for the SHL and it’d all work out pretty well. It didn’t take me too much time, and I could go with the flow with that pretty easy. But the big problem is that now the SSL does not lend itself to that schedule, with the media change, I need to figure out something because now the SSL requires a bunch more time to max earn. A player needs about 7.5 million per season to earn, and my new SSL contract is for 2.5 million a season. So I need to figure out a 5 million per season to earn, and the new media payout structure of a flat 1250 dollars per word means I’m looking at something in the range of 4000 words a season. I’m not sure how many weeks there are in an SSL season, but if we say there are like, maybe 8 (which is my default from the ISFL), that means that if I wrote my standard 200 word article each time, that’s a 2 million base payout I’m going to get. Maybe we can say that that’s factored into the base amount of earning we’re getting, so I just need to find a 3 million pay source, which I think was about the amount I could get from just doing a single job and how writing a PT is actually going to net you more than 200 words per week, but I don’t really want to commit myself to a job here, I’ve got a busy IRL schedule at the moment and couldn’t commit to a specific scheduled job, which is why I really enjoyed being a batch media grader who processed a huge backlog.
Okay, so a three million deficit and 1250 dollars per word payout for media means about a 2500 word deficit to max earn, and I would like to max earn to make sure that Sov doesn’t catch me in TPE, not that I think he will, the SSL seems to be a lot weaker on the count of max earners which bodes well for me being the top earner in the class. So I need to write a couple long articles in the SSL to make up for the aforementioned 3 million deficit, assuming that I’m also writing PTs every week in the SSL, which is also another assumption we’ll have to get into later, and we will because of our incentives.
Before I could make a bunch of articles that I thought were like “structured” and self-contained like the bunch I made for what Magic: the Gathering deck your team was from a historical perspective (historical MTG decks, not SSL history) off of the SSL logos both minor and major league teams. It was great punching those out while I was really sick for a week, and I felt like they were their own articles that worked medium amount and I didn’t feel like I needed to pad the word count or anything, they would get paid out on their quality and so I could just dump some words out, but now, I almost have negative incentive to do that? This is a weird bit because the incentives are actually pretty close in actual outcome. Those articles, I’m not going to go back and read em, but they were probably around to 500 word count each which was what they amounted to pay out wise in the old system. However, now that we’re getting paid out per word, the incentive and style in these articles changes the texture of how I feel like I should write and what I need to do in order to maximize the value from the amount of time I’m putting into the league in order to max earn and minimize the actual amount of time I’m spending on the league from an earning perspective. The actual outcome for the writing hasn’t changed at all, the payout is about the same, and the effort I’d have to use in order to make another one of those is identical, but now I have an implicit pressure to pad word count because that’s what the outcome is based off of. My drive to write these things isn’t to have the most interesting or best piece of writing, it’s to max earn in the league. I’m not invested enough in the SSL to actually dive into stats and things in order to figure out what the best X or most interesting Y stat is from this season, especially with a shorter season that doesn’t feel like there are enough numbers in. So when the goal is only to make that bank account big, then just having that background knowledge that I’m going to really increase the worth of the time I spend on earning, which I want to minimize since earning money in a sim league where I just want to see number go up isn’t the most engaging thing for me personally, is to just pad words forever and ever in order to one shot the earning for a season, or for me, one shot the earning for the next season. So all of this is to say that the result of what these media changes have been for me is that I’m not going to write a bunch of short things that I was kind of interested in, like choosing a Magic deck for each SSL major and minor league team, which I was having fun with. The outcomes haven’t changed but the incentives have majorly changed, which has changed how I view the time I’m spending on media and how to extract the most per minute I spend on the league. In essence, the SSL has become the same as the SHL or PBE in terms of needing to spend time to earn, which I did not have as an expectation when I recreated here.
So, money is harder to get, money is linked to me just writing more words rather than better words, and a big part of my earning would be linked to me writing my PTs here every week, so we have another problem. The PTs in the SSL suck. It sucks because it’s a blank slate without any direction or reason. You have to decide what to write about, and that’s fine and good, but you don’t get any seed or something to go off of, which makes it even more of a chore to actually start on and do every week. I would do them here because it would fuel my max earning, but now that that’s removed, the incentive to do PTs here is much lessened. Doing PTs in other leagues with a varied and interesting source to write on (shoutout TubaDeus in the ISFL for killing it with the PT prompts) makes it a more varied and interesting experience. But with no direction here and a huge incentive to write your own thing rather than replying to something makes it something that is really quite a huge bother. I was okay with having the onus on me to provide literally everything PT wise every week when the rewards was that you got to have a maxed out player, but with even that removed, the incentive to write here is lessened, the goal is then to find out a simple hack or method to just get all the money you need to and then just link a more fun PT to the SSL so you don’t have to do all that work still for such a lessened payout. I think that’s my huge resistance and barrier after I saw that I could barely afford anything because I got paid out nothing for all the PTs that I wrote, which was in contrast to what I used to have. Writing an SSL PT is not fun because of all you have to do for it, it requires so much more than any other league, and then you still have to earn outside of it like every other league, but at least those leagues have more stats and numbers I’m interested in.
Okay, with those all as why I’m figuring out how to work around the SSL, I’ve got a couple more things, I’m very happy that I joined the SSL, it’s been a ton of fun, but now that this has happened, stuff like the lowering of the max career length is very exciting to me, because I’m feeling all this negative stuff towards having to earn money, knowing that I don’t have to max for like, the 3 years that players used to live for is great. I’d like to have a good player and lead the Liffey side to a championship, but I’ve got a much more bounded number of seasons I will be active for. It’ll probably be a year or so of earning, but that’s not a big deal. I might need to just bash out a bunch of graphics or something to build out my bank, but if I’m linking another league’s PTs here now, which is the plan, the SSL isn’t my Secondary Soccer League but instead is a very distant fourth behind the ISFL, the PBE, and the SHL, whereas it used to be about tied with the other non-ISFL leagues. And another thing is that the player bank system drives me, and some other users, to not recreate. It’s not a trivial amount of work to earn and play in a sim league, but to wipe out all that progress after your retirement is so annoying and so deleterious to any will or want to play more with that player. If I’m earning and contributing, maybe it’s jobs or just writing or whatever, why is that effort all erased after I make a new player? It used to be at least that the money was easy enough to earn and part of being an SSL citizen and doing PTs that it was annoying but whatever, but now that you need real effort to max earn, it’s actually super detrimental to me even considering a second player after this one. Sure this is maybe my fourth player(?) but I’m considering this my first real go in this league.
So in conclusion, we’ve got a ton of negative incentives now in this league to earn through doing PTs, the new grading system rewards users who wrote good long pieces, disadvantages others who wrote PTs here to affiliate, and puts a pressure on the writer to write a long piece rather than a good piece. Combined with the fact that writing at PT here is the worst of all the leagues I’m in, and that the bonus of writing here has been lessened, and with the knowledge that earning a dollar more than you want or need to over your career here is wasted with the bank reset, then you’re just in a place where the SSL is more of a chore to earn in than in the other leagues that are popular and large. I certainly feel that way and am looking for ways to just grow my bank and kick the SSL down in priority and do PTs that are more fun in other leagues to link them here.
I think there is a solution that is to bump up the baseline amount you get per article to make it closer to payouts from before, or maybe my perceived payouts from before. When the payment is just based off of work count rather than quality (other than that bonus structure), you don’t have incentive to really work on a many small, bite sized good things rather than one long, rambly thing of questionable quality. I would potentially just increase the word payout, or include a base payout for a media article over X words. I know that’s a thing that other leagues do, where an article automatically hits a X dollar amount bonus for Y words written, which means that your incentives aren’t just to make the worst long thing you can stomach and time box for. I would also do some 2x events, I haven’t seen any of those and that would be nice to just give people something they can write towards.
The SSL has been fun for me, but the media payout changes and earning system are quite bad, I would implement some amount of base payout per articles like I mentioned and also do a PT prompt instead of making everyone do their own thing and provide everything needed for a PT. I’m going to just stop doing SSL PTs and bash out some mid to mid minus graphics to build a bank because these changes have made me really never want to do any of this SSL PT stuff.
To any grader or media peep or to HO here or whatever, I do apologize if this is longer and meaner than I actually intended. Part of it is that this thing is rambling and long because the word count is what's important, and part of it is just frustration with the PT system giving absolutely zero to the user and making them do all the work themselves. Also, let bank carry over, it's really weird that it doesn't.
![[Image: lisfor-3.png]](https://i.postimg.cc/sDzJYqYM/lisfor-3.png)
![[Image: M7SNVLm.png]](https://i.imgur.com/M7SNVLm.png)
