S6 State of the League

[Canadice]

Start of S6

Today marks the start of the sixth season in the league.

• - All players whose contract expired can now sign with any team in accordance with their transfer value.
• - All players on their final season of the contract may now sign an extension.
• - All players (not unclaimed prospects) may claim the S6 Training Camp
• - The Waiver Wire is now open for teams to claim newly approved prospects.

Be on the lookout for more tasks to show up this week as we are getting ready for the new season.

SSL Bot

The league has its own Discord Bot! If your manager hasn't already added it to your locker room, let them know so it can be added. Managers, you have received instructions in the manager chat. As of the current version, there are commands to, store a player name to your Discord User (sets the default player for all other commands), see your (or your teammate's) bank balance, view the league leaders in different categories, view your player statistics in different categories, and view your attribute distribution. There is also a command that returns a random SSL trivia fact. If there are any issues with the bot, please contact Canadice (#0985) on Discord.

Rule Changes

After yet another off-season, there are some rule changes that has been passed by the BoD and the Team Managers. The following additions can now be found in the Rulebook:

Ability to sign inactive prospects
Section 5 Subsection 2 has now an additional rule that allows teams to sign an inactive prospect they have drafted or claimed through the waiver wire to a one season Inactive Status Contract.

No movement clauses
Section 5 Subsection 2 Rule 3.b defines the only clause that can be included in a contract as a No Movement Clause (NMC) instead of the previous No Trade Clause (NTC). The NMC covers all forms of movement including trades, loans and exposure for a potential expansion draft. As always, the player is able to waive their NMC.

A team may only have 4 players signed with an NMC clause.

Sensitive team information or leaks
As part of the Personal Conduct Policy in the beginning of the Rulebook, there are now rules specifically against leaks of information either private, team specific or league job specific that is not intended for public view. We hope that this is common knowledge for everyone already, but it is now specifically written into the Rulebook in case there was any confusion. We will take infractions of this nature very seriously.

League Updates

The league is quickly approaching its one year anniversary in November/December (the S1 Draft started November 23 and the first official match of S1 happened on December 7th) and I wanted to take some time to write about some aspects of the league.

Divisional Structure

Season 5 was the first time in the league when the teams were split up into two divisions. After the excitement on the last matchday of the season, we saw two teams promoted and two teams relegated resulting in 8 teams in Division 1 and 6 teams in Division 2 yet again. The goal is to have an even number of teams in the different divisions (maxing out at 10 teams in any one division), both simplifying scheduling and giving the players in different divisions the same number of games to play. We did not create the initial divisions with an even number of teams (7/7) for two reasons; it is much easier to schedule an even number of teams for each matchday and to allow for an easy process if/when the next expansion occurs. Any future expansion will naturally slot in the second division and will have to raise their team through the divisions to fight for the league championship. Any expansion after that This way of structuring the league is unique to sim leagues, but not to the sport of football, which we hope can garner interest from people new and old.

The Casual League and PT Structure

The SSL has always been a casual sim league, at least in comparison to most of the other main sim leagues. The capped TPE structure with the multitude of ways to earn these, especially if you are participating in one of the other sim leagues out there, makes it easy for a player to earn at or close to the max every season. One thing that we have noticed is that there is a lot of media (articles, podcasts and graphics) being posted that does not get enough time in the spotlight. The current PT structure favors monologues and leaves less incentive for people to engage with the material posted. We are looking into ways of restructuring the capped PT system, to incentivize engaging and expanding on other’s posts.

League Resources and Burnout

There is one final thing I want to touch on in this announcement. This league can only run with the help of two things; one, a user base that is excited to create and develop their players throughout their career, and two, a user base that is eager to help out in what happens behind the scenes.

There is an abundance of things happening behind the scenes in order to make this league run. Everything from managing a team, checking and approving player updates, organizing weekly capped and uncapped point tasks, recording, commentating and producing the league game videos, filework within Football Manager, creating graphics for teams and the league as a whole, managing the league Budget and the Bank, and more league wide responsibilities in the Board of Directors. Since the inauguration of the SSL, there have been, and still are, users that have covered multiple roles and responsibilities for longer periods of time. This is an issue as it tends to result in user burnout which is not good for the longevity of any sim league (as seen recently with the dissolution of the WSBL). In order to prevent user burnout we can do either one of two things. We either lower the "quality of the product" or try to get more users helping out.

The first option would mean for example that we don't expect or assume the grading of weekly game predictions to occur within a couple of days, or the processing of trades to occur directly after posting, or split the player updating to alternating weeks based on the division of the team. Most of these examples focus on lowering the expectations of a user that has taken it upon themselves to do the work.

In my personal opinion, this is not what we want to strive for as we would risk losing the other core of the league, a user base excited to play in the league. Instead I believe that we should work towards the other option, getting more people involved in the different departments. Now I know this comes as a bit of a swivel from the earlier paragraph about the SSL being a casual league and I know that we all have different preconditions as individual users in a sim league. I am not saying you would have to dedicate your entire free-time to this league, but if you want to help out there is most likely some task (from something minor to more extensive) that needs doing throughout the season. If you are interested in helping out a bit more, we are actively looking for Department Heads to oversee the team of users that are completing the tasks and willing to step in during times of extra workload, or in between hirings.

Feel free to reach out to myself or any BoD member if you don't find any of the job hiring posts interesting but you still want to help out. Also don’t hesitate to reach out if you see an individual listed in a role, as that does not mean that the workload is spoken for. We will be more than happy to try and figure something out. Together we can make this league even better!

/Commissioner Canadice

[G2019]

That's my commish!

[Valpix]

in canadice i trust