S25 State of the League

[Canadice]

S25 State of the League

We are happy to announce the start of the 25th season of the SSL, an anniversary season! The (re)introduction of promotion and relegation brought with it one of the more exciting final weeks in league history, with important games in many of the final matchdays and eventual playoff promotion. We hope to see the same level of intensity this season as well!

Seasonal Survey

I will try to summarize the results of the Seasonal Survey that was sent out in S24, focusing on the changes and important information we have gathered.

Just as an introduction we received around 180 responses where almost 40 % of respondents indicate that the SSL is their main sim league. We have always known that the SSL is mostly a secondary or “casual” league for most but this high percentage indicates that we are moving towards becoming more and more independent. It is also most common to be in 2 or more sim leagues (1: 25%, 2: 29%, 3: 18%, 4: 17%...) with the SHL and ISFL being the more prevalent other main leagues at above 20% each. We got some insight into the job situation where almost all of the hired users in the SSL feel the PT pass and monetary rewards are fair for their contributions.

As for the league changes, a vast majority of respondents liked (62%) or were impartial (23%) of the move to promotion relegation but we also saw a big portion of respondents (35%) express that they believed the number of games in a season are too few. We will have some changes announced related to this later in this post.

At some point in the future we will also most likely conduct additional expansion(s) to reach our “final form” with 16 organizations that was announced a couple of seasons ago. In the survey we asked your feelings in regard to the latest expansion that happened in S22, which about 55% of respondents were here for. Out of these respondents, almost 80% had a positive experience but almost 8% said they did not (and 10% said they are not open to another expansion in the future) so we will look at the detailed responses if there is something we can mitigate if/when another expansion occurs. There is nothing concrete planned at the moment in this regard, see more information later in this post.

For the bounty system, a large number of respondents have answered that the information is not really clear which we can understand given the amount of changes that have been made on a season-by-season basis. If you are unsure, you can find the latest information about bounties in its subforum. The reintroduction of a banner competition has been positive, and we will adjust for S25 that championship banners are separate from the other banners so we get more images into the banner rotation. Another main point from the respondents has been the difference in grading detail which we will take with us to the bounty department and work on.

We will soon have yet another Cross League Charity Drive happening which we hope more people will see and participate in compared to the last one. We are aware that most of the other main leagues are participating in it as well and we understand that you may choose to donate through another league. We will look at ways to incorporate fun and unique charity auction items to entice participation through our drive. We will send out a post closer to the charity period for items that can be put up for auction.

In summary the survey has given us a lot of good feedback both in general and in specific areas we asked about. Thank you all for participating and your TPE reward should be submitted to the portal shortly!

Rule Changes

As is custom for these seasonal posts, we have some updates of the Rulebook that we want to announce and make everyone aware of.

The first is less of a rule change and something that came up based on the responses in the survey. We have worked with the FM Editor to swap the order of the division 1 and division 2 matchdays as in S24 division 1 was set to premiere on the early slot (15 Eastern) and division 2 on the late slot (19 Eastern). In S25, we will see them change so that every odd matchday has division 1 early and division 2 late, and every even matchday has division 2 early and division 1 late. As always the Matchday Producer bot in the Matchday channel will post the detailed schedule for the week on Mondays and Thursdays.

Speaking of matchdays, the BoD has in tandem with the sim team also voted to increase the number of games to 15 per league, corresponding to 3 matchups per divisional opponent. This number is more closely tied to the number of league games we expect in our final form (14) so this will be a fixed schedule for the foreseeable future.

With these new changes we have also adjusted the Code of Conduct punishment guidelines to reflect the number of games per week. The punishment for a first infraction is 3 games suspension, while a second infraction incurs a 7 game suspension.

Another rule change that we have voted to apply is the following to tactic submissions:

Code:

New 3.c.iii

It is not allowed to submit a tactic where the tactical formation has less than two (2) central defenders capable of playing at that position with at least their secondary position ability.

New 3.c.iv
It is not allowed to submit a tactic where there are more than three (3) players playing at positions outside of their primary or secondary position abilities.

New 3.d

The BoD reserves the right to invalidate a tactic submission, even if it fulfills rule 3.e and 3.f, if it neglects a team's defensive duties, e.g. submitting a 2-5AM-3 formation.

The intent is to restrict weird and too offensive tactic submissions that create artificially long games (2x-3x of a normal sim) for the sim team to record.

Changes to weak foot updates

It has come to our attention that the interaction between footedness and weak foot ratings in FM24 may result in unintended consequences for left-footed players who purchase the maximum weak foot upgrade. Specifically, for the purpose of corner taking, any player with a 20 rating in both right and left foot will always be treated as right-foot dominant when taking corners. Any player with 20-20 in footedness will never take a corner with their left foot.

Looking through regular FM players, there are none of the current "two-footed players" that have 20/20, they have 20/19. FM was most likely never built to work with 20/20.

During this first week of S25, we will adjust anyone who has 20/20 down to 20/19, looking at your initial build to determine the strong foot. If there are players that have re-rolled or re-distributed to another primary foot do let us know if this adjustment based on the initial build is wrong.

The bank will now allow for purchases of 19 max weak foot for the same price as before (as the intent is the same) in increments of 10 -> 15 -> 19.

Recruitment and Expansion

To preface, this is not an announcement about a new expansion!

We are planning for yet another Reddit recruitment this season, and intend to make this a regular occurrence in our recruitment schedule every three seasons. We are currently on pace to hit the current max number of starting positions (264) during next season.

Expansion is heavily dependent on how many people we retain from this upcoming Academy class as well as interest in management positions. Depending on the retention percentage we will begin to look at expansion options shortly after. Keep in mind that during the S20 and S23 classes we had a drop off during and after the Academy season and we want to be able to find a balance where teams are not completely full while also not creating expansion teams that will struggle to field 11 active players between two teams. In short, an update on possible expansion processes will be announced when the BoD is confident that we have surpassed our max number of starting positions in a sustainable manner.

Available jobs

If you have not yet looked at the open positions subforum I would recommend you to do so as we have quite a few open positions at the moment. Among them we want to highlight:

Accounting Head responsible for the budget sheet.
PT Members helping out with the weekly and career point tasks
BoD Members and Intern helping out with the running of the league
Simmer responsible for recording the games

If you don’t see a position that you are interested in applying for, do let us know within the BoD and we can refer you to the proper person.


Commissioner Canadice and the BoD!