Posted by kschoenberg on 9/11/2012 9:08:00 AM (view original):
tecwrg, right and you get the positive reputations by enforcing certain rules like minimum wins, specific rules on trades, non-collusion, etc.. If you don't have rules that can enable a league to rid itself of bad owners and make it unattractive to the bad ones in the first place it's very hard to build a strong following.
A league where an owner is allowed to lose 90+ games season after season to build a powerhouse isn't going to be attractive. The same goes for leagues where owners are allowed to neglect their minor leagues would be the same way. So, yes...it's not the rules alone that make a league attractive, but they're the basis for a strong league.
Agreed.
But my comment was more of a response to tomfool's contention that maybe private world rules were a hinderance that were preventing some of the private worlds from filling. If a particular world has a lot of openings that it is having difficulty in filling, it's probably not the rules that are the problem.
Two of the worlds I'm in (Moonlight Graham and Cooperstown) have among the toughest minimum win rules that I've seen in HBD, and unlike a number of other worlds that have minimum win rules, there are no committees to "review" failures to meet the requirements. You miss it, you're gone, no exceptions . Yet there is fairly low turnover, and usually a waiting list of owners wanting to join. And that is due mostly to the reputation of the worlds themelves, the reputation of the owners in those worlds, and the reputation of the commissioner.
I've played in a number of other worlds as a replacement owner, taking over abandonments one season at a time, and there are a lot of messed up worlds out there with weak, innefective commissioners, rules that are not consistently enforced, and are running rampant with tankers and trade-rapists. These, shockingly, also seem to be the worlds that typically have 7 to 8 openings after every season and take a relatively long time to fill. It's not the rules that are the problems with those worlds.