One of our users, tecwrg, has recently organized a group of experienced and helpful HBD owners who have made themselves available to help new HBD owners in their first few seasons of HBD. Below is the set of rules he and other users helped put together along with the list of owners who have volunteered to participate:
This is something I've been thinking about for a little while.
HBD is a complex game, and can be quite overwhelming to first time owners. A players "card" has 31 different ratings. Some are much more important than others. Some are important for some positions, but meaningless for others. Overall ratings can be very misleading. There are many decisions that need to be made by an owner before the first spring training games are played: setting budgets, resigning free agents, arbitration, free agency, coach rehiring, coach hiring, Rule 5, etc. For the uninitiated, that's a lot of opportunity to screw things up before the first pitch is thrown.
So I propose a mentoring program, in which a number of experienced owners volunteer to take one or more newbies under their wing to give them some guidance during their first seasons.
For the mentors, you would make yourself available to answer questions about the game, to give some guidance on how to evaluate player ratings, help the newbie during some of the decisions they have to make throughout the season, evaluate trade offers, help with Rule 5 and then again later with the amateur draft, etc.
I'd also say that mentors should not be making the decisions for your "student", but should just be providing input (pros and cons) about the decisions they are facing. You want your mentoree to be able to make an informed decision for themselves after considering your input. Ultimately, it's their team, not yours.
Mentors should probably have 10+ seasons of experience with the game. Some level of success would be desirable as well.
For the mentorees, I would suggest two things:
(1) Don't look to somebody in your own world to be your mentor. They might not have your best interests in mind, and seeking advice and guidance from somebody in your own world could unwittingly (or wittingly) lead to collusion.
(2) Try to latch on to two or even three different mentors to get a number of different opinions. There are many different philosophies that one can use to run a franchise. If you "lock in" to only one mentor, you're only seeing one point of view which might not necessarily be the right one for your particular team.
Communication between the mentors and the mentorees should be done privately via sitemail.