I think people forget what makes OL great. It's how fast they fill. You can draft a team and have it start the next day. This is why people play OLs more than anything else. Tiered OLs won't work because even a relatively low-threshold entirely changes this dynamic. For example, the threshold for Champs Leagues is just 5 WS appearances, not titles. An owner with 0 titles can play in Champs leagues, plus they have increased rewards, but even at their fastest it takes 3-4 weeks to fill a champs league, and there was a gap of 8 years between champs leagues filling at one point. Making a multi-tiered OL system would only compound this problem. People want their teams to play, not sit in leagues waiting weeks, months, or years to fill, as would be the case if this already existing tiering is expanded on in any fashion.
Next, we all want new owners to stick around, and I think it's somewhat unfair to attack owners (especially people like dn8779) as being predatory. There's a lot that goes into each OL and they're all unique. An identical team could win 120 in one league and 85 in the next. The biggest advantage over new owners is knowledge of sim workings, not IDing "cookie" players. There's a bunch of ways to win. I had a team with a winning record with an $8m pitching staff, made the playoffs with a 2003 Mariners twist team but only using other Mariner seasons, and won ~90 games with single season teams from 2019 and 2020. This has nothing to do with cookies or preying on new owners, but strictly from understanding how the sim works better than new owners do.
Sure, some players, like '02 Bernhard or '19 Marte, show up on a bunch of teams, but this just means you have an idea of what your opponents are using and gives you an advantage in trying to beat them. These guys aren't invincible or unbeatable. Drafting them doesn't guarantee a 100 win season and a WS title. Even if a new owner drafted them, they still aren't as likely to succeed.
Dynamic pricing doesn't change this balance either, owners who understand the sim better will be able to find "bargains" or "value" and still build teams that succeed just as frequently, but it keeps things fresh. New owners will still have the knowledge gap issue with dynamic pricing in place. That knowledge gap would increase if new owners were limited to leagues only with other new owners. Most OLs I'm in have frequent dialogues in the league boards from veteran owners offering tips and advice to newer owners. This feedback is way more valuable to newer owners than them waiting a week or more for the league to fill and then winning 85-90 games (and there will still be owners in there that lose 100+).
The change to recommended IP/PA and the addition of links to the FAQ/Advice for Newbies will go much further than any of the above proposed changes.
The only proposed change that might have an impact on retaining new owners, or at least helping close the knowledge gap faster, would be removing fake names for AAA (and the normalization to current season). Everything else proposed here doesn't even address the root issue, just a perception problem, or would create bigger problems (leagues never filling and owners dropping because they never get to see their teams play) than the ones we already have.
1/21/2021 11:27 AM (edited)