Subject: I.1

yeeeeeeahh... i need to spend some time and do some house cleaning. my biggest issue isn't so much the staff members though... they're more the band-aid to the bigger problem.

I have too many players. so i have to carry more staff for adequate training and injury prevention. But my biggest costs come from the player fees themselves. I had over 200m last season in fees from having too many players.

I need to figure out how many guys i actually need to hold onto for growth / development and how many i can realistically cut. Now that my older players are hitting free agencies, it's getting a bit easier, as the whole reason for carrying so much depth was my fear that i wouldn't be able to keep everyone when they became free agents.

Thats hasn't (thus far) been too much of an issue tbh. my biggest thing is just making sure i'm active enough that i don't lose people for the stupid reason of "not accepting their free agent demands."

That's already happened 2x now with Lloyd Russ and Pcolka. zzzz.

Free agency is hitting me pretty hard in another sport where I have a home grown team of solid players. Every few weeks, I get hit with another 100m. The salary bonuses I had given out are helping to make the costs a little more manageable, but I might end up losing a bunch of players. When players reach their 30's they start to hit free agency once per season. My world class goaltender in soccer was costing me 100m every season and sometimes 200m-300m into his mid-30's.

I still haven't been able to afford my final facility upgrades in handball. I pretty much need to rebuild and substantially cut down my salaries to afford the last bit, but as a solid top 5 team that's competitive for 2nd and close enough to challenge for 1st, I haven't been able to justify such a rebuild.

Guys, I am pretty that Lanky is folding...

Probably. His non-handball teams have already folded. Even if he does come back before his Pro Pack ends or the deadline with Pro Pack approaches, teams that come close to folding frequently (like the HCD Crackers a while back) tend to eventually fold unless they are specifically away for a vacation or something.

And I have zero money... Hopefully someone lands a few of those players when the time comes.

It seems that the Cataclysm won their first National Cup title, ending the Doppelgangers' 5 season win streak. It was a close match against the Big fatty cats. Both goaltenders were excellent. In a sport where shooting percentage is pretty high, both teams stopped over 50% of the shots. I think my goaltender stopped 8 out of the first 10 shots he faced or something to that effect.

All those players are up....

damn.

yeah. i was on vacation after the holidays. and since then i've been sick for like 10 days.

hadn't really logged into my laptop at all. and when i did, and chrome opened up with ppm tab, i got a cold chill down my spine. sort of knew i'd been out too long this time.

it's nice that ppm let me restore my access to my team... just in time to see all of it get sold.

i wish i could bid on my own players.

i'm sort of torn on what to do now... i'd be in suuuuuper rebuild mode. but even that would be a tough pill to swallow as all of my brightest prospects will be stripped from me.

...

shit. just looked at it. i'll literally have 6 players left from the team i created. ouch.

...

so maybe use this account as a farm team for building up national team people? while i'd love to do that, i really need to be more active to do that..

i don't know. part of me is doing this clutching and grasping at this all because this franchise was like a child. something i nurtured daily for years. and then it sort of got to a self-sustaining point and didn't need me every day anymore. so life moved on and other distractions came. but i've been running this squad since... jesus... 3 jobs, 2 moves, and 4 girlfriends ago. i started this account before my dog was even diagnosed with cancer. he's been dead 17 months now.

i do sort of blame the structure of this game tbh... and the developers for giving up on updating it. i haven't really had a reason to log in daily like i used to. construction sort of ceased to be a thing. all the meticulous spreadsheets i kept, no longer necessary. i guess i just reached my point in the life cycle of things. sadly.

i mean does anyone have any interest in taking over my account?

i'd much rather someone make use of what i built up than have a + thrown by my name and see it turn to nothing...

also. i've been tracking CL progression in a spreadsheet since season 8. if anyone doing national teams wants that, please let me know. i'd be happy to make that available as well for research or statistical analysis. i always had a mind that i'd figure out a statistical probability for every possible CL progression path. but... i never got into doing that. just... collected lots and lots of data.

i dunno. shoot me some thoughts on what you all think. i've always valued the little community we have here, so i'm all for opening it up to discussion what you all think my options are (realistically). i'm probably not in the best headspace to make a decision one way or another right now.

i do know i have enough pro points to apparently fund 2 years or so of the pro pack though. not sure why i have so much. the devs must've suckered me with a great "sale" at some point. o_O

You're about to possibly become very wealthy, and you already have the infrastructure that would take most new players years to build before they even have a chance at being competitive. Prices are cheap enough and the U.S. is lacking enough in depth of competitive teams that you could probably rebuild a top 8 team pretty quickly.

Realistically, even though you might have had the top U.S. team, your team was not good enough to be elite on the world stage. You might even consider a rebuild/getting rid of all your salaries/saving money for a few seasons/developing prospects and selling them at ~20 years old the next step in your team's evolution.

Even if you rebuild, you'll have a good OTR built-in for the next few seasons. You could tank next season to demote and still have a decent OTR once you start trying to collect wins in division II. The hard part would be to not promote again since the level of competition has fallen in handball.

I would take the money and start building the world class team.