Subject: I.1

oooooh. yeah. doesn't look good. just noticed that he hasn't logged in a single time since he posted that comment in the hockey forum. that's not a good sign.

the unfortunate thing is... u.s. handball is getting to dangerously close to a threshold of no longer having their own national team. we're not really even able to fill up one division with high caliber, regularly managed teams now with tescosamoa and max leaving.

i have enough credits to be pro in handball until october 2021, but I'm honestly imagining we might not make it that far.

maybe if the devs actually cared about keeping user-ship up, they'd dump us into the world league / division to sort of revitalize things (we'd probably lose the national competition, but at least league / division play would be more competitive again. more like the old days from the first 10 seasons)... but i'm not sure they're really paying much attention at all anymore.

actually... i just looked at the market (since i've got money to spend, why not), and that shit is BARREN. I don't ever recall there being so few 15 year olds for sale the first week of the season.

It's also nearly impossible to find any decent staff options to buy too. So maybe it's not just the u.s. seems like the whole world is hemorrhaging players. or at the very least, people are losing interest in droves and just not maintaining their teams as actively as they once did.

Sort of a bummer tbh.

Years ago, I pushed for the league structure to be based on language and not nation for better competition, but obviously that went nowhere.

It's too bad, we could've had a vibrant community for much longer I think.

I'm trying to buy one or more of yours that's up there. I play all four sports here, and handball is probably tied with hockey for my favorite, but hockey feels much more competitive. Of course, I also feel I have a better shot to be a really good team in handball.

I honestly wanted there to be a North American league in handball with Canada and US combined where we retain our national teams.

What's the threshold for keeping national teams?

It's definitely wide open for anyone to rise to become a solid I.1 team at the moment.

Just make sure you don't let your facilities/roster/staff outpace your arena and HRE facility going forward.

Your old player David Allen seems to be on the market for slightly more than you got for him.

hmmmm... crunching some numbers... it MIIIIGHT actually make sense for me (and really only me) to buy him at that 222m price tag.

iirc, i'd only have to pay him 35% of whatever offer he receives during RFA (i gave hims signing bonuses every year he was on my team starting at age 15). So assuming he gets a $300m RFA deal in 80ish days, I'd be on the hook for $222m now and about another $105m in 82 days. All in "cost" of about 330m for a player with one of the best OR's on the U.S. national team.

Considering that I got basically 185m for selling him, i'd really only be "paying" like 145m or so for him. Not terrible when you look at it through that very derivative lens.

I guess the question becomes, "what do i expect his RFA offer to be?" Because that's gonna be the biggest factor in all of it.

Thanks for the heads up. Definitely something to chew on. he's one of maybe 4 players at this point that I'd be interested in buying back (players that I heavily invested in season bonuses for): keenan, allen, john field, and mayyybe leo patel (though i only had i think 4 bonuses into patel at the time of the blowup).

yeah. a north american league with separate national teams would've been cool.

as far as the threshold goes... they never really said specifically (i think they didn't want to box themselves in to a rigid standard), but there are several countries out there with only one primary division which don't have their own national teams iirc.

and yeah... it's funny, I hadn't ever watched or heard of handball before i started playing this product. i started with hockey because i loved hockey and it was a (healthy) step away from fantasy hockey for me. I started handball when it started largely because "why not, i'm already here?" I liked the mechanics of handball just sooo much more than hockey, so it became my primary sport on here. To me, hockey was too simple. Soccer was rather unnecessarily complex. Handball was a happy medium. Basketball, i see as failed potential. If they'd basically just made it "handball with hoops" I probably would've been happy. I just really didn't like that they shortened the seasons tbh. Felt like a "dumbing down" of sorts. Like the difference between what diablo 2 and diablo 3. more accessible i guess. but, for me, less interesting as a result.

Well I accidentally scheduled the first friendly of next season for our U21 team against Brazil. Not Brazil U21. Just Brazil. LOL

Yeah, no prob, kick some a$$... ! (:

god dammit. i really hate this game. just lost michael horne for freaking 50k. free agents are so freaking annoying.

I just got back from vacation in the desert for the past week, and didn't have connectivity, so i couldn't click the "yeah, pay that guy the paltry amount of money necessary to keep him on my team please" button. -_-

Biggest pet peeve now that I have basically unlimited money is that there's not an "automatic renew free agent button" along with the "automatic contract renew" button. I've lost way too many free agents, who I otherwise would've kept, because of this nonsense.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is why people ultimately end up quitting the game. I recall thinking as a newbie how silly it sounded when Leggman quit hockey, after several seasons as the top ranked u.s. hockey team, largely because he was annoyed by his repeated loss of free agents. Now though, I totally get it.

I mean seriously. 50k compensation for a 2100 OR player. All because I couldn't log in for a week because, life. F*cking bullshit.

Man, that truly sucks! I do hope you stick around, though. I'd hate to see this game in our country dwindle to nothing!

I have avoided situations like this by making a "trusted" manager my team "sitter" when I know I will be absent for several days. I give him instructions on how to deal with the various situations that may arise.

yeah i know. I always felt that way too. It's honestly one of the reasons that even though my interest in the game took a serious nosedive after a couple of seasons ago when I lost basically my whole team, I really have tried to scrape myself up off the ground and keep playing.

But it's just getting to the point of being more frustrating and annoying than it's worth. It's like this sense of dread every time I log in, wondering "what's gone wrong now" rather than actually something I look forward to.

In my experience, that's normally a sign that it's time to quit the game. I'm really fighting that urge, but honestly, if I got news of someone wanting to take over my account I'd probably take them up on it because I know it could be better utilized by someone without all the baggage that I now have about it all.