Subject: I.1

You have some progress to build off of; I wouldn't completely restart.

Getting the arena to 20,000 is one of the most important things. I get 18,192,293 per week from my media sponsor in addition to 10,000,000 per home league game from ticket sales and souvenir sales (fan shop). I also get 3,473,959 per week from the Skyboxes in the arena. You have a good base to build off of, but I would focus on upgrading directly to the triple-floor multi-purpose stands at this point.

For facilities, anything below level 10 won't hurt you too much in terms of maintenance costs. You seem to have focused most on your HRE facility which is good for your general sponsor. The maintenance center isn't a bad investment to have in place to diminish maintenance costs once you start to have a lot of high level facilities.

Staff can be extremely costly and aren't really effective below level 10. I'd cut everyone but your managers and maybe your arena custodians. You can see your daily maintenance on the arena and facility pages. If you un-assign your staff, you can see the change in costs and compare that to their daily salaries to see if they are saving you any money (they also prevent vandalism costs, but that's a bit harder to quantify).

Foreign players have higher salaries and can increase daily expenses a fair amount, however, your Overall Team Rating on your team page (which is determined by winning games) has a significant effect on our general sponsors. It might be worth having a few good players to make sure you're winning games. You want to be the 2nd-3rd best team in your league since you'll lose almost all of your games and take a hit on your sponsorship if you promote (after having a good sponsorship in the first season). It can take a few seasons to recover from promoting too early. Honestly, it look like your roster is about right for II.1 You probably won't promote, but you'll be one of the best teams. You only have a small handful of foreign players. You have facilities that are good enough to develop players of similar caliber to the other teams in your league.

An alternative strategy is to buy a bunch of cheap old players (~35+) and try to build a team capable of competing in the playoffs in I.1. That's what the HC Dallas Stars and Rockland Rage are doing. It's a bit risky though since you'd still have to spend a bit of money to buy players and pay their salaries. You also have to frequently replace players as they decline too much or get stolen through free agency. If you don't do well enough to get one of the top 8-10 sponsorships, you can end up setting yourself back.

TLDR: you like you are going in the right direction to me. Most importantly, I'd just focus on continuing to improve your arena and HRE facility.

About the promotion thing...I went 38-0 and had to find a way to not promote without getting a sponsorship hit, because I knew if I promoted I'd get killed up there! I am seventh in the country for OTR, but 17th for strength. I also have a 40-year-old goalie lol.

I did that neat little trick and discovered my arena custodians are saving me money...a grand total of 400 per day.

I forgot to mention the best way to avoid promoting - play every game before the playoffs on very hard. It's what I did in basketball to avoid promoting until I had a team capable of of being a top 8 (now top 6) team in I.1. You'll do better in the regular season and then struggle in the playoffs.

At 400 per day, you might be one new contract/raise from starting to lose money. If you have multiple arena custodians, it's possible that one is saving a good amount and the other is losing you money. It looks like you already fired your arena staff. It also seems that you only have a level 3 maintenance facility and a level 1 education facility at the moment, so your staff would be much less likely to save you money there.

Sounds good! I'm in a weird spot where my team can pretty much dominate every other team in my league, but I'd struggle to win more than a few games in I.1.

To be fair, there is a fairly significant promotion bonus now that sort of offsets that issue, but even with that bonus, the sponsors in this game are flawed and poorly calibrated in a way that creates weird incentives to avoid promoting to a better league.

I have a player I am selling: Alvin McCollum . Qs: 97-54-76-99-77-96-67 As a G, 90% avg Q; as a shooting C, 87% avg Q. His starting OR is low, but someone might want him.

UPDATE: He sold for 1.1 million to a French team that has full facilities, so that should be good.

It looks like I get to draft first in a draft where I've found an A+ player.

We found the same guy then. Drat!

Wait....I'm mixing up my sports. I'm not in this league lol! It's been a crazy week.

It seems I've been playing a random roster using some of my starters (instead of my exhibition roster) every Saturday playing on very high (I play exhibitions on very high to develop the experience of my prospects) because I have so many players away for national teams.

I guess the silver lining ( ) is that friendlies don't use up as much energy as league games, so it's not the end of your season yet.

I came close, but I couldn't win in the end.

The Bouncing Pucks are surprisingly only the 4th team to win in the playoffs in I.1. Congratulations!

Very close series, and well done on defeating the Razorback Thugs in the playoffs. That's something I still have yet to accomplish.

My players have definitely earned some vacation time, poor Thomas Rinderer is down to 67 energy .

Not only this, but they ended Razorback's 17-consecutive playoff championship streak! Signs were coming, in that season 34 was the last time Razorback Thugs won regular season, playoff, and National Cup. This is healthy for the league, for sure. I'm headed up to see you guys. Please don't make me go back down