A couple of days have passed, more leaks have shown up online and I figured I would make a post describing my current thinking about the migration to BB2020 that will be happening.

Before I get into it, I want to make a few things very clear:

1. I am basing this current thinking on what I've seen and heard online. I cannot guarantee that these things I've seen and heard are authentic. To simplify writing, the below post will be put as absolutes without noting that it's based on potentially inaccurate information for clarity.
2. I reserve the right to change my mind when we have more official information.
3. I am posting this *very* early in order to hear what you think of these ideas. It's not a "beta" type thing where everything is already in place and I genuinely want to air this before I start working on implementing it all.
4. I am going to propose a LOT of things here, and are all part of a package intended to deal with the new edition and also try to improve some things in general. Please go through it all with an open mind and don't get stuck on a single detail and rage about it all. I've spent a LOT of time thinking about this, and am spending probably an hour writing this post trying to get this out to you.

So. What are my current plans?

First off, my belief is that the skill system is at least compatible with the current system we have now. Skills have changed, been split, been combined and we have a skill system where you "buy" skills. However, players are limited to the "levels" we know (Rookie -> Legend) as before. 6 skills max per player.

This means that existing teams *can* be migrated into this new system, by mapping skills to their new equivalents, or dropping duplicates if need be. This is easier to do this time around because teams track "Unspent SPP" rather than a fixed number of SPPs which generate a number of skills in a direct function.

So, no complete wipe of teams is in the current plans. I am really happy about this.

Next up, seasons.

In BB2016, seasons are a relatively important aspect of the game. We've not implemented it because it's a big change to do in the middle of a ruleset. However, teams are quite significantly bloated in terms of TV which is not very friendly for new coaches, and makes it harder to find games for those teams in general. Seasons are an integral and important way to limit the TV of teams.

With BB2020, I think the season rules are, on a high level, unchanged. Re-drafting is still a thing but there has been a few modifications to it. There's an optional gold cap set to a pretty aggressive level making re-drafting very high TV teams complicated.

Now, to go with this, other changes in the rules make it even more important. On a whole, player attrition is significantly reduced (fewer deaths, and an ability to heal injuries during the re-drafting process). We're looking at a ruleset where TV would balloon even more, and on top of that you'll be able to build your players the way you want by picking skills (even the double equivalents now called "secondary skills"). This would lead to highly optimized, super high TV teams and worsen the problem as a whole.

As you may have figured out by now, I am thinking of adding seasons and re-drafting into the competitive division.

The way I imagine it working is as follows:
- A season is 20 games long.
- Teams can, if they choose to do so, manually put their team into re-drafting after any game (even after the first one) played.
- After the 20 games played, a team can either re-draft or join a tournament
- Tournaments can push the team to beyond the 20 games, but after a tournament they're forced into re-drafting regardless of the number of games played during the season.

Re-drafting is done as per the rules.

With the aggressive cap in place, I figure all existing competitive teams will be put into a special migration re-drafting, where the cap is more forgiving, let's call it 1.75M. This would give teams some thinking to do about which players to keep and which to recycle, but still leave these very highly developed teams at least a chance to keep the core of it for the initial season.

20 games would inevitably allow these teams to build to quite strong tournament teams should they choose to simply build towards that and ignore the consequences for next season, or phase out some of their more bloaty cost players in preparation for the next season.

While we're talking about tournaments, there are things that will need to happen for those as well.

A prize revision will obviously take place. Current thinking is a reduction in power level to match the new expected "normal TV". Minor tournaments will probably need some kind of reworking or at least rethinking to match the new environment. This will happen a bit later and I fully expect minors to take a short hiatus once the new system is put into place.

Clearly, we need more information as to what happens with the rules to be able to come up with new prizes, so this will be something we announce later this year.

Now, the more keen-eyed of you may have noticed I mentioned "competitive division" in singular form before (go ahead, scroll up and check if you didn't). This wasn't a typo, and the plan for R and B is as follows:

- All existing teams get put into the competitive division, in the re-drafting state as mentioned above. Call it [C] if you wish.
- Box teams are marked with a flag designating they're "hardcore", or something to that effect. Name is subject to change.
- The Blackbox scheduler is moved to run in this new competitive division.
- Hardcore teams can not use the game finder system, and can only be scheduled through the Blackbox scheduler.
- Normal teams can use both game finder and the blackbox scheduler.
- New teams created can choose either normal or hardcore mode.
- The Blackbox Trophy will only allow hardcore teams to participate.
- Blackbox Trophy teams must, at least initially, be newly started. This could change once we have more experience with seasons and re-drafting. Perhaps later trophies could allow re-drafted teams too.
- Blackbox Trophy teams will not be able to re-draft during the trophy run, but will be forced to re-draft after completing their trophy games.
- A hardcore team not part of the Blackbox Trophy can choose to switch to a normal team should they choose to do so.
- There is no way to switch a normal team to a hardcore one.

While we are talking divisions, the Stunty division will be sunset. Teams will be moved into the L division. There is simply not enough games to warrant keeping the division alive at this point, and this "rules review" is a good opportunity to clean things up.

The League division will naturally remain. The new rules will be applied there, with the new skills and passing stat. However, I am considering the possibility for custom league commissioners to choose to remain with the BB2016 system of rolling for skills. If it's not too technically complicated, I'll make that happen. Note, though, that the legacy skill list is probably not going to be maintained.

Finally, before I end this somewhat information-dense post, a couple of things to keep in mind:

- The ruleset is set to be released "this holiday season". I will do my absolute best to make FUMBBL be compliant with the new rules as quickly as possible, but it involves a large amount of work - Both site stuff as listed above, and also a lot of client work to support all the changes. It probably won't happen over-night, and there's inevitably going to be a period of transition and a period of bug squashing. It is extremely likely that the start of BBT4 will be postponed (however, BBT3 will end as planned with no extension).

I expect a fair amount of chatting about this blog post, and I would appreciate it if you responded with your thoughts in the the corresponding forum post. I wanted to write this in a blog entry to make it more visible due to the huge impact these changes will have.

Thanks for your time!