As of today, the final parts necessary for seasons to be enabled in the Competitive division have been implemented. While I'm not intending to stress through the change, this means that we're pretty close. My intent is to leave things as-is for a little bit of time and allow some testing to happen for the leagues using the seasons and redrafting rules.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who are wondering how this transition will work, which is the purpose of this post.

First off, the season configuration shouldn't be a surprise to too many of you:
- 15 games per season
- 1000k gold base budget
- 10k gold per game
- 10k gold per win
- 5k gold per tie
- 1350k redraft cap
- 70k per game ramp-up for the cap
- 20k cumulative agent fee per season

These are the default values for rulesets, so many of you have probably seen these settings before even if you haven't used them.

Once a team has played the 15th game, it will enter end-of-season state with coaches given the choice to go into redrafting, or alternatively enter an end-of-season tournament (more on tournaments later).

At any point after the first match in a season, the team can voluntarily enter end-season and redraft or enter a tournament, although certain can prevent this from happening (again, more on this later).

So, what about the transition? What will happen to existing teams?

Teams that have less than 15 games played will simply be switched over with no apparent change, other than End-season being an option. Once the 15th game has been played, end-season will be enforced.

Teams with 15 or more games played are a little bit more complicated:
- If the team is scheduled in a match, it will be pushed into end-season state after the match has been finished.
- If the team is not scheduled, the team will be converted into end-season state immediately.

Teams that are part of the Blackbox trophy will be restricted from ending their season, which will unlock when the season ends.

Teams that are currently part of an official tournament will for the most part not be able to end their season until they get eliminated, nor will they go into redrafting.

Going forward:
- Minor tournaments will allow teams that are in the Ready state to enter, as long as the team has played at most 15 games in the season. Once the team is eliminated, it will be pushed into end-of-season state if they have played 15 or more games (including the tournament games)
- Major qualifiers will require teams to be in the end-of-season state, and they may not have played more than 15 games in the season. After exiting a qualifier tournament, teams will be forced into end-season state
- Invitational tournaments will require end-season state, but will allow more than 15 games played. This is intended as a playoff final for a major tournament, and will allow qualifying teams to enter the tournament. On exiting an invitational, teams will be forced into redrafting state.
- Major tournaments will require end-of-season state, and not more than 15 games played in the season. This is designed to be a major tournament that doesn't have a qualifier (such as the FUMBBL Cup). On exiting the tournament, teams will be forced into redrafting.

This is a very very significant change, and will have a huge impact on teams in the Competitive division. If you have any additional questions regarding this, do feel free to post a comment below, or ask on the FUMBBL Discord. Any frequent questions will be added and answered to the bottom of this post.

FAQ

When will this happen?
Uncertain. As mentioned above, I want a little bit of time for the last updates to be tested before I push it to such a large number of teams. Once I have a specific point in time for this change, I will write another post with the appropriate information.

Can I opt out?
No, this will affect all teams in the Competitive division. If you want to play without seasons after this change has happened, the League division is the environment for that.

If my player has more than 15 games played, will it count as more than one season in terms of agent fees?

Updated

Players with lots of games will have their "season count" adjusted to: min(floor(games / 25), 4).
To clarify the formula:

- 0-24 games => 20k agent fee
- 25-49 games => 40k agent fee
- 50-74 games => 60k agent fee
- 75-99 games => 80k agent fee
- 100+ games => 100k agent fee


Why are old players given a discount on agent fees?
This is a simple question on a complex topic. There are a handful of teams on the site where players have participated in many seasons' worth of games. Pushing the full cumulative cost onto these older teams has a high probability of basically flushing the teams back to TV10000. Player cost would reach up towards 600k in the worst cases.

This is on teams the coach spent literally 100+ hours building, and I'm not so keen on simply killing off those teams.

Fundamentally, it comes down to finding a compromise between the effort needed to develop technical support for the migration, allowing old teams to continue in any fashion, and making people building new teams not feel they have no chance.

Are there going to be teams that are perhaps too powerful after this system? Very likely, yes. With any change of this magnitude, there will be edge cases where things aren't ideal, and trying to find a "perfect" solution is mostly going to delay the introduction of seasons for a very long time.

Perhaps giving these players a "free pass" is too generous though, but I genuinely don't think it's reasonable to hit a player with 300k agent fees either. I'll consider methods to scale the agent fee with the number of "virutal" seasons the players have played. Examples could be a straight up max cap, or a linear scaling of some kind. Not a lot of time remaining though, and I will likely lean towards the more lenient side of things.

Edit: A formula for how this will be handled has been edited into the question above