i agree with lost heros on the tiers and 6x10. im not sure who the uu playerbase is and who really cares that it's in the tour, but it's fine. i would also advocate for a 3 minute timer between games for the classic bo3o5. let's not play for 2+ hours. and i would also agree to shortening the timer between games to 5 minutes for All series.
manager pricing has been an issue for like 7 years. i agree simple would be best, but 15/35 or 20/35 is just a buff to one manager buying themself, or can result in 0 managers buying themself in the case of 20k for one. I think we do want to incentivize managers to be able to play just because it's kind of necessary with 1v1's manager / player pool. but the prices for the buys must be reasonable Enough, which no manager getting away with a super cheap price, and none being truly impossible to buy because of their price being too steep.
what i will propose instead is the following, which is certainly more complicated than flat pricing. it involves voting, which is subjective and i dislike, but i think could be worth trying.
in CL there will be 6 manager pairs and 12 managers. each manager pair votes on the other 10 managers, and ranks them into 4 tiers.
Tier 1: 24k
Tier 2: 20k
Tier 3: 16k
Tier 4: 12k
Managers can only place up to 3 other managers in each tier, e.g., 3 managers in T1, 3 in T2, 3 in T3, 1 in T4. The median vote is taken for each manager and is their price (idt average works because there are only 5 votes).
As an example, using the OGPL 1 Managers, I could reasonably vote like this, from the perspective of the WOOLOO WARRIORS:
Tier 1 (24k): Lumi
Tier 2 (20k): Kaif, Waylaid, J*mez
Tier 3 (16k): Elo Bandit, Urfgurgle, Mubs
Tier 4: (12k): Nick, DezShizzels, Jabiru
I think it would take quite a bit of collusion for people to end up more than 1 tier above or below what is "fair" for them due to it being a median. there would need to be 3+ manager pairs in on everything, which is not impossible, but still. you could rely on other teams putting Lumi in Tier 1 and vote her in Tier 4, but if other pairs do the same thing, Lumi gets to self buy for 10k. Womp womp.
for those who are less familiar with math, if there is a vote spread like t1, t2, t2, t3, t3, we take the median as written, so this player would end in t2. i think it could also be possible to do average with assigning points to tiers, e.g., T1 = 4.0, T2 = 3.0, T3 = 2.0, T4 = 1.0, drop the highest and lowest vote for each manager, then do the average of the votes and if a player reaches a certain threshold they are in that tier. this would need some math to determine if this is better than median, and i am someone less familiar with math!
other prices for the tiers are possible but idk it's pretty arbitrary (e.g., 25k, 20k, 15k, 10k). I chose this spread of prices because i think 25k is too high and 10k is too cheap and since i think people won't end up more than 1 tier above/below where they should be, a 4k difference is chill. the prices could theoretically be more expensive because i don't know how many credits there are in a 6x10 auction lol
i think it would also be reasonable to change how the assortment of players into tiers are, e.g., lock it to 2 in T1, 3 in T2, 3 in T3, and 2 in T4, so you have to put a minimum of 2 players in each tier? i think it could also be arguable to not set a limit for how many managers in each tier, but then why would i not just send everyone to 25k? that didn't happen when voting was a thing because there was a total price we could not exceed, but here it is not a thing.
ftr i think this would work better in PL since there are 8 teams there so more votes. lets do 8x10 CL! jk. but anyway lmk thoughts since i'm sure there are loopholes I haven't considered since I came up with this over the course of the last 60 minutes, so this will need some fine tuning
