SPL Retains

[Eo Ut Mortus]

I know people like retains for the storylines they can build, but that's only nice if you end up on one of the few dynasty teams. As someone who has played SPL from the start and been on bad/no-name teams for 5/6 seasons, I wish they'd be cut altogether to give everyone a fair playing field. In a world where SPL was run exactly like a sports league, I might value what franchise players bring to the tournament narrative-wise, but with the high amount of manager/player turnover between seasons, I'd more readily remember teams for what they do in a season than for what dynasties they build. The only franchise player I can recall from memory from before the past two SPL seasons is Conflict on the Sharks; on the other hand, it's easy to remember the downfall of the overhyped rey/dice/tama Falcon superteam, Sogeking trying and failing to lead the Frogs, and the iconic Ruiner/Cryo tiebreaker featuring ABR/Geemick. I think it's fair to want a tournament where we can cultivate and celebrate these types of dynasties, but I don't think it's a feasible effort in a community where people continuously come and go, and I don't think it's the only way for us to invest in teams and their identities.

 

[ABR]

Regardless of the validity of your sentiment itself Eo Ut Mortus, we aren't looking to do such a large scale change for this upcoming SPL. My apologies as I probably could have specified that in my above post.

For the time being, it's important that we accept retains as an important part of SPL's identity and that's not changing for the next edition. From this point, I'm very interested in hearing specific opinions on how their existence can be improved upon.

To be clear, retains will be in SPL X.

 

[MANNAT]

I think the main issue with retains in SPL is that what they actually were created with the intent to accomplishing and what they actually accomplish in the actual tour itself are completely different. The main philosophy behind retains in the first place is to establish team identities and and reward managers for making great finds and drafting good players for cheap early on, making it easier for franchises to form dynasties and have continual success. However, this isn't what occurs because of retain trading's existence, as retain trading goes against the philosophy of retains in the first place with them encouraging teams to have complete makeovers from year to year and making it nearly impossible for a team to really build a strong identity for more than a couple years. There also isn't enough retains to maintain a similar looking roster every year, as there's a whopping 11 players picked up every year that weren't retained from the previous SPL. Additionally, another reason why retains don't accomplish what they were initially intended to create in the first place is because the player and player pools are both highly volatile from year to year, with new faces cycling in and out of franchises constantly, making it difficult for teams to retain an identity when everything about the team changes every year.

This isn't to say that we should do away with retains, but that if we want to work to ensure that retains accomplish their original goal of molding these team identities and rewarding good managers, we need to make an effort to make teams hold these identities longer by coming up with solutions of some sort. I know that it's unlikely that retain trades will be done away with is unlikely in spite of what qualms I have with Dante's idea of increasing the number of maximum retains honestly isn't horrible because all it does is reward the better teams for drafting well the year before, and the incremental increases in player prices makes it so that it's not insurmountable to overcome these teams in spite of having a decent amount of retains. Even with retains increased to, say 5 players, teams still have to draft an additional 9 players that they didn't retain from last year's team, so realistically retains can be increased a good bit without making parity a genuine issue in SPL. No team in the history of SPL has ever won this tour twice in a row and the massive turnover in terms of rosters and which teams are the best makes it so that there's never any dynasties/great teams from year to year to create storylines going into new seasons. Storylines in the SPL tend to focus on individual players and their performances rather than the individual franchises for the most part unless there's an exceptionally well-performing underdog,. I find that to be an issue because with the skill level and roster of teams being so different year to year, it becomes impossible to build more than single-season rivalries and thus drum up the hype of the tour as a whole. Additional retains also encourage good/successful managers to come back because they get to work with a similar group of people as last year instead of a couple of their old guys + a bunch of dudes they haven't teamed with before/in a while. Obviously, it's hard to guarantee managers return on a yearly basis because of the nature of the tour and this game in general, so I think that this is the best we can do.

However, I understand that with the current tournament community climate regarding SPL retains, it is unlikely that retains get increased, as people seem to have this obsession with ensuring parity in the tour, even though a different wins every fucking year, but I definitely think that we shouldn't nerf retains because then team identity becomes even less coherent than it already is and at that point you might as well do away with retains altogether. Ideally, I would like to increase the capability of managers to keep the same team as last year, with the most obvious solution being just increase the number of retains, but I would also be content with SPL retention rules staying the same seeing as they worked just fine last season.

Please fix the sellback rules though because there was a lot of obvious issues with those last year that don't exactly need to be spelled out ._.

 

[Tony]

Alright. Let me start this post by saying this is the TD team speaking as a whole, Eo Ut Mortus. We've carefully considered the points you've all brought up and we've come up with a solution to the issues that currently exist with regards to SPL retains.

For starters, we're removing retain trading altogether. Trading retains has been abused quite severely the past few years and the only real reason to preserve trading retains is to give teams with weaker options a chance to retain a player or two as well. The removal of trades will also be applied retroactively, which means managers won't be allowed to retain players that weren't originally drafted by their own respective franchise in auction. Examples include ABR and undisputed, but also going back further like Ojama and TDK.

Our second change to SPL retains will be regarding the retention fee. We tried finding a balance between rewarding smart drafting, without also enabling long term retention patterns like we've seen with TDK and ABR, for example. Retention fees will gradually increase year to year by 3k. For example, if you were to draft a player for 10k then retaining them the next year would cost 13k (+3k), the year after it would cost 19k (+6k) and the year after that it'd be 28k (+9k). By making this change great players will be featured in the auction a lot more frequently, as they wouldn't be retained every year with very little relative cost. This change will also be applied retroactively. For example, for the Wi-Fi Wolfpack it would cost 18k to retain Fear this year, as he was drafted for 9k during SPL 8, retained for 12k (+3k) during SPL 9 and 18k would be 6k on top of last year's price. Should you want to retain a player that cost 3k in last year's SPL, then it would still default to 10k this year. However, keep in mind that a second retention would still be a 6k rise, thus resulting in a 16k retention price.

We're confident that these two changes cover the balancing aspect trading retains had, while getting rid of the negative aspects regarding retains, too. We have a few more changes lined up for SPL X, but since this thread specifically addressed SPL retains we'll announce those when manager signups go up.