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I will also add here a proposal I may have floated originally when we were setting up the HGL.

As you might recall, I used to be involved (about 35+ seasons ago) in a large Australian PL competition called the Fishbowl. Like the HGL, it started off relatively humble with 16-20 teams and quickly began to grow as more and more teams heard about it and wanted to join.

As a result, we created an upper division and a lower division (the names of these escape me as I write this). The upper division comprised of the top 16 teams and the lower division comprised of the 16 lower teams. I don't recall how we defined which team went into the upper or lower division but I think it was based on salary.

We also had a component that required a team to win or finish in the final of the lower division (for example) to be able to 'promote' to the upper division where the 2 worst performing upper division teams relegated in much the same way we do in the league currently.

Now, I may be not entirely accurate in the number of teams [..] but you get the idea.

Perhaps we might consider something similar for the HGL? In terms of effort on your part as commissioner, it wouldn't be that much more work. More scheduling, however, and perhaps more importantly, will alleviate the PU token pressures that are surely on the horizon if we maintain the current setup.

We could even have a Deputy Commissioner responsible (in the same way you have been for the HGL thus far) for scheduling, maintaining and enforcing rules for the proposed 'lower' division.

These are just musings of course as you have floated the possibility of change and, as we can predict with some accuracy, change will be required at some point in the future if the HGL continues to expand.

I won't edit all parts of your message out that I'm not referring into here, but I'll just respond to some parts of your post.
I remember your Fishbowl experience, however I've forgotten most if not all of it's details.

It is possible that HGL reaches similar kind of interest when time flies by, but as for now, there are still limited number of HG teams, of which limited amount are interested in playin in HGL (both of those numbers we of course hope will increase in the future), so this is clearly not a problem within the same scope as it was with Fishbowl with approximately 36 teams playing in it.

As for considering similar kind of system for HGL, I'm currently not a fan of it. While it does have some positives, and while I haven't 100% ruled out two tier league system somewhere in the distant future, I don't see it being optimal at all at this point. Of course it is necessary to approach this cautiously, as we want to present HGL as inviting option and want to give potentially new HG teams a realistic time scope within which they could achieve a place in HGL (by playing or by accepting team by a Commissioners' decision as has been the case so far), so that their initial experience/feeling of HGL would be as positive as possible.

However, we do need to remain realistic on the amount of HGL related work (remember it is 100% manual league). If team number would grow, league related tasks would grow significantly, and even more so on 2 different level league tiers-setup.
And as long as token usage remains about lower than what can be acquired per season, I don't see that as a major problem.

As for now, dividing some tasks among 100% committed managers that share the same views (on everything, including forcing penalties strictly) could be okay, but I don't think I'd be a fan of giving for instance this "lower level league" total control to someone else. And if I wouldn't, then it would still mean I'd have to verify everything myself (yes, again more work). So as usual, I will consider all you've written and those will possibly alter my opinions (towards your views) in the future, but they didn't change my position/current views at least just yet.

Perhaps we might consider something similar for the HGL? In terms of effort on your part as commissioner, it wouldn't be that much more work. More scheduling, however, and perhaps more importantly, will alleviate the PU token pressures that are surely on the horizon if we maintain the current setup.

We could even have a Deputy Commissioner responsible (in the same way you have been for the HGL thus far) for scheduling, maintaining and enforcing rules for the proposed 'lower' division.

These are just musings of course as you have floated the possibility of change and, as we can predict with some accuracy, change will be required at some point in the future if the HGL continues to expand.

I'll just take a quick example about the amount of work, given that league would expand.

Matches played (please correct me if there's a mistake in calculations!) in HGL regular season, if there are:
- 16 teams: 120 matches (current setup)
- 18 teams: 153 matches
- 20 teams: 190 matches
- 22 teams: 231 matches.

So as you can see, there's tremendous amount of more matches, if amount of participating teams are added even ever so slightly. And in all-manual league, this work is done, well, manually.
Those who haven't done the scheduling process themselves (including creating posts, checking/verifying matches for correctness, sending posts and BBMails so that uncorrect situations will be corrected, keeping a list of required actions, etc.), probably can't appreciate the amount of work that is required before it's all correctly finished. so adding 4 teams to current setup would add over 58% more matches to the regular season, which is a big number.

And dividing teams into two different level leagues would have many other negatives which have been discussed in great length before, including what Hadár mentioned earlier (kind of in between the lines, while he didn't present it exactly this way, but he presented as playing 2 matches per week as a strong point of HGL), that it would drop the number of games played in HGL per week to 1 (and shorten the season), unless we'd then play twice against the same opponent during the season (which if my memory serves me, demars mentioned as a negative side effect of such league with low team amount as it's more boring to play twice as opposed to playing different opponent each week, which I totally do agree).

Anyway, about the possible expand (to 17/18 teams?) on Season 3, again I would prefer an even number of teams, and as we currently have "only" 17 teams that are willing to participate for Season 3, we could start to think of the options...

I will also add here a proposal I may have floated originally when we were setting up the HGL.

As you might recall, I used to be involved (about 35+ seasons ago) in a large Australian PL competition called the Fishbowl. Like the HGL, it started off relatively humble with 16-20 teams and quickly began to grow as more and more teams heard about it and wanted to join.

As a result, we created an upper division and a lower division (the names of these escape me as I write this). The upper division comprised of the top 16 teams and the lower division comprised of the 16 lower teams. I don't recall how we defined which team went into the upper or lower division but I think it was based on salary.

We also had a component that required a team to win or finish in the final of the lower division (for example) to be able to 'promote' to the upper division where the 2 worst performing upper division teams relegated in much the same way we do in the league currently.
[...]

These are just musings of course as you have floated the possibility of change and, as we can predict with some accuracy, change will be required at some point in the future if the HGL continues to expand.

I appreciate sharing your views, MrJ, so please don't get tone of my earlier posts in a wrong way. Being direct and condensed in communication sometimes could leave a wrong impression.

Again, with the goal of not starting a thorough discussion about this matter, I'll just add/repeat, that these "issues" if going into two different level divisions have been discussed in lengthy manner earlier. It does include several downsides, such as making a division among "better" and "worse" teams, which is way more pronounced compared to if we play on one, same level league (like now).

And it doesn't even make way more even leagues, as there´d still better and worse teams in each different level divisions (of which I was writing about in my reply on Homegrown Teams II-thread a tad earlier, if my memory serves me).

Also, a new team selection would be more complicated in terms of fairness, as at least personally I don't like the idea at all, that new teams would jump/walk into the highest division directly (if there would be two different level leagues), which means they would have to go through at least one season in lower level "Division 1".

This would in some cases cause seasons with perfect winning record, taking away promotion chances from other potential lower league level promotion candidates (or if two or more good teams would enter lower level league in one season, might immediately diminish promotion possibilities of other, otherwise promotion capable lower level league teams). Needless to say, this might cause motivational problems with lower level league managers (who would have been looking to promote), which would need to be tackled somehow to enable also other than newly added teams to promote.

Also, all stats/records, both team and player, (if/when made available) wouldn't be comparable, as they haven't been achieved against equal opposition (as all teams wouldn't face all teams during the season).

As MrJ noted, it's good to take a look at some possibilities beforehand, and have some discussion about them. But as has been said, this matter has also been discussed in length before, and I didn't check out those messages now to gather all my points into this one - I just wrote semi-intuitively, based on what I remember from my old writings.

This post wasn't written to start a lengthy conversation about this matter again right now (again, it takes time to delve into these kind of topics).

I would also like to cordially add, that while of course I have the intention to make HGL as inviting as possible, it's not necessarily good to do that "regardless of price".
While HGL is an open league, I think it's good to keep in mind that being selected to play in HGL is a priviledge, and not a right. :)