Thank you Marin! I never expected a BB will reply. Achievement unlocked!
When playing an opponent, a meaningful part of the attendance is affected by the fans of that opponent - so it makes sense that playing human teams brings a higher attendance (and income) than playing bot teams. This difference, over time, might even grow if we determine that there is indeed a loss of income (on average).
Yes, it makes much more sense now, if not only the league champ bonus but also the "promotion aura" on the fan base is applied to the newly promoted teams.
This is true, but the effect might be overestimated. We might think of a way to offset this, I like the idea of keeping 4-6 bot teams per league.
Currently, in most bot-filled leagues, many top talents are lost to bots anyway, so I don't think the difference will be that big. I cannot estimate precisely though, we might need to just wait and see on this one, and apply changes on the fly if the draft pool is severely guttered - something I very much doubt.
Maybe there is some data you can collect from the BB side in order to estimate the discrepancy. Collect all the draft data from the bottom league, and see how many of them are currently in a human-controlled team right now.
I might try playing with BBAPI recently and see what I can do, but for a country of 100-150 players, I am anticipating ~20% loss on the high-end rookies coming from the bottom league. As a very rough estimation, if each league gives 0.5 18y HoF and 1 18y MVP on average, that means ~2.4 18y HoF and ~4.8 18y MVP loss. This is quite consistent to @atsii's estimation in this thread
(314977.24).
That being said, it is great that BBs are willing to put bot-drafted rookies on the transfer market in case things go wrong. The "deus ex machina" solution is not optimal, but it should work.
3. Important updates like this should be announced at least a season before the rollout.
I agree with this too. There were some factors that made us decide to push this though. Things that may or may not happen in the short term, so we'd rather not elaborate yet.
Thank you. I understand that BB has a timeline for releasing the APP and some change in the dynamics is necessary. Maybe the team consolidation will cause some loss on my side, and maybe not, but I can understand.
Please keep up the work and the communications!