- Teams promoted without a championship will not have the extra boost on team support, which can make quite a difference in the ticket income.
We will give the same extra boost on team support, as you call it (it's season ticket holders) for all promoted teams - all promotion effects are going to be the same from now on, no matter how you promote.
- Compared to a bot league, it would be much harder to sustain a good weekly profit in a human-filled team, while still keeping at the top of the league and having the same merchandise bonus. I think this has been justified in the Utopia league.
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).
2. The rookie pool will be shrunk, especially for smaller countries.
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.
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.
Is it something like: Older users fill in human-occupied leagues (e.g. III.1-III.3), while the fresh teams go to newbie-and-bot leagues (e.g. III.4-III.16)? Where do the new teams go if they are good enough to grab their championship? If they still go to a higher league, are they going to suppress the promotion slots of the former?
Yes. We are yet to think of a way to fairly give promotion slots priority to older teams. However, I do believe this won't be a big factor - new signups rarely have the strength (and luck! the wins-losses of the bot teams they replaced still remain in the first season affecting rank a lot) to win their leagues right away. Also, there just isn't that many other teams that are fresh but might be able to do so. I might be wrong and there's a variety of situations in different countries, so we might change some things if we see a problem here.
One last thought - we don't want to make it impossible for fresh teams to promote!
Another issue I can think of which does not happen in the current Utopia leagues is the shifting of "newbie" leagues. After one season, the new teams will graduate from being "newbies" if they are not promoted. How will they be merged into the old leagues? Will the old teams be assigned to a random league every season together with the new teams?
The way it's currently done is that only teams occupying the last (highest number) leagues occupied by human teams are rearranged to fill the empty spots of the lower numbered leagues. So there is no total randomization, after the first season, most teams will retain most of their leaguemates after each offseason.
Teams occupying spots on "fresh" leagues, that are no longer fresh themselves, will be moved to a "standard", human occupied league. I will write an addendum to the last newspost to clarify this further.
In all cases where there's something lost, we believe there will be other things gained enough to offset the losses. However, we reserve the right to tinker, of course.