I agree with you, managing an HGL project is more important than a medal.
I have a proposal: teams like mine, who buy and sell drafted players but are also coached by others, have an advantage over those who decide not to trade.
I suggest creating a parallel postseason, in addition to the traditional tournament, for only the teams that don't trade.
Let me explain:
Regular Season matches will be the same for all teams.
At the end of the regular season, the traditional tournament continues as usual, while the teams that don't trade also compete in single-elimination matches.
I don't know if this would create additional work for the commissioner, but I think it would be interesting for those who don't trade to win a medal, too.
Thank you for your response, it's interesting to hear your take on this. It's a very complicated subject (if we want to consider all aspects of it), but I do agree/feel that teams that do trade players do have an advantage over teams that don't trade.
This is partly why I created "a salary benefit"-comparison (a separate post, that hasn't yet been calculated and published for Season 3), so that people can check which teams are receiving "salary/training benefit" that way.
And all this also depends on where we draw a line (or would draw a line, if it would need to be determined which team is "buying and selling team").
For instance, demars's and my team are technically teams that have re-purchased player(s) in their teams, but their salary is $226-227 per week, and our salary benefit number is therefore standing at
minus $.
I haven't had enough time to think that suggestion of yours (if it would work as is), but in a couple of days that I've had time to think about it now and then, my initial thought is that if we would divide teams into "trading" and "non-trading" teams, it would be better also to have separate Regular Seasons for both kind of teams, and not only separate playoffs (also because otherwise non-drafting teams would face "drafting teams" during RS as well, and results of those matches would likely affect who would be allowed to enter playoffs in the first place).
This on the other hand would create numerous challenges, including that 1. there wouldn't be even number of teams in such leagues, as there aren't that many "trading teams" in HGL currently
2. how do we define "trading team" fairly (one option being a salary benefit-value, but even that's not 100% perfect)
3. it would create somewhat confusing (at least to me) double playoff-system; I'll explain better what I mean below. Having separate leagues altogether of course wouldn't have this confusing aspect built in it (at least from my point of view, however, it would create more work and be problematic from the standpoint of unequal league sizes and matches/season values)
4. yes, it would add some more work if "separate, parallel Playoffs" would run simultaneously.
I assumed that you meant, that let's say out of 16 teams 4 were "trading teams", and based on ORSR-rankings, best "non-drafting teams" would be "let to play" in "a separate Playoffs for non-trading teams". So in this case
all teams would be allowed to play in playoffs, as 12 participate to playoffs.
But for the sake of an example, what if there would be 5 teams that would be counted as "drafting teams" and we'd have 16 teams in HGL - there would be only 11 participating to Playoffs, in which case our playoff system couldn't be utilized as is. (Yes, I guess technically it would be possible to implement an another rule that states how in that case playoff participants would be determined.)
But while this reply might seem like a very direct, this is just my style (especially if I don't have time to "soften" things), and like I said, it's nice to see you've also noticed there's a difference in a difficulty level, depending on how beneficially you sell and buy back your previously owned players... :)