Big Baller League

Game Design Principles and the RP Economy

It’s Tonger again, back with another nerdy article. I’ve been noodling on this article over the past 3 seasons as I’ve gotten up to speed on the league and how it works. There’s an incredible amount of depth to the league and to the simulation engine itself, and much of the complexity of the game is built on RPs, which functions very similarly to a currency economy in a video game.

Obviously, the behavior that video game companies incentivize is to invest your real-life money for in-game benefits. Just as obviously, that’s not how we receive RPs. Instead, we invest our time - into trades, into SLN jobs, and most importantly, into content - in order to receive in-game benefits. We all want this time investment to be fun and rewarding.

A long time ago, I worked for a company that made highly addicting freemium games. Maybe 90% of what we spent our time thinking about was the in-game currency system, as it's the foundation for basically all of the game’s engagement and monetization. As part of onboarding, we wrote thank you cards to the “whales” - the users who spent the most money on in-game currency - and I later found out that the person I wrote a card to was a housewife from the midwest who spent in the high 5 figures in the prior month across multiple maxed credit cards.

So, from the perspective of using game design principles to make the league even more fun, the purpose of this article is to propose tweaks to optimize RP generation and spend. Some disclaimers:
- Some of these proposals will have more or less benefit for parts of the league and/or specific members.
- Some of these proposals are not novel and have already been implemented (awesome).
- For everyone who’s thinking “I’m not sure I want this game to be more fun” - we’re already addicted anyway.

I wanted to write while I still had a “fresh” perspective on the league - I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Game design principles:
Overall, as I hope we’ll all agree, the goal of the game is to have fun. Designing a currency system that not only enables but actively drives “fun” is fairly scientific. Obviously there’s a whole industry and many PhDs written on this, so I’ll cover only the principles most relevant to SLN.

• All players need to have an equal opportunity to earn currency. The most straightforward principle. Players should be able to accomplish a baseline level of success for investing a baseline level of effort. Sounds obvious, but is difficult to implement with parity.

• Players should be incentivized to consistently invest over time - and on the flip side, not consistently investing over time should lead to a deterioration of performance: this one should be obvious. If you don’t invest the baseline level of effort, then you shouldn’t receive any benefits. In video game terms, you want to optimize for the lifetime value of a player, not one-time spend.

• One player’s spend should lead to positive observational externality for other players. For example, seeing a tricked out character in an MMORPG is cool to see. It makes the game more fun. In our example, this means investing in player development, because good players are cool to see. Shoutout to @SoNicks here for consistently investing supercamps in interesting players, e.g. Dion Waiters and John Wall.

• Players who put in an increased amount of effort or have an increased amount of success should receive extra benefits, which should be both fun and rewarding but not game breaking: Stated otherwise, players who put in the time and thoughtfulness should be rewarded with incremental advantages. Importantly, you should still be able to succeed in the game without these benefits. These are pure “extras,” but importantly, there should be a broad menu of extras that encourages additional investment.

To apply all the above principles, the game first has to define what the "core" uses of the currency are (that is, the uses on which success are dependent and also drive positive observational externality for other players), and what the incremental uses are. For SLN, what I’d propose is that:

• The core use of RPs is player development. Probably not a controversial statement, but important to note. Sometimes this gets lost in all the other uses of RP. Camping your players is essential to success and also drives fun for the other players.

• All other uses of RP - e.g. RFA, frontloading, pre-draft scouting, etc. - are incremental uses. The corollary here is that you can succeed in the league without these bells and whistles.

The recommendations:
So, putting this all together, here’s the list of targeted recommendations I’ve compiled over my first 3.5 seasons in the league.

RP Generation: Generally, the tweaks below are meant to move us further in the direction of economic parity and incentivizing ongoing activity.

• 1. [already implemented] Content bonus for each GM’s first piece of content every season. Love that we're doing this. This drives ongoing time investment for all GMs while keeping the upside for GMs who invest more time.

• 2. Increase the RP rewards for winning. Specifically, would recommend increasing the reward amounts by 50%. In my opinion, the benefits to winning are too light. All players should be highly incentivized to achieve to making the playoffs, winning a championship, etc. - success at the game should beget more advantages.

• 3. Tweak the way we handle SLN Jobs. Yes, this has been discussed a lot. Fundamentally, the way we currently do it (most jobs going to the same GMs every season and jobs granting a high amount of RP) clearly violates economic parity. Rotating jobs is the “simplest” fix but probably not an optimal one, given there’s benefits to the league from continuity (e.g. having Jesse maintain the RP tracker every season). Other ideas might be to 1/ reward jobs with another benefit instead of RP - e.g. the ability to make rules in the domain of their job - so that jobs don’t impact the RP economy at all, or 2/ create enough jobs such that any GM who wants one can have one (these jobs could be nonessential, e.g. the great "news editor" idea, but add flavor to the league if done).

RP Spend: Using 100 RP per rating increase as a baseline, my recommendations here are around optimizing the incremental uses of RP to drive more engagement - specifically, offering more tools and incentives to find and develop players.

• 4. Make the incremental uses of RPs more expensive, but keep player development costs the same. As a league, we should want to drive more RP investment into player development vs other uses. Specifically, would recommend making RFAs 2,000 RP, frontloading 1,500 RP, and scouting 200 RP.

• 5. Create a “middle tier” of Reward Camps that incentivizes investment in players with 4-6 years of experience. How many players get off their rookie contracts and have a solid sim, only for us to wonder what could have been? Specifically, the recommendation here would be to charge 150 RP per rating increase, but enable up to 10 ratings increases per season in those two seasons. That would enable up to a full camp for those players, but offset by a much higher investment level.

• 6. Set the RP trade cap on a net basis, with an additional gross spend cap: We currently cap on a pure gross basis - e.g. you can send out 1.5k RP no matter how much RP you have incoming. I’d propose a 1,500 RP NET cap and a 3,000 RP gross cap, such that you can send out up to 3k RP total, but also offset that spend by taking in RP in other trades. This would add an additional layer of strategy to RP management and drive more engagement.

• 7. Enable FA scouting, with a similar mechanic to pre-draft scouting: The same mechanic would likely work fine - 200 RP for 5 ratings - with a deadline of Day 1 of FA. This would both 1/ help uncover more diamonds in the rough who haven't been developed or played (which, again, would drive more positive observational externality!) and 2/ also enable an additional layer of RP spend complexity and strategy.

As stated above, some of these have already been implemented, which is fantastic - for the ones that haven’t, I’d love feedback/discussion. Thanks for reading!

I like the majority of these changes tbh - most current rules are compromises based on what tonger has proposed here and inertia .

Only challenge would be in tracking all of the above but I can probably handle

1) this is just really interesting philosophy about games that i enjoyed learning about

2) here are some of my thoughts on the ideas for changes. I personally think the job thing is an obvious easy thing to look at that can be improved. Not sure how I feel about upping playoff bonuses but not wholly against it (sort of equivocates to successful teams selling more tickets in the postseason).

I'd be very against jacking up the price of RFA/scouting (frontloading I think is fine since it's minimally used and super advantageous situationally), but I already think RFA is challenging enough as-is — if we are going to make it more expensive then I think it should be allowed to be used more often, too (every other year? dunno) — I generally don't think it needs to be touched. Even poor teams should have access to retaining their guys. I also think scouting is not used enough generally by the league but it also feeds directly into the idea of investing RP in player development, I don't see what making it more expensive does to help anyone in any way.

I love the idea of middle-tier reward camps and helping lengthen the window to camp guys (although I'm assuming this is still keeping the normal 24 points cap, not adding on top of it, I read this as a way to give longer life to guys who maybe didn't get camped early in their careers by their first team, etc) — this makes free agency more useful and makes it more viable to mine value out of the player pool/in trades/etc. Also like the idea of a net cap. Not sure how I feel about FA scouting because I kinda like not knowing how the sausage is made, but not wholly against.

This is my favorite article in a long time. Thank you for writing it!

Matt wrote: May 29th, 2024, 6:36 am This is my favorite article in a long time. Thank you for writing it!

That’s saying something coming from the Master of Games

Thanks for the feedback and engagement all, I appreciate it! A couple more specific responses:

• @The Transfer Portal, on gross/net RP trade cap - to make it logistically easier to manage, maybe we do away with the gross trade cap and just cap the amount of RP per trade at the lesser of 1500 or the team's remaining net cap. It's then trackable by looking at overall ingoings/outgoings. I don't think taking out the gross cap will lead to negative side effects, and if it does we can add one in - if anything, I think just doing a net cap would lead to more big trades (because you could swing 1500 RP in a single trade and try to make it back in another trade), which would be fun for the league.

• @jwoo, on scouting - the points on scouting not being used enough by the league and making it more expensive running counter to the goal of discovering diamonds in the rough are both great ones. Keeping at 150 RP would make sense - appreciate the callout!

• @jwoo, on RFA - I'll take the other end of RFA being more easily accomplishable for poor teams. IMO RFA should be more expensive for a few reasons: 1/ Only a limited number of players (e.g. strong top 10 picks) are worth RFAing, and if you have an RFA-worthy player, you can plan for it and produce content; 2/ It's more fun for the league overall for RFA-worthy players to be owned by engaged GMs, and by making RFA more expensive, we're driving more content, especially from GMs of bad teams who tend to be less engaged overall; and lastly 3/ It's more engaging to be able to poach good young players (stated otherwise, every incremental RFA tag subtracts from the overall fun of the league instead of adding to it).

I’ve read through this a few times and have some thoughts.

1) I think the 4-6 years of experience camps should definitely be 150 RP. Or maybe even 125 Y4, 150 Y5, 175 Y6, into 200 Y7-10. There are a lot of players who are woefully undeveloped because of people being RP poor or just disinterested in a particular guy. Does Serge Ibaka have way more value on his contract if his +16 left in rebounding camps isn’t so insanely expensive? I’d argue it actually incentivizes more content etc because shrewd GMs will be targeting an underdeveloped player like Kenneth Faried, Danny Green, or Marco Belinelli in FA to grow into a rotation player or potential starter. No different than how NBA teams target guys in underused roles and give opportunity. When it comes to ratings inflation etc, I defer to Ashes. If he thinks cheaper camps break the game then these are the breaks, but if he’s in for some additional content and thinks it’ll be fine then why not!?

2) I think the RFA rules are already penal enough with only 1 every 3 years. You make them more expensive, which either rules out certain GMs, allows a bunch of young guys to hit the market, and/or creates an exorbitant price for just wanting to keep an interesting piece. Tanking is the absolute bane of every GMs existence. Is it cool to land a stud? I wouldn’t know but seems like it. I’m just trying to figure out how it’s beneficial for the league to make Steven spend 500 RP that could go into camping Seth Curry or THJ to keep Anthony Davis who was never going into UFA anyway. Tanking is some form of necessary evil typically unless you luck into a guy or abuse someone in a trade.

3) On FA scouting, I just don’t really see the point. For most of the players you have 160+ games worth of data to comb through. I’m not sure how finding out Jimmy Butler has 75 3pt +/- 10 is gonna be any more beneficial than seeing he’s a career 40.7% 3FG% shooter who is at 47.9% this season on 4.8 attempts per game

4) On increasing winning bonuses, the current SLN champ gets 1600 RP or 2 full camps. Doubling that is 3200 RP or a potential super camp every offseason. Feels like that leads to an enriching the rich versus driving parity across the league. I’d argue that if you’re going to increase RP, it’s better to do it for round 1 and 2. It impacts more teams across the board and makes some RP reward disparities less stark. As it stands now, you get only 50 more RP for winning 50 games and getting beat in the first round than Derek and Josh get for tracking 2 RFA tags and 1 MLE extension per season, which isn’t a slight on those guys but a comment on the job economy.

Agree with much of what Merv said as well — I think the other thing I'd say about the RFA thing is that while I'd love to operate under the premise that the change in rules is suddenly going to make less-engaged or less content-oriented GMs create more content, I just don't see that as necessarily true — I think it's important that there is incentive, and I'd love more content from everybody, but realistically I wouldn't hold every single GM to the standard of being as engaged as the top third or what have you, it just isn't going to happen.

While I'd love everyone to be totally engaged at all times, I also don't think making something like RFA structurally punitive in a way that demands more of people is the way to improve that — we'll just get more disengaged GMs once their players leave in free agency, and poor/bad teams (obviously everyone has their own prerogative to win/not let their team fall into disarray, but it's just something I foresee happening if we start taxing heavier on things like RFA). Has to be a middle ground that allows for people not being 100 percent focused on SLN at all times, and I think it's already quite demanding to have to manage the way RFA works/plan ahead for all facets of player retention. It's already expensive!

550 RP raw score
x1.5 (NOOB BOOST)
x3 (FRENZY BOOST)
+200 PRIMO CONTENT BOOST
FINAL = 2675 RP