I got a name, and I got two numbers

[voyagers_uk]

I think you are over-compensating matt....

seriosuly any attempt to buff teams with stars is a bad idea, if you wanted to do this you would have to balance it in a Thrud-esque way and if the player fails an action his Fans join the other teams contingent for the rest of teh match.

[mattgslater]

If it matters, teams that don't make the top three in the quarterly tournament are disbanded, but players off those teams are available to be hired by new teams, using a "waiver wire" and a system of "franchise" tags. Those that do make the top three enter an upper league, which plays on a slower schedule, mostly against one another. So HOF players would mostly be playing either in the unlimited class where everyone's a winner, or on a rookie 1M team that had to pay full value for the guy's improvements out of starting cash: the free FF is a small consolation.

I see what you mean about the Fan Favourite thing, though. Still, I'd like a mechanic to represent the player's HOF status to encourage the coach to attach value to it. The +FF should be enough.

[voyagers_uk]

Damn, your world is complicated....

[mattgslater]

Yeah, it's just me. I lack the talent to do mental shorthand, so if I can't explicate it, I don't see it. It's a lot of fun on Magic day, because I can come up with a new multiplayer format every week and I never get confused by complexity, but it's kind of annoying when I say something and everybody wonders what I've been smoking. So I need rules that are clear and comprehensive, and for the sake of my fellows they also must be unobtrusive and intuitive.

Oh, if you're talking about the league format, this is something that we've been doing in various ways since the '90s. I used to have a lot of NFL fans in the league, and we liked doing a bunch of fixed-schedule gaming and offseason scheming. I found the waiver wire to be a great way to build depth of strategy without locking out expansion coaches: a few studs running around on otherwise rookie teams is actually quite a lot of fun. You get the accessibility of a rookie format, but you also get to build a sense of history by developing players from old teams over time.