To be fair, if I hadn't been a part of the creation of the HGL with you and others, my team's entry (with $55k salaries) couldn't have been justified. I am sure that every team that has faced me in the HGL thus far this season has done so with out any real thought to game tactics...because my team is essentially a bot-like team. So, my participation in Season 2 is a positive for the HGL I believe. It will allow for a stronger field.
However, as I said, I will be back...and stronger than ever.
Well, justifiable is a flexible term in this case, as team selection criteria in HGL are not "locked" so to speak. Having said that, it was clear from the beginning that score wise it's going to be very difficult season for you with those salaries (just as was the case with Big Chillers), but that's not all there is.
And yes, score wise your team might have been a bot like team for many, and huge score differences aren't totally ideal, I agree. However, while I didn't suspect I wouldn't win your team when we faced, I did try to place optimal tactics (other than predicting your offensive speed and focus) for our match.
And I don't know about you others, but while I'm very serious about HGL, I still also play it for fun. So for me it adds the fun to the experience if I can for instance give some of my older players couple of minutes play time here or there, without having to think about score difference of each game (like in my own "regular" BB league), so also in that sense HGL is a breath of fresh air.
While I don't agree with that mostly, I understand what you meant with your teams' absence from Season 2 being a positive thing for HGL. As long as league isn't getting overcrowded (now we are already 2 teams short of our Season 1 team lineup, even if we'd accept newcomers Hårdboll and Eos), HGL has space for all levels of teams,
as long as they're ready and willing to stay committed for the duration of whole season no matter what their season success is.
As a response to your absence creating stronger field, it is true technically as now 2 sub-$60K teams will exit HGL.
But there's a limit when the reduction in amount of teams becomes counterproductive.
I would prefer to see as close as possible to 16 teams playing in HGL each season. So therefore I'd also find it important to have at least large enough amount of teams and being able to play only once (and not twice) per season against each opponent, to keep it more interesting.
What can be done to ensure all this?
Making HGL so good and tempting option, that people will choose it anyway. If we take an all-important fact - that Home-Grown League will always remain free for all participants - into consideration here, then either HGL becoming official part of BB and becoming "an automatically organized league", or remaining as it is now (manually coordinated league) are the only possibilities to ensure Home Grown League to remain free for all.
Home-Grown League remaining free is really the only way to go in my opinion. It should be like US Open, British Open etc., where every qualified participant is given right at least to play play-in matches to determine participation rights for next season, and not like Pay-to-Participate style of Private League (PL).
(Pay to participate style of league is always also in one sense pay to win-style league, as you can't participate without paying).
What else would be beneficial for HGL?
We should do all we can to promote HGL to HG managers still not aware of it, and put our efforts into that one common goal. While HG community in Buzzerbeater is certainly bigger than teams presented in
LOPO's list of homegrown teams (not all HG teams are included), it's still not too big and for that reason already, we should put all work towards HGL.
For the future and positive development of HGL, it would be very beneficial also to have
only one HG-teams based league for first (not Utopian) teams,