As a new-ish to here person who doesn’t have any idea about sixes:
a fee for individual team member joins etc just seems weird unless it’s directly before/after roster lock or before playoffs(to quote Max Payne, “You play, you pay”). However obviously this would make a lot of low-end teams straight up disband rather than pay up. If we’re talking a fee paid before the first official I’d like it to be a team fee that a team may divide amongst themselves.
Also in the above interest: (If we have individualized fees) I’d like for sub seats to be cheaper(or even free, with only the starter 9 paying) personally as well(along with the requisite lower prize pool cut), as a sub would often be paying for a team they barely if at all get to influence positively or negatively.
I do not know what a ringer fee is, but it’d stress people extra to have to pay up every time they ring someone seeing how common that seems to be in main and below, and no one’s gonna ring for a team if they themselves are paying for it, in fact with a prizepool I’d expect to be compensated for ringing any official as much as I know that would really not happen if it wasnt the final or smth.
I very much welcome a HL league that takes itself a bit more seriously, but there are the Obvious Caveats in that the raised stakes would increase ferocity of arguments and toxicity in general within and between teams, in and outside of matches. This would also significantly discourage lower-end teams from joining in the first place. I don’t know if the “I paid so I must get my money’s worth” will outweigh the team stability issues caused by this, and league growth is important.
This would also reverse the incentive to climb divisions. Where now it’s seen as not a big deal to move up from being dominant in a division to being mediocre in the upper division, depending on fee differences between divisions it probably will make a ton more sense to stay at the lowest div you can feasibly convince the admins to let you stay in.
I’d prefer that the prizepool be distributed amongst all of the playoffs or maybe top half of playoffs, because no one’s playing TF2 to win big, and having it rather feasible that you at least make your money back if you’re semi-decent would be cool and encourage lower-end teams to still try, big high-end prizes are cool for viewers, but really not that big of an incentive. (Example numbers for example distribution: if there’s 12 teams in a league, 4-5-6 would get back 1x their fees, where 1-2-3 would get back 4x-3x-2x what they paid in order)
fees below Main/IM really are a bad idea because of player demographics, high NC being good enough to be good enough for playoffs in AM, and AM(and tbh maybe IM too depending on role/player) really being doable for anyone with 1k+ hours and no comp experience. The amount of unknown quantity players and teams with average ages of 15 makes any given caveat with this system significantly worse, especially in Open divs, souring the new player experience for most teams.