Originally posted by Dub J
That was true some time ago. There is literally no margin for error as you move up now. I've picked up dots here and there as we rose through the leagues but rarely did they replace what was lost or what should have been. A lot of people just retire their dots when teams fold now and the rest are mostly meh. Most of the leagues coming up are pretty small to begin with. Once you've lost dots and fall behind those top 2 or 3 teams you're screwed for good. People know this and that's why they reset or fold after losing enough dots and/or have so many builds stray. Not many people want to play out the next 10+ seasons knowing the best they can do is scratch and claw for a CC game loss.
Really, this is the problem more than networks. I tend to kill off my dots now when the team folds, because it was built for a particular team. If someone asks about the dot before I kill it off, I'll usually give it to them, but I really have never put a dot "on the market". I've had dots go between "networks" when one team goes down and a different team (in a network I tend to hang with) asks for it, but I don't keep dots to a particular network but instead to a particular team.
Networks all operate very differently, anyway. DS is very focused, the Addicts was more a social gathering of "networks", and Cult/Wu are a group of affiliated teams that tend to operate independently. There is a little dot sharing, but in most cases, the teams all have their own separate farms. Instead, we more share information and a mutual love of MITH-bashing (he takes far more abuse in the Cult forum than from any of the MITH-haters outside).
We even organized a mini draft in there last season and had some non-Cult teams participate, so it's not about keeping dots intentionally out of the marketplace.
Of my 13 current lvl79 dots, seven are on the original team they were designed for, one is on an associated team because he didn't make the cut for the original team he was designed for, and the other five are on teams that had nothing to do with the original teams they were designed for but were teams that went belly up in the original network and someone in another team/network convinced me to keep them. Of those, one was a Lounge team that went under, one was a Cult team that got distributed through the draft (my dot went to a non-Cult team that decided to become Cult after the draft), one was an Addicts team that got shutdown, one was a HOOD team that disbanded, and one was just a friend's team that demoted.
Every one of those five dots would have been retired if someone hadn't expressed an interest.
Networks helping Networks is the way to go.
