It's not just the custom leagues, very few of the MFN leagues are full, and most with openings have >5 openings.
There are a few things that I think are driving this:
1) The implementation of user created leagues - both public and private. These leagues can be more selective and develop active user groups. The are also a revenue stream for MFN. All of these are good things for the veteran user base.
2) Community growth seems to have stalled. JDB would need to confirm this, but anecdotally this seems to be the case. General forum posts, particularly in the Community Help forum, have dropped significantly over the past few months. What is surprising is that community growth seems to have stalled at the same time the NFL season is really starting to heat up. Usually, you would expect to see more growth in a sim community at the same time that the professionals of that sport were playing. But that doesn't seem the case.
Why I think community growth is stalling - if indeed it is stalling and the perception actually matches the reality - is two fold:
a) Few new features actually excite veteran users. - There is a lot of flair that has been added to the site and the implementation of user created leagues is pretty awesome. Other than that, the game has basically stayed the same in terms of strategy for the past two-plus calendar years. Playbooks have not changed. Winning game plans really haven't changed. OL play is much better, which helps game planning a lot. But most things are still the same.
FACT: Players that aren't excited about a game anymore are less likely to recruit new players.
b) The game is really hard for new players to learn and excel in. - The game is both amazingly simplistic and agonizingly complex if you really want to excel. If you're new to MFN, be prepared to read a lot of forum posts to even understand how and why to weight a player let alone why your "best" players seem to be the worst on your team. Eventually you'll come to learn that Speed dictates most key positions in the game and you'll realize that attributes that you think would be essential really don't have any value. Once you get there, you'll start to do better.
But then you'll run into the problem with game planning. If you're only using the matrix, and don't use any rules, you're asking veteran players to exploit you game after game. It only takes being beaten by 100+ points once to move on and find something more enjoyable to sink your time into.
You'll need to do this without having great game documentations. Although, I haven't watched all of the videos, so I don't know if they are any better than the old guides. The ones I did watch still wouldn't have given me the level of detail I needed to know to make my team actually competitive if I were new.
c) Things on the game take too much time. - Play knowledge drives a good deal of game play, but it's really hard to develop. It's also hard to develop a competitive roster since winning strategies are so limited. So unless you're willing to invest months into those things, you're not going to progress to the point where you are competitive and the game actually starts to get fun.
The general UI, matrix, rules engine, miscellaneous options, and depth chart overrides - all of which you need to master - are difficult enough to use on their own that it can take hours at a time to make simple updates to your game plan. They are also confusing and contradictory if you don't know what setting is controlling your players in a given scenario.
Last edited at 10/16/2017 5:30 pm