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Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By jackals
6/14/2022 10:54 pm
Mcbolt55 wrote:
I don’t even fill up my 40 or 30 play game plans anymore, and even with 20-25 plays in each there’s only a half dozen real options that are consistently useful.


You're missing out on a lot of decent plays. There are about a dozen plays that are amazing, but each playbook has 30-40 offensive plays that are solid or better if you know how to look.

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By Happy
6/22/2022 10:57 pm
Personally, I'm very busy. I love this game, but the passing game in 4.6 makes this more of a 1940s football simulation. I'm not sure I'm very invested in that.

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By Cjfred68
6/22/2022 11:24 pm
Happy wrote:
Personally, I'm very busy. I love this game, but the passing game in 4.6 makes this more of a 1940s football simulation. I'm not sure I'm very invested in that.



Almost exactly what I said before JDB released bleeding beta as version 4.6. He listens to people who either don't really enjoy the game or never could figure out how to win in version 4.5 so they pushed for a change.

At least in version 4.5, a novice could pass for 300 yards on occasion without much hard work.

Version 4.6 has widened the gap so elites still pass for 300 yards while novices pass for 110 a game and made it almost impossible for newer owners to contend.

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By Blondie1977
6/23/2022 7:31 am
Happy wrote:
Personally, I'm very busy. I love this game, but the passing game in 4.6 makes this more of a 1940s football simulation. I'm not sure I'm very invested in that.



Amen! How to stop leagues from closing? We need a new engine and quick.

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By GtR47
7/03/2022 12:30 pm
Agree with the new engine…

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By Cjfred68
7/03/2022 1:25 pm
MFN needs a few things to take the next step....IMO

FIRST
NEW GAME ENGINE

A new game engine which opens up the passing game so novice users can have some early success. That success should be tampered down via turnovers or ill advised passes but anyone should be able to hit 300 yards passing on occasion....especially if they are losing big in games. You see it all the time in the NFL where defenses goto prevent and QBs rack up big stats in losing efforts. This version makes no real distinction between the 1st quarter with the game scoreless and 10 minutes left in the 4th quarter, down 35-10. Instead of the defense playing deeper (Safer), it actually continues to snowball in the opposite direction and becomes harder to move the ball.


SECOND
MAKE AN APP!!!!

Right now this is a PC game which users can port to their phone but the interface is clunky and counter-intuitive. An APP for your phone instantly broadens the user base and allows anyone to play anywhere at anytime. They can play on the phone when on break or lunch at work or anytime they find themselves waiting with time to kill. Instead of checking social media or playing some bubble game, they can manage their football francise!

THIRD
WE NEED PASSIONATE LEAGUE ADMINS

The best leagues currently in MFN are being run by very active and dedicated league administrators who add content, recruit owners and keep their leagues full so the A.I. doesn't have a chance to destroy francises through bad contracts and drafts. Most of the MFN-# leagues have died off for the very simple reason that nobody was minding the store. I refer to MFN-# leagues as the wild wild west because their is no leadership. Most of them became half-full leagues where you had the "haves" and the "have nots" as the A.I. made horrible choices and became feeder teams with the user-owned teams. Over the course of time, it became harder and harder to fill teams as the gap continued to grow until they finally fell below 50% ownership and went away.

How do we fix this? Where do we find league admins? Not just a league admin in title only but active admins who run their leagues and attract owners with added content....in my opinion....the second thing I mentioned....creating an APP should help broaden the user base which should increase the likelihood we find individuals willing to fill those rolls.

FOURTH
UPDATE PLAYER WEIGHTS

This is probably the quickest and easiest fix that JDB could do! Update the default player weights more in line with a players true value. This would address a number of problems including making brand new owners more in line with what players are the best. Default player weights also directly effect trade scores and how the A.I. deals with signing contracts and drafting. Nobody should join MFN and spend 30-60 days using the broken default player weights before realizing they were drafting or signing bad players. I remember my early days in MFN....I used the default player weights for months....couldn't finish above .500 while drafting, signing free agents and making trades. After finally editing my player weights, I realized just how badly I screwed the pooge with my draft picks, free agent signings and trades. Some players with 85 rating under default player weight became 68-69 when I changed my player weights....especially the skill position players with no speed.

It just doesn't make sense to me that New owners should have to dig real deep into how the game works....just to know which players are actually good and worth drafting or signing.

This is my 2 cents worth, I've been playing MFN for around 5 years and currently I'm league admin for 3 leagues!

XFL
23 SEASONS
FULL

QUICK AND THE DEAD
24 SEASONS
FULL

DEATH & DESTRUCTION
3 SEASONS
4 openings

Thanks

CJ

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By ColonelFailure
7/03/2022 2:50 pm
So, I'm on the verge of restarting my private league. As a collective we bounced around other games to see if any of them had what it takes. The answer is... no. Several come close but MFN is closest to the right game experience. A few quick reviews:

Draft Day Sports Pro Football (any)
In terms of choices off-the-field DDS is amazing. Contracts, stat-tracking, player development, scouting, drafting, even down to having auto-generated news articles. Just amazing. Its potential for greatness goes a step further in that you can develop your own plays and playbooks. It really could be great. It's let down badly by the game engine. On-field is very buggy, hard to watch and feels erratic. Also working against it is the unintuitive multiplayer approach.

Goallineblitz 2
If you've not encountered GLB before, the hook here is that you control the career of a single player (or more if you buy multiple), you can then sign to a team controlled by another player which adds an interesting dynamic. Leagues are organised in the same way as soccer - multiple divisions in ascending order of "power".

I played the original 12 years ago and while it was always pay to win, it's gotten far worse with the sequel. Not only do you have to pay to keep up with the opposition, but veterans get bonuses in the form of star players. This makes it impossible for a rookie player to be competitive under any circumstances. The game engine is good as is the rate of progression. Player development is great, but that's where it ends.

Pro Strategy Football
Not a multiplayer game, but the teams can be adjusted out-of-game in a .csv, so we manually ran a league (all players submit roster updates, CPU then plays itself). Has a good suite of features but options are limited off the field and having to hand moderate is time consuming. The game engine looks superficially attractive but there isn't the same cause and effect feel you get from MFN's 2D approach.

Sunday Rivals
Very attractive arcade-like game that is, again, single player so we worked on a hand-moderated multiplayer solution. The toughest part is allowing owners to see their teams in action. Next to no off-field options (it's designed to be an arcade-like experience) but the action on the field was fantastic to watch, if a little repetitive. I'd recommend it as a casual single player experience.

Each of these attempts to find a "new game" lead us back here, because MFN comes closest to a great multiplayer football manager experience. It has its shortcomings most certainly and that's not helped by JDB's insistence on playing game-engine whack-a-mole with what little development time he has.

This isn't to criticise JDB at all, far from it, but some outside the box thinking would speed development in the right direction. Now, this is obviously backseat driving on my part - I don't know the ins and outs of the code but I do know the single truth of game development:

YOU CANNOT PATCH THE PLAYERS

No matter what the game, players will find the fastest path to success. In MFN terms that means working toward cookie-cutter builds and gameplans, min-maxing all over the place, only using plays that outperform the norm. That's what players do. They want to win, and will do whatever it takes to do so. The second someone posts an "ideal stats for this position" guide you can bet everyone will be doing it. It's not an exploit, but it is hastening the discovery of any holes in the engine.

To that end, like CJ I advocate not only for attracting good league admins, but giving them the tools to admin the league in a way that makes the holes in the gameplay less severe. We all knew that the 4.5 hitch was an easy-mode TD, solution choices were: fix coverage on WR2 slants... or give admins the ability to remove the play from playbooks. Option 1 takes months of back and forth coding and testing. Option 2 not only deals with that play, it deals with any others that are equally OP in the future.

A second example: speed is an overpowered stat. It just is. There isn't a single position where speed doesn't make the position more potent. Fix option 1: re-code how speed is employed in the game and check it with every possible scenario. Option 2: allow admins the ability to change the draft class stat distribution. Give admins sliders for the number of players with abilities in different ranges. This second option, again, can then be used with any stat that has too great an impact. It also opens the door to "mutant leagues", where every player has 99 speed... or 9... or whatever.

CJ referenced weights and updating them. A good idea. Multiple ways to handle this - decide the "perfect" weights and readjust the template, have the default weight set itself automatically based on how players in the league have their dynamic weights set or... you guessed it, let each league admin set the weights.

This thinking can be expanded across the board. Personally I'd add an offense and defense "strength" slider to the league. Want a higher scoring league? Set offense to 100%, defense to 50%. How would you code that? Simple, make it a stat multiplier for every player calculated at the start of each game. Sure, you'll get some weirdness with extremes, but your admins will find the sweet spot.

Anyway, the point here is that JDB has a finite amount of time and seemingly all of it is invested in game-engine whack-a-mole. What the game needs is features. Make it look nicer, add more off-field options, expand on animations, add greater personalisation for owners (anyone not want their own team field graphics? Or cheerleaders?), let's have some dynamically selected plays of the week... the list is plentiful and none of them need to be especially complex while working to enrich the game experience.

The game engine will never be perfect. It will never be exploit-proof. It will get stale however, if that one route to success remains the only route to success.

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By TeamCleaner3000
7/03/2022 8:03 pm
Edit: CSB uses teamcleaner3000 to clean up the really trashy teams in his leagues (with permission from JDB) and sometimes suffers from duplicity hahahhah!. Crazy is as Crazy does.

ColonelFailure wrote:

CJ referenced weights and updating them. A good idea. Multiple ways to handle this - decide the "perfect" weights and readjust the template, have the default weight set itself automatically based on how players in the league have their dynamic weights set or... you guessed it, let each league admin set the weights.


..and we have a member of the community in Setherick that absolutely excells in this.
EDIT: I still do do not understand how his contributions and expertise in the area of player weights were never embraced and included into the defualt game settings by ownership - which I assume led to Setherick abandoning such a beneficial - yet woefully time consuming project late v4.5. NOt to put any ideas about there - specifically my speculation and mine alone.

In truth, there are folks willing to contribute, some of which have gone to great lengths to do so.
Of the player base willing to help with no charge beyond wishful thinking and what I would do blahblahblahs, there's some folks in this game that have offered some absolute talent and experience willing and ready to offer their experience and strength for free only to be met with a quiet "nothing" in regards to any acceptance of such help.

I'm OK with that.
But it has certainly - and always abruptly - extinguished the flames of any grassroots ignited fires or solutions fromthe MFN playerbase.

It's the quiet nothingness to some great talents out there willing to - and have often freely and for free participated in developing the game's issues to be more palatable to the new User experience.

...but I don't know sh*t about sh*t.
Especially when it comes to someone else's sh*t.

None of us has any idea what JDb wants to do, it drives us nuts becuase humanity is hard, but MFN is his deal and I am definitely along for the ride until the final rest stop is reached.

Stay Amazing.
Last edited at 7/03/2022 8:15 pm

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By TeamCleaner3000
7/03/2022 8:07 pm
Addendum:
I always latch on to exceptional games and then ride them into oblivion.
#McLovinIt

Re: Leagues closing at a high rate

By Cjfred68
7/03/2022 11:25 pm
I don't know much myself but I can only assume based on the roughly 300 current active users that we (those 300) are JDB's beta testers.

In that regard, I offer my feedback on the game and offer suggestions based on my 5 years of playing.

Whatever JDB does or doesn't do with that is beyond me but I do enjoy this game, have for said 5 years and wish it continued success.

With that being said, all I can do is run my leagues the best way I can, keep them full of active owners and hopefully keep it fun and competitive through my added content.

From my limited perspective (my 3 leagues +1 custom private league as owner only)....MFN is thriving and all 4 leagues are basically full (123/128 teams owned) and fun while being highly competitive.

I leave the mile high view to JDB but MFN is under 50 active leagues and 300 active owners....maybe that is his sweet spot at this time as the game is still in development.