The 21 custom leagues have 235 total openings, an average of 11.2 per league.

The most populated leagues have six openings. One has 19, one 16, and five others 14.

I have some theories about this, but I would be interested in hearing from others.

those leagues are
19 openings = https://cust14.myfootballnow.com/
16 openings = https://cust78.myfootballnow.com/
14 openings = https://cust17.myfootballnow.com/
14 openings = https://cust21.myfootballnow.com/
14 openings = https://cust62.myfootballnow.com/
14 openings = https://cust64.myfootballnow.com/
14 openings = https://cust79.myfootballnow.com/

Death to Smoochy!

What has happened is that already when custom leagues expanded to the high 70s it was starting to get stretched out. Pop-up private leagues whenever any one desires tipped the scale of supply and demand even further. As long as we sit stagnant now with custom leagues we can hope for a popularity boost with the site along with new users to fill up the leagues.

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.

The offseason is unnecessarily and agonizingly long with no game action at all. The draft should be 2 days, rounds 1,2 on day 1 which starts the same day that Early FA 4 runs, then rounds 3-7 on day 2 which coincides with Late FA 5, then the next morning Late FA runs right away. Also, if there could be some kind of scrimmage action it would be nice as well.

Sorry, guys, I was referring to custom leagues, not the general state of MFN.

My take is that the problem with custom leagues is one of affinity. Most of us have a strong affinity for a few NFL teams, perhaps a strong dislike for another handful, and a neutral opinion of the rest. However, when an owner customizes his custom league team, he creates something that only he has any affinity for. Only one person understands the significance of the Tonawanda Toadstools (or whatever).

When that owner abandons his team, he leaves behind something no one else has an affinity for, or would have any interest in taking over and rebuilding. Without actually surveying the problem, I would guess many of those vacant franchises fit into that category.

I know it has been proposed in this forum before that abandoned customized teams should revert back to one of a set of preselected metropolitan areas likely to support a professional football franchise (Dallas, Cleveland, Miami, etc.) or perhaps the city that originally occupied that spot in that custom league. This may not be the panacea for all empty leagues, but it is one idea.

As for MFN itself, I have played numerous football sims, and I think this one is the best one ever. With an effective marketing plan, I think MFN could carve out a sizable piece of this niche.

If we are going to graduate from a narrow discussion to a broader one, I think setherick makes some valid points about the complexity of the game. If you want to compete for a championship, be prepared to spend a lot of time on the forums (reading setherick's posts, ha ha).

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that demands immediate gratification from almost any endeavor. I can live with delayed gratification. I'm old. I've lived with it a long time. Others, especially others younger than me, may not want to devote considerable study to something they are doing for fun.

I actually prefer the custom leagues, but I acknowledge I might be in the minority. I'm a little sad and concerned about how empty the leagues are, and I'm not sure why it's happened. I think that Seth might have a few good points, but his frustration isn't shared by me. I think the game is great. I do think that the new user controlled leagues are part of the problem, with owners spending more time on one or two leagues. It wasn't that long ago that a bunch of new leagues were added because the leagues were full...

I also think for many of the long time veterans of the game (many of which had a great deal of teams) that the game at it's core has gotten stale and they have drastically cut down on teams. I used to own 30-40 teams, I am now down to 3. That is an entire league right there.

This is a good point. Veteran owners owning several teams made leagues feel more full than they were.



For me, it's not really the amount of time that I have to spend to be competitive. It's more the limited options for game planning. There is really only one defensive style that allows you to stay in games, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get the right players to play in that one style. So even if you have a great offense, you're going to struggle and most of the time, you're not even going to know why.

On offense, you have more ways of being successful but most of them involve throwing the ball more. It's really easy to shut down another team's running game even if they have a great OL and great RBs by blitzing 2 on key downs and keying Run. In fact, keying Run used to automatically shut down another team's running game regardless. The passing game is still easily exploitable because it's mostly Speed vs Speed and you can find more WRs with 90+ speed then you can DBs. And even if you can find DBs with 90+ SP, if they have bad M2M, then you're putting yourself at a disadvantage for the short game.

Also convoying of QBs, and...well, you get it.

There are other things that really bother me about the game as well. Like penalties. The number of penalties that you get scales linearly with the number of plays that you run. That means that offenses that I like to run - those that ideally run 70-80 plays in a game - are at a disadvantage to the throw every down offense that is going to run 40 mostly long passing plays in a game and win by 35. And there is nothing I can do about it because it's a linear scale, which means someone is going to get a penalty even if they have 100 DI. (Also the fact that a penalty is going to occur is often determined presnap - i.e. the cluster of holding penalties.)

So while I'm perfectly happy taking my time and taking a game apart, I'm still going to point out all of the holes that I find in it as I go. :)