I'm excited to announce the upcoming release of Custom Leagues! This will give you the ability to customize your team - rename them, move them to another city, create a new stadium, upload your own team image, change the colors, etc! This has been a feature that has been requested quite a bit, so I'm really excited to make it available.

In some of the forum discussions about this concept, we had several folks who wanted to be able to maintain the integrity of the existing leagues. To that end, I have no intention of opening up any existing leagues to customization. However, if you want to start a petition in one of your leagues to change it to customization, I'm open to doing that. Here is what to do if that is what you want: start a thread in your league forums to talk about it. I will convert any existing league to a customized one as long as there are NO dissenters currently in the league. If you want to dissent anonymously, you may send me a private message to that end. I am going to leave this option open until November 14, which is two and a half weeks from now. At that time if no leagues vote to convert, I'll open a brand new custom league.

A couple of ground rules on the customizations:

* They are optional, of course. You may participate in a custom league and never customize anything, or even take over a team that has been previously customized just like you can in any league now.
* You must perform your customizations during the offseason. The league will retain all the historical team info, so if you move a team after the first year, all the history will still show that team in the previous city if you look back at the history.
* If a player leaves a team, his customizations will remain until a future player takes over the team and makes additional customizations.
* You will be required to make a credit purchase to perform any customizations. You will always be able to play for free and stay in all your leagues for free, but this is a value added feature that has no impact on the competitiveness of your team and will require a credit balance greater than 5 credits.

I think the concept is fine, I would just ask that you not change any teams per se. As I understand it, the only changes are team name, stadium etc. The game play itself is unaffected correct?

Game play itself will be unaffected - the changes are purely cosmetic. You will be able to change the team name, move to another city (you must choose from real cities, so you can't just make up a city name, in the same way that right now you can rename your rookie players before TC but you must choose from real names to do so), change your team colors, change your stadium settings ... the idea is that a custom league would be more custom, less NFL-like, and allow you to make your team whatever you wish. The only aspect that will affect game play is the weather at the city your team is in, i.e. if you move your team to Alaska you're going to have more snow games and if you move your team to South America you'll have more hot games. I've even toyed with the idea of having a custom league begin with random cities, but at this point don't plan to do that.

Sounds good

Like this as well, I am in for it