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 2If 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 FootballNot 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 RivalsVery 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 PLAYERSNo 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.
