From a GM perspective:
I just went through adding 10 new players to Lost Lounge's roster after cutting 9 (we only carried 42 last season). So this is something I have very recent experience with.
1. The tools for finding players suck. The marketplace is filled with players made by agents who you can't be sure are even playing anymore. Add in the number of agents who posted players without opening builds, and the complete lack of any ability to search for players with certain skills, and the garbage ratio is just too high for that to be much more than frustration. That said, I did find a coverage strong safety there, but 'twas luck.
2. There are tons of bad players on the market. I really expected to be able to find an upgrade for one of our free safeties going into the offseason. They're both decent builds, but general purpose, and that doesn't fit with where our defense is going as the game evolves. I prolly looked at more than a hundred free safety builds between people PM'ing me, posting in the forums, and my attempts at using the marketplace. I kept the free safeties we had because ultimately, they're better than that great big pile o' mediocre FS's out there.
3. I absolutely should have been able to find o-lineman who are better pass blockers than what we have since passing wasn't really on our mind when LL was created, and hence, those original o-lineman don't fit. And this is where the differences between reality and sim become severe. In reality, you can take a guy with good physical talent and teach him pass blocking. In sim, a player's caps at creation are virtually binding. So those hundreds of run blocking o-lineman languishing in the marketplace and forum have no place to go because the handful of run-first teams already have their lineman, and existing players can't change to meet new demand.
(this also killed an entire Lounge team as we couldn't change to play by the new rules)
4. I'm totally with Laggo that there needs to be a mechanism to add teams at tiers beyond rookie. We're down to 4 Journeyman and 5 Seasoned. Every team that doesn't move up creates up to 43 human owned players that have to find a home on the few remaining teams. Sieg and I both are making shifts to how our playbooks are going to look that precipitated us signed a bunch of new guys. But even that only worked out to 10 new players, and of course, the 9 guys who got cut weren't all planning on quitting.
In short, GLB2 is set up in a way that eliminates its customers. I kinda think we'd be much better off getting rid of team-based levels and going with a relegation-style system where teams earn their way to the top based on win-loss records. Maybe give them a few mandatory seasons of say rookie-sophomore-seasoned, but after that, turn them free to sign the best players they can and use salary caps to keep teams balanced, and set up leagues by ladder rankings at the end of the season, rather than now where attrition kills off teams and leagues leaving lots of players homeless.
I just went through adding 10 new players to Lost Lounge's roster after cutting 9 (we only carried 42 last season). So this is something I have very recent experience with.
1. The tools for finding players suck. The marketplace is filled with players made by agents who you can't be sure are even playing anymore. Add in the number of agents who posted players without opening builds, and the complete lack of any ability to search for players with certain skills, and the garbage ratio is just too high for that to be much more than frustration. That said, I did find a coverage strong safety there, but 'twas luck.
2. There are tons of bad players on the market. I really expected to be able to find an upgrade for one of our free safeties going into the offseason. They're both decent builds, but general purpose, and that doesn't fit with where our defense is going as the game evolves. I prolly looked at more than a hundred free safety builds between people PM'ing me, posting in the forums, and my attempts at using the marketplace. I kept the free safeties we had because ultimately, they're better than that great big pile o' mediocre FS's out there.
3. I absolutely should have been able to find o-lineman who are better pass blockers than what we have since passing wasn't really on our mind when LL was created, and hence, those original o-lineman don't fit. And this is where the differences between reality and sim become severe. In reality, you can take a guy with good physical talent and teach him pass blocking. In sim, a player's caps at creation are virtually binding. So those hundreds of run blocking o-lineman languishing in the marketplace and forum have no place to go because the handful of run-first teams already have their lineman, and existing players can't change to meet new demand.
(this also killed an entire Lounge team as we couldn't change to play by the new rules)
4. I'm totally with Laggo that there needs to be a mechanism to add teams at tiers beyond rookie. We're down to 4 Journeyman and 5 Seasoned. Every team that doesn't move up creates up to 43 human owned players that have to find a home on the few remaining teams. Sieg and I both are making shifts to how our playbooks are going to look that precipitated us signed a bunch of new guys. But even that only worked out to 10 new players, and of course, the 9 guys who got cut weren't all planning on quitting.
In short, GLB2 is set up in a way that eliminates its customers. I kinda think we'd be much better off getting rid of team-based levels and going with a relegation-style system where teams earn their way to the top based on win-loss records. Maybe give them a few mandatory seasons of say rookie-sophomore-seasoned, but after that, turn them free to sign the best players they can and use salary caps to keep teams balanced, and set up leagues by ladder rankings at the end of the season, rather than now where attrition kills off teams and leagues leaving lots of players homeless.
