[jerseyjay14]

I was wondering what your guys perspective was on the average makeup of an online league? Do you view most leagues as public ones with random online players joining for a league, or more of a private one where guys say on a message board who know and communicate with each other join a league together with their own rules and such... and which of these 2 do you design for?

I ask this for a few reasons:

1 - im curious to the actual make up of leagues and how many are random guys vs organized guys who know eachother. i cant EVER imagine a league of random guys who join through your online tool would EVER complete a league. I say this because its tough to complete a league with a bunch of dedicated 30+ year olds who know each other.

2 - it seems that last year (from what i read and saw in your interviews) you made some decisions based on the assumption that in general a league would be filled out by randoms who join and dont know each other -- example:

- scheduling. while its a must have option you assume here that people cant communicate say on a message board and make a schedule or schedule a game... obviously this is an assumption you NEED to make however you didnt include the option of block scheduling or a commisioner tool where he can set schedules and deadlines for owners... which would be the way to go for an organized league of guys who know eachother

- Trades. in the interview i watched you mentioned trades be 1 to 1 because you didnt want a situation where a player had 7 games played and was traded to a team that has only 1 game played and would thus play in the same week multiple times... this to me signals that you dont feel you can rely on the league members to police this stuff and have policies for it. for isntance in our league we would have handled this by forcing the owner with 1 game to wait 6 games before being allowed to use moss.

I guess my hope is that when designing future online leagues or online franchise that you give more control to the league and its users and allow us to police our leagues, runs our leagues, schedule our leagues and so on....

i think the BEST online league/franchise i can envision would basically be taking offline franchise and making it available online, with no changes, and relying on us the users to work out the details... (scheduling, trades, etc...) all we would need is afull live draft tool(like mlb the shows) and thats it. for the games just leave them all there to be played with the commisioner given the option to unlock weeks ot make them available to be played(see league daddy)

control and options is what its all about. when i play in online leagues (madden, nba2k9, mlb the show) i keep running into the same issue.... im too restricted. i dont have full control, and as a league we are forced to make some sacrafices.

id love to hear your thoughts on this... so if you have a second to respond i would really apreciate any incite into how you guys view the emerging world of online league play