I've been playing for 2 1/2 years. I've read about a time when there were updates & improvements to the game. In my time, I think HBD added a few barely useful screens and they fixed a bug in a browser. That's it.
For better or worse, HBD is a dead game. What we've got now is all we're going to get. Maybe Fox Sports will pull a Diablo & release a new version of HBD in 10+ years, but I wouldn't count on it.
Take out a calculator & add up the numbers. How many worlds, How many teams in each world. How long a season lasts. Allow for the time between rollover. Then subtract expenses for customer support (they do reply to questions & serious issues like alias abuse), computers, rent, free seasons, credits for coming in last place, etc.
It doesn't take a math or business genius to realize HBD does not make Fox Sports very much money.
1-2 minutes of commercial time on the worst Saturday afternoon baseball game of the season probably brings in more money than running HBD for a month.
HBD generates enough money to be a great business for 1 or 2 programmers who love baseball, someone who knows how to market, and 1-2 support people. The only hope we have of seeing a better online MLB simulation is Fox selling this off or a few people deciding to build their own game from scratch.
I post suggestions hoping that programmer out there somewhere reads these posts & is considering them for the game they are building.
None of this is any reason for new people not to start playing. HBD has a lot of good points. I played a seven year old game on my XBox last week. That's a dead game, too, but it was still fun.