The folks who thought of and coded HBD did something I consider remarkable. The SIM engine isn't perfect, IMO, but it is VERY good. And everything around that, for a version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 of a game is remarkably good.
For pretty much everything other than the game simulation, time is passing it by. Gaming has never been a bigger industry. MLB seems to be doing fine. Yet, this game seems to have fewer and fewer players every year.
Making changes to the existing structure, like allowing 24 or 16 person worlds, doesn't address the big stuff. Yes, it will help some worlds fill faster. That could also be done by setting a maximum number of days for a world to roll and then have bots run any unclaimed teams. Almost all of that logic is in the existing code.
Where HBD has failed while other strategy and simulations games have boomed is how the game is organized at the most fundamental level. Since HBD has been released, a gaming model that works has been developed and (at least for now) perfected.
HBD was designed to #1 be about The World and #2 about the fake players. #3, at best, is the humans who play the game. I'm not claiming anyone could have done better the year HBD was launched. But I think there's a lot of evidence that if anyone was going to start from scratch and create an MLB simulation, they'd need to make it a lot more about the humans and less about a very rigid game structure.
Everything about the marketing of HBD sucks. From the lack of ads to the **** landing page to what happens next if someone signs up. Of course FOX knows this. They just don't want to do anything about it. (Mike could not be more wrong about how advertizing works. He won't change his mind, so I won't debate it with him.)
If someone wants to signup and play today, they can't. They can signup, but they can't start playing for what is typically days to weeks. That's just not how gaming works now (if it ever did). People want what they want now. This is a foundation problem. Fix this and other problems are swept away. Don't fix this, and a large percentage of first time buyers will turn away or ask for their money back.
HBD penalizes success. If you do really, really good, you get to have a dominant team. And then people don't want to play in that world, because it has a team that always wins 100+ games and wins the WS too often. How many other games can you name that penalize success?
HBD has no escalation. Winning a WS (or making the playoffs) should be rewarded by allowing us (or forcing us) to play against better competition next season. Instead, we have to chose to start over in what we hope is a more competitive world or keep playing against the same level of competition. And it is just "hope", because there's easy way to evaluate the level of GMs in a world.
HBD takes a lot of time. So do many other strategy games that are booming. The main difference is HBD requires us to play on the game's schedule, not ours.
Why can't we set budgets and make some other moves (release, maybe resign, etc,) the day the world roles instead of a random 24 hour period when the game says we can?
Why can't we get email or text notifications when something happens that needs our attention? An ML player got hurt. An SP at any level will start at below 80 in 2 days if you don't make a change. A position player will start below 90 in 2 days if we don't take action. We have a trade proposal or a message from another player? That's how gaming works now. We don't have to log in 3-6 times a day to see how things are going. They game sends appropriate messages so we don't burn out logging in 3-6 times a day only to find out 90%+ of the time there's nothing that really needs to be done. If you were trying to create a game to burn people out, you'd copy HBD.
Why can't we rank draft picks all season instead of smaller time period?
The FA process could not be any more human hostile. There are a lot of successful auction websites and ways to run a auction that are designed around what's best for the person bidding, not what's best for the thing being auctioned (in this case, fake players). HBD could change to any one of those models and FA bidding would take less time, be more fair, and have just as much if not more strategy.
Why can't we take our teams and bring them into a world we want to be in? That's how every successful game I can think of works. As you get better at the game, you can take what you've created and play that team (or that character) in different or more competitive scenarios. Or, if you want, you can chose to start from scratch and grow another team or character. In HBD, we are stuck in the world with our team. This is another foundational flaw in the current game. World history is cool and all that, but I'd toss that in a second to be able to play my team(s) against better competition. That doesn't not mean the team would disappear from a world if it started in new world. They players are not real. They can be copied any number of times.
Some sort free or $1 trial to make it easy to start. Disable features in that version (like trading). That model works in pretty much every industry, including gaming.
Contests - FOX wants more people to sign up? Everyone who wins a WS goes into a drawing. Winner gets a trip to the World Series or All Star Game. (I know there's more to this, but tiny companies do stuff like this all the time.)
Making more money - Why aren't there ads all over this site? How much money if FOX ******* away every day on that alone? There are games that live on nothing but advertising money. At least at the entry level. Want more features and fewer ads? Pay more money. It's just silly we don't have ads on the world home page and have to click through at least one ad per session to get to a 2nd screen.
I realize this post is too long. FOX / WIS won't do any of this. But it's out there for someone to run with. The problem isn't that an MLB simulation can't have more customers. The problem is in how this particular website is doing it. They blazed a trail. All praise for that. And then they chose not to improve or extend that trail. That's not a criticism. Just an observation.