I'm no expert on the subject but the landscape of gaming online has changed the past 10 years. 10 dollars for a season to most is now expensive in comparison to other options. Free to play has become widely popular. For those who don't know its basically, game is free to play but has limited features and tons of ads.

WIS is at it' best in fuller worlds with human coaches. Sim AI is basically a walk over game for the most part.

Heres my basic idea.

Division 3 is free. Anyone an enter, but division 3 also gives no rewards and is full of ads. For vets who like D3 they can continue to play there for free, as they likely are already going to the sweet 16 every year and play off rewards. For new players it doesn't feel like a waste of money learning the game. In addition you can pay to play without ads at this level. Say 5 dollars a season, but still there is no rewards.

Division 2 and 1 require payment to play in like the current system, you can pay a smaller fee say 5 dollar a season and play with ads or pay the full 10 bucks and get the regular experience like you do now.

I'd love to see something like this. I doubt it will ever happen.

Interesting idea, but I don't think HD is high enough up either the WIS or Fox Sports hierarchy of "things that matter" to be anything other than a low-cost revenue stream for them.

I'm not sure that cost is the key factor to not having more new coaches, I would say it's the fact that it's relatively unknown.  10 a season is a deterrent for many, but if it was advertised more and more people were aware I think the number of coaches would grow regardless of 0, 5 or 10.

I wasn't here for the free season promo, did that bring in an influx of new coaches?

Free to play requires massive scale. Where are the 5-10M users that is needed to make this work? And it would require massive amount of investment and research to match ads with each user's taste to boost average revenue per user. 

I would think free play at the D3 level could result in more new users bailing on team sin mid season.  That could actually end up worse than having a sim-run team.

Very interesting idea about free D3.  This would attract a huge influx of new players (if implemented properly).  Many of these new players would inevitably get curious and want to try their hand at D1/D2.  Could be beneficial for all parties.  I like it.

I'm with kmfloyd though... I think a lot of players will stop playing halfway through with no money holding them in.  I also don't like the idea of no rewards for D3 (not that I win them but it is nice to dream of winning them!)  Also, IF this does happen, a better firing system for D1 HAS to be put into play.

Cheating would also be pretty rampant at D3 if you made it free.  That was one issue with the "freeHD" promotion they did.

Posted by jaymc2007 on 5/14/2014 2:53:00 PM (view original):
I'm with kmfloyd though... I think a lot of players will stop playing halfway through with no money holding them in.  I also don't like the idea of no rewards for D3 (not that I win them but it is nice to dream of winning them!)  Also, IF this does happen, a better firing system for D1 HAS to be put into play.

If a player bails on a team mid-season, it wouldn't really be a big deal.   By the halfway point all the important stuff would have been set already (recruiting, depth chart, practice plan, and player distribution).  All that wouldn't get done is adjusting team gameplan and tweaking of player distribution, which would have a minimal effect.

Perhaps I'm taking what you said too literally.  A team getting abandoned halfway through the season wouldn't be a big deal.  A team getting abandoned before recruiting, or immediately after, would.  This could be prevented by having the SIM autoset depth chart and player distribution automatically, if it hasn't been set by the player immediately prior to the first game.  I think the game already takes measures to sign players during recruiting if a player hasn't logged in, so this wouldn't be too big of a change.

I was going to mention "FreeHD". Safe to say that experiment was a failure.

Making D3 free makes it about as exciting as most free fantasy leagues. Some will take teams and forget about them, some will be interested for a bit and quit, some will make numerous accounts and put them in the same conference.

As a new player, I'm not exactly a fan of shelling out 50 bucks for a steep learning curve. That has to be a deterrent for a lot of potential players. It is for me, as I'm considering calling it quits after my season run out.
I think there can be a decent middle ground here. Have a half price "learning package" that's up to 5-7 seasons, than go full, with the potential of rewards offsetting those costs. Keeps the game affordable but also competitive as players want to get rewards to reduce costs.
This is a pretty cool game, and with the right attention to new players and some pricing balance, it could take off pretty good.

What if D3 was free to play until you made the NT, then you had to begin to pay. WIS could monitor IPs that log in to make sure a user doesn't just keep making new accounts and keeping the same team.

@tcplotts: Not that I'm the world's best player, but learning how to be at least competitive in this game is pretty easy. I strongly recommend the aejones piece that is periodically bumped on the forums. If you read it, you will instantly become at least decent.

If you're too lazy to read it: Recruit for (1) athleticism and (2) speed (in that order) above all else at D2 and D3. There... now you can be competitive.