Am I the only person who thinks the biggest problem with the game is lack of structure for better interaction among coaches? When I think of online games, I think of the relationships we build with our fellow gamers.
This game has great opportunity for that but something is missing in the interaction piece. Often it seems like pulling teeth to get much communication going in a lot of conferences/worlds. I actually think nothing else matters more. I can honestly say I stuck around in certain conferences/worlds longer than I wanted to because I enjoyed knowing that other people cared and would interact.
At some points in the past, we had individual coaches do up write-ups, previewing good matchups, and reviewing past ones. That fostered great interaction when it happened but it sort of entirely fell on that one coach and when they fell off doing it, we went back to our various corners. But it was so much fun to have that extra layer of intrigue. It would be so great if we thought about ways to strengthen our ties to one another so the games have more meaning. Beating a top ranked team or some other great feat is great but if nobody is there to hear a tree fall in the forest ...
Some random thoughts (maybe Seble will see this):
1. Introduce a more formalized way to do home and home series
2. Introduce a way to do non-conference tournaments and/or conference challenges
3. Designate a coach or two in each world/division to be the "color" person who breaks down/previews games. And build in an apparatus to allow better/faster interaction on each days' game results. Right now, there is no way to do this outside the individual Coaches corners. In some conferences, nobody ever looks at that.
4. Why cant we fill out brackets (NCAA) style once we get tournament seeds released. Maybe a prize for who predicts the bracket the closest.
I recognize these ideas are a lot of work to implement but I promise you guys, if there was more going on and more interaction, more people would stay. It's too easy to just close up shop and move on. Nobody even notices when it happens! Unless you're in a league where people really care. I know there are some out there in various worlds but there should be some in every world.
Thus endeth my rant.