I'll say one thing. There seems to be a lot of replacement owners being requested lately. Lots of owners dumping teams. Haven't really looked to see if they are all noobs or not.

Looks to me it's a lot of these dormant leagues that finally got rolling, only to find a few owners that bailed weeks/months ago.

We've been waiting for owners for 2 months in Riley. That's unheard of. We had 1 spot open when the world rolled over and that slowly turned to 6 before the bleeding stopped. That's scary!

Sort of lends itself to what I've been saying all along.   Advertising is nice but, if someone wants to play a sim game, they can find it without an ad.   And the vast majority that come in via ad are going to say "$5?  I'll give it a shot" then decide it's not for them.

I'll wait here for the "you were right" posts.

Posted by hockey1984 on 12/1/2015 6:43:00 AM (view original):
We've been waiting for owners for 2 months in Riley. That's unheard of. We had 1 spot open when the world rolled over and that slowly turned to 6 before the bleeding stopped. That's scary!

Seems like this would be one of a few things.

A. team was so destroyed no one was interested in it
B. commissioner did a poor job of finding one owner

I'm gonna lean B because even if a team is wrecked you can usually find someone who is looking to take on a project 

I'm in Riley. Looking at Riley and perhaps expanding outward... if we have a lot of replacement owners moving around, a lot of dumping teams, then how many of these owners are looking for chances to win now?

All of the open Riley teams have been looming rebuilds. Previously, it seemed not that hard to find owners who were willing to move in and burn things down right away... the everyone is available no I swear I'm not tanking approach.

But if we have more owners bouncing around these days, perhaps they're the kind who are much less interested in three or four seasons down the road.

In my experience, I'd start my recruitment  threads early and get interest early.    The last time, the interest came later.    Much closer to rollover than ever before.   So I got the feeling owners were looking to play now but didn't want to get on a waitlist to find there were no openings in two weeks.

It's been so long since we rolled over I legitimately don't remember the one team that we had to fill.

I'm a little peeved at some of the owners for jumping ship. One in perticular for reasons I won't go into, just sucks is all, I thought we would be days, maybe a week. Now it's months, maybe a quarter year. : /

Are people allowed to make Aliases and get the $5 dollar discount? If so I am sure people are exploiting a obvious loophole to get $5 teams.

I have also been struggling recruiting veteran owners. I have never seen it this hard to recruit veteran owners. It use to be I could spend 30 minutes to a hour researching worlds and I would at least get 1 interested owner from the sitemails I sent out. Now it seems like very few veteran owners are interested in taking on new teams. Veteran owners appear more interested in shedding teams than adding new teams which is increasing the problem.

12 replacement owner ads in the classified section. And then there's the Vancouver Franchise in Mike Squires...

132 private league openings. 132 worlds. An average of 6 openings per world.

how long would you expect a public world with 7 openings to fill up? we were private, but flipped the switch to go private b/c we had 8 openings. I recruited a guy who posted in the forums that he was looking for another team, so now we're at 7.

we've been public since Wednesday or so with no new owners from being public.

I have no idea. Its a logjam right now.

one of our long-term owners came back for his team, so we're down to 6. One thing I realized: the worlds with fewer openings are filling up, and as of last night there was only one with less openings than ours - and now that we're at 6 we won't be tied with several others at 7. I think we'll start adding owners once we are the public world with the fewest openings.