>> Is anything being done to try to get more people playing? <<
If there is, whoever is doing it is good at keeping their efforts a secret.
One of the main reasons I hang around it to see how what happens next to the slow train wreck that HBD.
Once upon a time, HBD was a leading edge online strategy game.
Since then, strategy gaming has EXPLODED in popularity. MLB attendance, TV ratings, and the number of people playing fantasy baseball have, overall, all gone up and up and up.
Yet, through a fascinating combination of inaction and poor decision making by the revolving door of business ownership, HBD continues to fade and fade and fade.
Anyone who has paid attention the past 10 years has seen what it takes to make a successful online strategy game and surrounding community. I can't blame the original creators of HBD for not knowing all of that years ago. Nobody did.
Yet, year after year, HBD adapts no proven best practices.
What other game do you know of that, if you want to sign up and start playing, most of the time tells you, "Thanks for signing up (and paying). Please wait weeks before you can play."
You can wait for weeks for a world to start, be on vacation for a few days, and miss critical actions that could have been performed during the weeks you did nothing.
HBD's design, from the ground up, puts primary focus is on the worlds and the fake players. The actual humans who play the game are given the least consideration.
There is no simple way for better human GMs to escalate and play with and against others who play at their level. And for more casual players to do the same.
Success requires an investment of a disproportionate amount of time in the least fun aspects of the game.
Coach hiring sucks. Ridiculous amount of time and no idea how it pays off helping your players get better.
FA bidding is needlessly time consuming during certain days and needlessly time boxed. It's designed to maximize the fake player's contracts, not the time or budgets of the humans.
The amateur draft is needlessly time boxed.
Player development is so flawed that a solution was implemented to just hide the data that exposes the flaws from the humans, instead of improving the algorithm.
If you want to rebuild a current team, budget restrictions make it a wiser economical and entertainment choice to abandon the team and pick up a different one.
Moneyball became a common household term. Yet, HBD ownership never did ANYTHING to capitalize on that platinum mine of a marketing opportunity.
Advanced baseball statistics have brought in millions of a new generation of baseball fans. The vast majority of which play online strategy games. HBD was waiting to offer them a compelling product. I've never seen an ad on any of the websites that attract millions of these folks every year.
Until they prove otherwise, I don't think there's any reason to expect better from SportsHub. So far, the only change I think we've all seen is drop off in customer support. As little as Fox Sports did, someone there seems to at least care a little their was on the site.
I used to post questions like this a few times year. Then maybe once a year. I think it's been over 2 years since the last one. I don't expect anything to change with HBD. More likely I'll see a refund on my credit card for my last purchase than anything done to bring HBD into the realities of 2010s online gaming.