(Zubaz and I chat on these very topics, above.)
Happy New Year to all of you out there in the CSFBL community. Here’s to hoping you have a great 2023 ahead of you, and that we’re going to get to have a lot of fun together.
The Year Past
A lot happened around CSFBL in 2022 – links to major updates can be found HERE if you’d like to revisit. We had a huge list of things that needed to be done – and we go into 2023 with greater development flexibility, testing ability, and support capability.
One of the biggest things that happened behind the scenes was filling out the team working on the game, which is going to allow us to develop, test, market, update, communicate, any other verb you want to put in there, better than we ever could before. We’ve got a good mix of folks with deep experience developing and playing this game, and some new eyes and fresh perspectives from outside the game. We’re ready to go.
We will also be the first to admit that we bounced around a bunch in 2022. We had that huge list of things to do, and less of a clear vision on the best way to make them happen. There were important changes that needed to be made behind the scenes of this twenty year old game, and some of those changes interrupted the continuity of many long-standing leagues – sometimes it was in ways we didn’t intend.
We are learning from some of these setbacks. We will do more to protect continuity of the game for existing leagues and strive to make updates optional wherever we can with the belief that if new features and options are fun, people will freely move towards them. If we build it right, they will come.
The Year Ahead
A lot will happen around CSFBL in 2023. Just a few of the things on the horizon….
*Player Development/Aging Model Updates – options that change both speed of development and length of development peaks
*Changes To Free Agency – getting more players moving in the off-season
*Sims Running On Per League Basis – reducing the number of sim outages that impact the whole site
*New Ways To Play – different league sizes/head-to-head/one-player versions of the game
*Quicker Game Formats – ways for existing users to challenge each other and get some immediate satisfaction to new users
*Enhanced Live Draft Tool
*Updates To the Look and Feel Of the Site
*More Ways to Facilitate League Creation/Community Building
*More Contests and Tournaments
*A Marketing Push To Bring New Users To the Site
*More Zubaz
Truly, there is a lot to look forward to.
_______________________
We know that you are all busy folks, with jobs, families, and any number of things tugging at your time – and we truly appreciate that you choose to spend some of your time with us. Whether you’re here to scratch some baseball manager itch you have burning inside you, or you use CSFBL as a fun way to get away from the rest of the grind, or maybe you’re just like us, and have found some real friends through this community – we’re happy to have all of you, and we’re trying our best to figure out how to share that experience with more folks just like you.
You are our best test market – you’ve given us some great ideas this year, and yes, you’ve been some harsh critics at times, but throughout, it’s always been clear how much this community really cares about the game. We couldn’t ask for a better foundation to build from here in 2023.