A League (Manager) of Their Own

So, I think League Manager is a great thing for our league. It's helped
us manage things fairly well and it has some great stat stuff and
features. But, I also kind of feel that getting excited about League
Manager is like getting excited about buying a used Kia...it gets the
job done, but it doesn't make me excited to be alive in the world (I'm
also a little confused about the commercial with the hip hop hamsters).

Anyyo, I'm working on a long term project to make a League Manager site
that fits how we do our franchise. I could realistically have it ready
by the time Madden 12 comes out, so I want some help/ideas from all of
you.

What features would you add to a League Manager type site?

Keep in mind that you can't change things that affect the game...but you
can manipulate things that have to do with the information the game
spits out (i.e. stats, salaries, player information, game information)
and you can affect free agency, trades, and draft stuff.

I will be posting a list of some of my ideas on this forum post, and if you have any, I would love to hear your ideas.

Also, do any of you guys do any PHP/MySQL stuff? That's what I'm using to do all of this, so just thought I would check.

This will be kind of a scatterbrained list, but here are some of the things I'm working on:

- A home page for each person in the league that has:
- Trades proposed to you
- Recent transactions (trades, free agents, signings, IR, etc.)
- Game scheduling
- "Press releases"

- More interesting Free Agency (and resignings) that includes:
- Players stats affecting their salary wants
- Player attitudes affecting their salary wants
- Ability to add signing bonuses (don't affect your cap but do affect your budget)

- Player hall of fame
- Manager of the year
- Adding Vegas lines to the game schedule screen
- Voting on games (to affect power rankings slightly...also for fun)
- Game of the week

- Manager profiles
- Ability to add nicknames to players
- Draft scheduling

There's a ton more stuff, but this is just kind of the ones that I can remember off the top of my head. Let me know what you think.

That sounds awesome! The player attitudes might be a bit difficult to do and I don't currently understand the point of a signing bonus; but everything else is awesome. Vegas lines, voting and nicknames? Behaaaaave!

Signing bonuses are kind of like an extension of the cap. You would have a "budget" and a salary cap. You could offer a signing bonus that is paid out over several years (like they do in the NFL). A signing bonus would allow you to get more talent for your team in the short run (because they don't count against your cap) but if you backload it to the end of the contract, you would have to figure out a new strategy when the bonus starts hitting your budget more. Also, this would make trades more interesting if you have a signing bonus attached to a specific player.

Just something to give it a little more depth and strategy...Also, maybe add a franchise tag and transition tag option to contracts.

The player attitude thing is definitely doable, but it would be something I add later on to make resigning and free agency more interesting. Right now, league manager just has increments of 4, 6, or 8 (maybe more too) that a player's salary goes up, but it's solely based on their overall and not on their performance or any other factors. If you assign a player (not all of them) values based on certain attitudes (swagger, loyalty, etc.) you can make it so there is more to the resigning and free agent process.

I'm working on databases and layouts right now and, even at this point, it's fun and exciting to me.

This is amazing.

Ryan, you are a legend. I nominate you to be the foundation member of the Hall of Fame once it's done.

In all seriousness though:

http://www.xtreme-football.net/

This is a league manager-esque site that doesn some things better, and some things worse. It certainly doesn't have the CAP system that LM does, of many of the managerial tools, but it is better with stats, and doesn't take 5 minutes to load every single time you click.

One thing we NEED to consider is that this idea demands a hefty server. That takes some dolla billz.

Yeah, this is great. I'm really bad with money though, so look for some Overdraw Fees from the Bengals.

My plan would be to make this new LM-type site for our league and work out any bugs with just us. If it works really well, then I would think about expanding it to other leagues. I realize that Derek Adams's LM is used by a ton of people and that bandwidth is expensive. I wouldn't be willing to pay for that unless I had something finished that I truly believed in.

Right now, I have some of the main layout stuff done and I'm almost done setting up the databases (for the features that I have thought of). I will post a more organized/comprehensive list of what I have so far tonight, so you guys can look at it and let me know if it makes sense...and then add some ideas. I'm always looking for projects to make myself better at what I do...i.e. Photoshop projects to try new techniques and web stuff (PHP/MySQL, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, etc.) and applications to build to get better at doing it. I think this is a huge project, but it will be fun.

I think you guys will have more/even better ideas than I have, so if you think of anything, let me know about it.

I know DA is planning a whole overhaul for the launch of 12. He may already be incorporating some of these things.

If the intention is to usurp him then go on ahead. But if it is just to 1up him, maybe join his team.

It's not really my plan to usurp or 1up, but this is a project that I'm really enjoying right now, so I'm going to roll with it. I would love to collaborate with DA. We've emailed back and forth and that might be a possibility, but in the mean time, I'm just busy plugging away on my own project. Also, I plan to use this same framework on FIFA and NHL (possibly NBA2K)

mikesuszek wrote:One thing we NEED to consider is that this idea demands a hefty server. That takes some dolla billz.

I don't know how everyone else is, but for me I buy a lot of my stuff on amazon thanks to a prime account. I setup an amazon associates account that I have a few friends/family using and it's not big money but I'll make some extra beer money every month. If everyone just bought their games even through amazon it could probably pull in enough to pay for server space. As it is Amazon usually has the best prices on stuff especially for the tax free states they ship to, plus lots of $10-20 gift certificate deals on games. Just a thought.

amoeBae wrote:

mikesuszek wrote:One thing we NEED to consider is that this idea demands a hefty server. That takes some dolla billz.

I don't know how everyone else is, but for me I buy a lot of my stuff on amazon thanks to a prime account. I setup an amazon associates account that I have a few friends/family using and it's not big money but I'll make some extra beer money every month. If everyone just bought their games even through amazon it could probably pull in enough to pay for server space. As it is Amazon usually has the best prices on stuff especially for the tax free states they ship to, plus lots of $10-20 gift certificate deals on games. Just a thought.

Seems like something 4thstring should have on their front page.