I'll try to keep this short. I'm curious if other people feel the same way about the Custom League setting.
It's basically the only *new* thing that we Franchise Mode players get to have this year. So it would be great if it was at least even remotely usable.
Here are my basic griefs with it.
You can't decide how to add your custom teams in to the custom league you supposedly have all this control of. I'd be fine if it was just one big expansion draft where you had to add X teams in. That would make (sort of) sense. You submit your list, and then sim past the expansion draft, and then it tells what player(s) you lost.
So you add your created team(s) to the league, but in order to create a team, you have to give it a roster. You can't just pull players out of free agency, or else you'll get duplicate players in your franchise mode. So you have to physically move these players from free agency in to another team, and then move that roster on to your created team. Which quite literally takes hours if you're doing more than one team. Now, I'm fine with setup taking a long time, if the payout is going to be worth it. But in this case it isn't. If you want the salary cap on, you then have to edit all of those players' salaries so that the team doesn't inflate their contracts when you create the league.
I wanted to make a 36-team league. Add 1 team to each division. Keep the rest the same. Sounds pretty easy, hey? So you add your custom teams with their weird rosters. Their AHL affiliates are in Sweden. Which is really dumb and there's no way around it. How about we fix that issue? Just let us make AHL affiliates for this league we have "total control" of.
You select all the settings for games played, points systems, all that stuff. Which is nice. It's good that you get to select that. It would be nice if you could make changes to those settings during the off season. Like if you wanted to try out a wins/loss point system but didn't like it. The screen is there in settings to change things, but they're all greyed out so you can't actually edit the league settings in your league you can supposedly control everything in. Obviously you shouldn't be able to change that mid-season. But I don't see why we can't make all the changes we want during off-season. Even division re-alignment during the off-season.
Then, lets get to division re-alignment on the custom leagues. Why is the default setting for the system to just randomize all the teams in the league in to whatever divisions? The time it takes to move all the teams back to their proper divisions, and then name each conference, and then name each division is ridiculous. I'll bet I'm not the only one that got 80% done this step, then pressed 'back' by mistake, and erased all of the division progress they had made (I did it 3x). I'd bet that more often then not, people are setting up custom leagues with divisions that at least resemble what they currently are.
I propose the following to fix some of these issues:
- Control over league settings during off-seasons
- Choice of custom teams added via roster or via expansion draft
- If multiple teams are added via expansion draft rules, we should have control over the order that those teams get to pick
- Unless number of divisions changes in your settings, teams should be sorted in to their current divisions, so the only things we're changing are where the additional teams will go
This doesn't fix everything, but it's a few small changes (that could probably be done with a patch wink wink nudge nudge) that would be huge difference makers to the custom league Franchise Mode setting. Also, if you got some extra room on that patch, and want to throw in the ability to add custom jerseys to teams in the off-season, and give us the ability to FULLY edit our players, that would be super-cool too.
