Franchise Ball News

We are all One Team

Mar 13th 2022 By Franchise Ball

By Milwaukee Lightning Badgers :

Bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, 2 outs, 1 run game, Game 5 (final game) of the World Series, the batter is stricken out that makes your team win the world series and the community is there to congratulate both your team for winning it all and your opponent for their amazing run in which they fell one hit short from winning it all in that sensational series.  This scene will describe the gameplay of the game and get the readers attuned to reading the article and this will show how the teams in this community support the game and how they play a role in being what teams say in this game, a great community. The community consists of many teams but I only got a few some of whom I am close with and talk to daily to tell the story of how great this community really is.  I am writing an essay about the Franchise Ball community because it’s a community I have been a part of for a while now and have experienced many different scenarios that have happened and different conversations you see teams have.  It is a great community because while we all have very different lives from each other and are complete strangers the community is so strong we are able to share things because of that comfortability something you would never do with people you don’t know but many do in this community because it’s so great.  I wanted people to see that this small community has much more than a bunch of guys going to an online website 3 times a day just to watch a simulation of a team that only exists virtually, I want to show the stories of teams journey and how they spend their time in this game playing a part to being a great community member.  That’s why I’m writing this essay and I would also like to publish this to the article page of the game so teams can read what other teams said about this community and help new teams feel comfortable in this community.  

Many members of the Franchise Bal community found the game searching the internet. For some of these just it was just months ago but for others, it has now been years and the game has evolved right in front of their eyes.  Jeffrey Steckman is a 55-year-old man from Carlsbad, CA which is about 50 minutes north of San Diego, and joined the community 62 months ago (which is just over 5 years) he only owns one team at the moment and is one of the best in the game as the San Diego Bombers.  He states the changes he has seen to the game over the years by saying, "There have been many improvements like the game manager to make the game more interactive.  These are the changes that are made to try and expand the community which has been successful in the past years as the community is larger than it was 5 years ago.  Damion Mujica is an 18-year-old boy in Olathe, Kansas he is now a freshman in college who is in his 39th month with this game (just over 3 years) he owns 2 teams on this game his main team being the Kansas City Royals0 while his Kansas City KCKC hangs around in the game. He tells us about the changes by saying, The game hasn’t changed noticeably until the last 10 or so seasons when I noticed that some of the things that Josh added caused the game to go into a kind of offensive dead zone.” What he is saying is that the updates to the game have made the simulator change like it always does with every move and now the game is highly offensive powers instead of focusing on getting a pitching rotation teams can tend t look at their offense to win games.  I also got to ask the owner and creator of the game himself Josh Lee; a very creative inventor who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and owns the Seattle Admins. He gives us his intel on how much the game has evolved saying, “ Franchise Ball has evolved into a self-sustaining supportive community that respects other teams needs more I’ve noticed.  This has been inspiring to watch.  I see more of this ahead.  Members of the community/teams have also become great fans of other teams, more and more.  I see this as a positive experience for everyone.” Josh has gotten to enjoy some time with this community with every chance he gets even though he is a very busy man, expanding the community and the game itself over the past almost 9 years now.

Even though this just maybe a game in which we don’t have much say in just putting our intel into a computer and hoping for the best to try and win games, that doesn’t stop teams from having their superstitions to help them win games so we got to ask some of these teams what their day-to-day basis for each game is.  Damian McKay is a 40-year-old man who lives in a very small town called Seal Cove White Bay on the island of Newfoundland just off of the Canadian territories he owns the St. Johns’s Deadly Sins.  He tells us his daily routine for the game by saying, “What I do before each game to help my team perform better but also mostly superstition is I make sure to log into the game 5 minutes before each game. I feel as though if I don’t do this my team will not perform as well. So I have 3 alarms set, one for 5 minutes before each game every day. I also believe this helps my team because it gives me a chance to check out my opponents’ lineup on the game page before each game. Other teams may do this for the same reason and it could benefit them.” McKay has owned the very successful Deadly Sins with 2 World Series appearances and has credit to having tied for the best record in a single season. He knows the game is all simulation but he feels that he can do these things to make his team perform at its best.  Joe Williamson is a 19-year-old man who is also a freshman in college just like Damion and Joe goes to Northern Illinois since being from the western suburbs of Chicago for most of his life he owns the Anchorage Aces.  While he said not to have his ritual he goes through routines he has seen from other teams telling us, “ I'm sure there are some people who have their own little "rituals." Some guys like to announce their games in the comment sections, and I have announced out loud my starting lineup before as if I was on the live broadcast at the stadium. It kind of just makes it feel more professional.” This shows how much teams in this community like to live through the games some take the role of an announcer while watching each of their game to give it that realistic feeling and make the gams even more exciting for them.

New members quickly find the values of this community and add them to their love of baseball or video games to stay in this community and become as involved as everyone else. Jacob Hobart is a 19-year-old man who lives in Northwood, New Hampshire he has had multiple teams over the months but his main team now is the Pheonix Diablos.  Jacob has been part of this community for just over a year now but he still remembers the value of the community when he first joined he tells us, “It gave me opportunities to make and play with new friends. I may not know them in real life but I still have a blast playing them. There are countless seasons and you always have a chance to win the World Series which makes the joy in playing this game.” Jacob is very involved in this community and has gotten to know more teams on personal levels in making his new friends in this game. He is a sports fanatic that just wanted a fun game to play when he came across Franchise Ball and now is devoting much of his time to the community he loves best.  I also asked Williamson who is also now spent just over a year in this community what values he saw in the game when he first joined and he said, “The pace of this game is perfect, most of the people who play the game regularly are great people to talk to, and it's all around just something fun that I can play as much or as little as I want. That's one of the best things about it - if you are busy, you don't have to worry about being on the game 24/7, but if you want to be on a lot you have the opportunity to do that as well. You can also choose to play as a free team or pay for extra perks such as in-game manager tokens, more game cash, and extra trades.” This highlights exactly what makes members of this community give this game a try and play the game then they build on that along with the interactions with the other teams and continue to play this game.

There are many challenges that exist in this community, frustration, and anger happen all the time and many come and go, this community has struggled through many different eras of the game and faced issues they never thought they would face in this community.  First I tried to look at the aspects of what makes so many people not stay in this game we all know bot and ghost teams are placed in the game but there are players who never even gave the community a chance, Steckman said, “The biggest challenge is keeping players engaged.  Too many players join and quit too quickly.  This game teaches you that you need to be patient to build a great team.” This highlights the key focus of one of the major issues in this game that there are teams that take one look and never return because they didn’t want to take the time or patience to figure the game out. This hurts everyone else in the community because the simulation keeps their teams for a good month or two before deleting it from the system and teams can pick up free players. This idea would get extended when I asked Williamson what are some of the biggest challenges he remembered when joining the game that might be the cause for teams leaving so quickly and he said, “The biggest challenge any player faces when joining the game is the lack of money and good players. Many challenges exist have to build your team from the ground up in this game, and it takes a lot of time, patience, and negotiating. Some teams like me get lucky in their first season (I won a league title in my first season, season 95), but even when this happens, they usually fall off after that until they can get better players or buy the premium subscription.” This is a great example of teams leaving because they may think they can build a good team and play for fun or draft a team but this is a game to try and start from a startup and build into a dynasty and they could lose interest of a lot of people.  Some teams do get lucky, get a good team, and get a ton of luck in their runs like Williamson said he had. Hobart summarized the annoyance of these teams for everyone by saying, “There are numerous times where I face "dead teams" which are basically teams that log in, log out, and never log in again. They tend to get under my skin and it makes them almost impossible for me to beat. There are times when they are incredibly easy to beat.” This is the reasoning of why dead teams are such a challenge for this game because of the people who aren’t willing to put in the time and so the team just floats in the game and the simulation is programmed to continue to make them competitive even though they aren’t a team.  The dead team issue is certainly a major issue in this community but there is more than that, I have seen teams be patient and build their teams but then vanish in the wind, I tried to dig deeper on what those issues might be.  Josh does a lot in keeping this website running and making the updates that teams want to see be added and sometimes that becomes a struggle but he told us, “It takes a lot of work for me to monitor various aspects of running the game, but we have a lot of automation in place that allows me to handle it from just a few interfaces.  It’s a big job but I love supporting this community.  I love the enthusiasm I see in it as well.” Josh is very loyal to this community and everyone is very appreciative towards him for doing the work he does, while he can’t fix everything and some of the issues faced by new teams has to be the way they are to help increase game production, he does the best in his power for the game and its community. As for other problems, McKay evaluated a big one he has seen from his team and what has made other teams just like his very upset, he explains to us, “Another big challenge is getting a team to play well in the playoffs, and once the regular season ends all bets are off. Some of my very best regular seasons were my very worst playoff performances.”  This is another major issue teams have seen through the seasons it came into broader vision last year when Josh made a very big update in the playoffs that allowed 40% of teams in Franchise Ball to make the playoffs.  The playoffs have always had the division winners bracket but in season 90 Josh made the update to add a very big wildcard to give the small newer teams a much broader chance in trying to win a world series.  This also gives the chance for more dead teams to enter the playoffs and with that, the simulation runs more competitive in the playoffs which makes these teams frustrated because they don’t know how to approach these games.  The last main issue that was brought up was finding players this was brought up by both McKay and Mujica when they elaborated how hard it was for them to find players and expand the idea too hard it is for many other teams to find players as well. Mujica would say, “The biggest challenge for me has always been trying to find the right people to add to my team through bids and the pesky dead teams that somehow are always beating my team. I know for me, I’ve been trying for the last 6+ seasons to find a replacement for my top SS Jamison Heflin. So if you can get lucky enough to get the right players for your team, Then you should be in good shape.” While McKay said, “Some challenges I have gone through that others may go through are things like finding good players as well as getting my team to perform in the playoffs. Teams will always have a hard time finding players, between the time it takes to find good players, then being able to win bids on them is a big challenge even for teams who have been around a long time.” McKay said it well in saying that it is very hard to find a good player that you need for your team without the bigger teams in this game seeing you place that bid on the player and easily outbidding you to get that player.  This makes it extremely difficult for new teams to get any players for them to try and compete with the top teams in this game making the game rather more frustrating than enjoyable.

So with everything the community values and all the issues, the community faces I got to ask the teams what they would do to the game to increase the population. But first I went back to Josh and asked what the plan was in a polite way since he is the owner of the game he gave me a straightforward answer by saying, “The effort right now is to improve SEO and then return to focusing on retention.  Retention is the biggest challenge but we believe other aspects of the game can be added to and modified to improve the baseball franchise ownership experience.” This sounds like a lot to understand but to put it in simpler terms the goal for Josh is to improve on getting the name Franchise Ball out on the internet so people can find this game and popularity grows. Retention on the other hand refers to teams holding onto all these good players that they don’t need and stacking their teams to make other teams weaker, they want to balance the game out more. I also asked Steckman what his take on increasing the population of the game would be and he stated, “I know the owner is making a big push on social media to increase game participation.   Word of mouth is the best way to increase the number of players in the game.   Players can already join for free to see how they like the game without a financial commitment.” This is almost a follow-up to what Josh said in his statement about trying to improve SEO they have made a great push on social media to gain the interest of people to join the game. I however do think what Steckman said describes it best that word of mouth may be the best way to gain population, we need the community to help increase population by getting the word out to their friends and followers.  Mujica focused on just one of the social platforms, the one that many of the teams in this community use to socialize with each other, Discord. He says, “I already love the community of FB, especially in the Discord, and I think it’s only gonna get better with every person that joins the game.” This shows that many teams in the community use the Discord server Josh made for teams to socialize more has been very efficient because we all chat and discuss.  The belief that the population will grow for the better of the community and the game itself will grow is very insightful for the future.

With all the values and all the issues, the community has I asked the teams one final question, asking them what would the change/suggest the game do to make it better.  McKay focused on how to help the newer teams so that the population can grow and we can fix the dead team issue in the process. He says, “something I believe would help expand the community is giving free teams a chance to earn more funds as well as have the same game manager options in playoffs as the regular season. In my opinion, if free teams were able to invest in the investment page they would see progress after a few seasons and once you start seeing the progress you want to continue playing. This will increase the competition in the game as well which in turn could cause more teams to buy a membership to get the bonus of full use if the game manager as well as multiple contracts. Also increasing funds will give teams a chance to bid on some better players and could increase budding overall in the game which could also give some teams a reason to buy in-game cash to compete. If the game makes more money then it’s more likely to give reason to make more upgrades to improve the game which will also help keep teams around.” These suggestions would help newer teams in trying to help them have more fun when they first start in the game that will help them stay and allow them to build on from there.  While this probably won’t happen until the game revenue does expand more we hope this is something that can happen in the future to really help expand the population of the game.  Williamson rebounded off the idea a little bit on focusing on fixing the issue that all of the community wants to fix a little bit in the dead teams.  He says, “I think I would work on getting some of the dead teams (teams whose managers logged in once then never came back) out of the system. There are a lot of those in the game and you're lucky if you play one live manager per day. I also think I would add a pinch hitter for the pitcher option, as well as tweak the bidding systems. Sometimes players leave because the game isn't "realistic," and these tweaks would help a lot.”  This suggestion is good because they are plenty of dead teams in the game and hopefully the system will be fixed to get rid of them a little bit faster so the number of dead teams will be lowered. Hopefully, in the future of the game, the community can get more teams to stay instead of leaving and never returning so this could also lower the number of dead teams as well.  Hobart suggested the idea of adding more realistic features to the game to make the game more appealing to the eye.  He says, “ I would add pitch counts and weather to the game. In the MLB, some games have rainpolitelyin delays, snow, sunny, etc. I think it would be more realistic if the weather was added to the simulator. I also think pitch counts would have a rather major impact on the simulator. In baseball, I see epic at-bats where sometimes they last 15-20 pitches and I think it would be more enjoyable if they were added to the simulator.” The idea of a more realistic simulator is cool for the future of the game as it could bring more interest to newcomers for them to stay.  It could also give a more realistic feeling for the teams to make them actually feel like they are in the game and invest more into the game.

So when it’s the bottom of the ninth in game 5 of the World Series, bases loaded, 1 run game on a warm 72-degree afternoon with everyone watching to see who will take home the crown. When that minute goes by and you have been crowned the champion, there is a bigger crowd this time than there was when you won 20 seasons ago as you celebrate with the great community you are glad you get to be a part of.

News Conversation
Its not a shot towards you Rhody. When you were big into this, the community was really vibrant
2 years ago
mate i had to do a community essay 2 weeks ago and I picked this community because its a great community I didn't pick when it this assignment came out this isn't a shot towards anyone
2 years ago
Aces : 
No Rhody Lightning Badger did this as an assignment for school and he posted it on here so we could see the results. Nothing personal
2 years ago
Oh..... couldn't comment.
2 years ago
Nah I mean the whole article about a great community ofc comes out when I left
2 years ago
Absolutely not my man, honestly I don't actually know you, this was in reference to a team which had called itself the Hartford Hitlers.
2 years ago
Is this a shot towards me
2 years ago
Many thanks to Josh for doing the right thing on that. He's created a great place for fun and it should stay that way, so kudos for fixing that team name. I think we can all deal with Hitters as a name lol
2 years ago
Yeah I play them tomorrow and I am just downright disturbed by the name
2 years ago
Aces : 
On it. That's disgusting
2 years ago
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