Oh my, oh my, how things have changed since Febuary 2015. I really only glanced here to see just how big the gap was, what I had left behind, really I had no idea what was coming that spring, sure I had some inklings but nothing could have prepared me.
I won't bore you with that stuff though, this blog is about football. Yes football sometimes gets stupidly interrupted by life's events but you keep moving on. As my 22 month old says "jus kee' swi-min" (she loves her some Nemo). In my case you keep swimming until you find a raft, a deserted island, or some other relative safety and then resume thinking about football even if your life turns in a way that you can't think about the sport you love as much as you used to. "Dammit there aren't any footballs on this Island!" or "You guys wanna play football on this life raft? Losers get cannibalized."
The Spring League I spoke of never came to be, mostly due to the unforeseen forks in the road mentioned above, but in an odd twist this last pre-iceberg hitting blog does have something in common with what I came here to talk to you about today.
The Teambuilder website by EA sports. At some point EA pulled the plug on their servers or at the very least disabled the ability to create new teams. This change was made without any warning and was never officially acknowledged or explained by EA. Everyone on various forums just started noticing that whenever they tried to create a new team it would overwrite the very last team they created.
In addition to this some people lost "slots". Perhaps I should explain further what I mean by "slots". If I log into my Teambuilder account today it will say I have 24 teams. If I attempt to make a new team it will overwrite that 24th team. Therefore I have 24 slots I can use, I originally had 32. Somehow 8 went missing. It could be worse, reading the web the number of slots lost varied greatly from person to person. I read one particular fellow had roughly 100 teams, 75 slots went missing. Others were barely scathed missing only a slot or two.
I will make a guess, a theory. All the teams were spread amongst various servers dedicated to the teambuilder website. One day EA decides since we can't make college football games anymore we'll put some of them to some other use. So if you were one of the unlucky ones who had the majority of teams on one of those server(s) that got redistributed, that meant a serious loss in team slots (like the guy I mentioned above who said he lost 75ish slots).
One would think this could create a market for accounts that are no longer used, but I get the feeling it would be one of those instances where connecting the buyer and seller even over the internet would be too hard to accomplish. I admit I’m tempted to look, but for all I know EA could shut everything down tomorrow (more on that later).
So what then? As with so many things, folks on the internet figured out a work around. You can keep creating teams by saving attributes like logos and other information offline, then creating the new team you want, downloading your new team to your xbox and then re-creating the team that was previously in that spot. Sounds more complicated than it is.
So here is an example, say my last team (the team that is going to be over written) is the Kansas City Whatevers. I save their logo, playbook, roster type, stadium all of that somewhere else, create my new team, say...the St. Louis Examples, save them and then go to my xbox and download the St. Louis Examples. Then I go back and re-load all the stuff for the Kansas City Whatever and it's like they were never gone and I have a shiny new team: the awesomely named St. Louis Examples ready to go too.
Of course it's a pain any time you want to make a minor change to a team that is the last team or some team after that. If you want a new QB you'd have to redo the entire team instead of just the QB himself.
All of this is for my “PFL” world. A league formed with only four teams and created using existing and personally created logos. The league grew slowly at first, but then I vowed that when the UFL folded I would create all those derelict UFL teams and absorb those missing teams into the PFL. This created an imbalance as I wanted teams and conferences with equal numbers, so even more teams were created. The result was the league almost tripled in one season. The end result was a league with 24 teams playing 16 games for a massive number of total games. No games are simulated. All games not involving at least one human controlled team are played computer vs computer. Because of the raucous events of 2015 that season took more than a year.
As the season progressed my step-daughter expressed interest in playing. I was glad she was interested, but didn’t let her join the league right away for a number of reasons:
The season was still in progress.
She had to learn to play, which meant she might lose or get frustrated and quit.
And because she was 9 and therefore a risk would always exist she’d just get bored with it.
To encourage her interests I created the PDFL, a sort of farm league for the PFL. This league only had 3 teams. They played a 6 game season and started a second. By her second season my step-daughter’s skills had improved and she even began winning games. I decided a fourth team was in order. With teams in even smaller markets than the PFL that is mainly made of up of major cities who don’t have NFL teams such as San Antonio, Portland, Las Vegas( at the time) and Los Angeles (at the time), the PDFL used even smaller towns.
The search for the fourth team was underway. I wanted the league to have more than just the usual teams close to Nebraska. We already had a team in Colorado, Florida and Missouri, so I thought Kansas would be a good location and to that point my stepdaughter had only left the state to briefly cross over into Missouri and Iowa.
So my step-daughter and I headed to Kansas so she could say she had been to that state too and we could find a fourth team. It was quite a journey and when it was over she had picked a town she had been to in person.
After we got back and I sat down to make that team, THAT is when I found out about the new limitations of the Teambuilder webpage. To this day although we have narrowed down the potential cities on the PFL official twitter account (@GO_PFL), we haven’t announced the winner. Once we do though I’ll no doubt have to do the team swapping like I mentioned earlier with our Kansas City Whatevers and St. Louis Examples.
All of the PDFL implications aside the realization that I no longer had an unlimited sandbox to create teams really crushed me. The PFL was originally started so I had football to play while I gathered all my stats I obsessed over between college football seasons on the same video game. This league grew to be somehow a creative outlet that involved FOOTBALL. Can you imagine a more perfect combination for me?
Even if I was to go weeks without playing a game I would see a logo and think, ‘That would look perfect with....’ or ‘how about a great lakes division with Milwaukee and St. Louis’ or ‘Maybe someday my stepdaughter will teach my daughter the ropes as she makes HER way through the PDFL. I can picture her now, learning with purple nail polished fingernails against the digital backdrop of a little Kansas town her big sister and I had picked so many years ago. From that to, ‘Oh hey that logo is cool! Oh wait....’ (sadness ensues)
So literally seeing cool team logos made me sad, and still does. That sucks.
Yes I can still swap teams in and out like the Kansas City/St. Louis. This is a huge pain though. I have an algorithm that changes which teams get better or worse after a given season, that would be a nightmare if I added more teams.
Annoyance aside, one has to wonder how long before EA pulls the plug completely? Yes I would still have the teams saved on my xbox but they would be static, stuck in whatever state they were last saved in,...forever…...pretty bleak future. I thought about this for awhile, and just figured I would play it out, when the time finally comes, it just comes.
Then I remembered my search for a game for a spring league back in that February before the world changed so much. A game I had dismissed pretty much completely. Axis Football. In the course of about 3 or 4 years the game has gone from a flash game in a browser to a full fledged on-the-brink-of-released-on-consoles status.
In fact it was announced until a few days ago that this year's version WOULDN’T be released to consoles, just the PC instead. I am completely fine with that. In addition and to their credit, they have embraced the same model as the PFL. Yes the game features 32 teams but they aren’t just different enough from their NFL counterparts to avoid being sued by EA’s lawyers. They have embraced creating new teams and made tools to help users create teams. It’s yet to be seen if I can create more than 32 teams. I’ve actually asked the main developer but as with most things I write, my email to him was pages long and he didn’t address that particular query immediately.
You see with EA having the exclusive rights to both the NFL and NCAA (even though they can’t use NCAA license), everyone else just stopped making games. So their technology is stuck in 2007 or whatever year EA got the exclusive license.
I seem to be in the minority here, but their is a prevalent attitude in America that if it isn’t NFL or NCAA Division I, and even then it has to be a power five conference (ACC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac 12, SEC), then it doesn’t matter. I can’t stand that attitude but it stops MOST people from touching anything without an officially NFL sanctioned logo on it.
As EA has fine tuned Madden into a photo realistic license to print money, everyone else is left in the dust making games featuring teams that aren’t QUITE their NFL counterparts, like the Atlanta Blackbirds instead of Falcons, but with the same color scheme. Just different enough to not get sued. And they always fail because they don’t have the unlimited resources EA has. But could Axis,.....might Axis….just the idea they are still out there, gives me hope.
I’m not saying Axis will one day compete with EA, but yesterday I started beta for this year’s version of AXIS football. As was stated over and over the game isn’t a finished product, but maybe, just maybe it will be by the time my stepdaughter is ready to teach my daughter the ropes in the dying light of the living room on a digital field in some small Kansas town.
