Another plea for Association updates

[ArquimedezPozo]

I've been running a 48 team Association-based promotion/relegation league for a while now, and would really love to see some attention here, though I know it's a relatively under-used feature and hasn't been a priority, maybe understandably. I've started variations on this thread before, and I'll likely do it again, but here's this year's version.

What I'd love to see:
- a more centralized approach to stats would be great. There are leaderboards but they're limited, basically, to active players. I do a lot of historical comparisons, and I have to download players by associated league (I have four), remove dupes, and add various things in Excel that the in-game system can easily handle (and does, within individual leagues). Having a way to look at stats across, for example, all major leagues, or all association leagues, would be amazing.

- similarly for news: while I've run some teams at various points, I usually just commish this one. One frustration is that I can't get news for all my major leagues at once; I can either get news from one at a time, or from ALL teams including minors, which is overwhelming and not useful. If the news filter simply had an 'All Major Leagues' option, it would make that all so much easier.

- unified Hall of Fame: the HOF is totally broken for associations, because it doesn't recognize all leagues at once. If I have a great player who splits his career between three leagues, he'll get ignored in HOF voting because his numbers in any individual league are not HOF worthy, only his career as a whole. I turned off HOF voting as a result, and have been manually inducting people, but the stats issue above also makes that a bit tougher. In addition, the plaques don't incorporate the player's whole career, only what he did in whatever league he winds up inducted as - even though the HOF itself goes across all leagues!

- Playoff history and champions: though I don't use this really in a pro/rel league, I know it's often been requested and it would be cool to be able to track that centrally over time.

These things DO happen in small ways in the game - for example, an individual player's stats page can display all Major League stats, and a team gets credit for championships in different leagues, and the Hall of Fame is shared even though the stats aren't. But overall the functionality makes it a lot harder to use than it could/should be.

Other Association users, add your own thoughts as I'm sure I missed stuff.

[darkcloud4579]

Yeah this is tough. I think the only way we'd ever get this is if the architecture of the game was fundamentally modified to let us have more than 2 subleagues in a league universe, because associations were mostly a hack to that and it's hard to imagine them making that format better -- they haven't touched them since they were first designed -- but I'm with you and it's why I've long stopped using them.

[spartacus007]

I wanted to use associations as a way to have sort of a "champions league." I can -- but the stats are really wonky. Instead of showing up in their own row like the tournaments do, they show up as playoff games in the league the home team is.

But just using tournaments doesn't fix this because the teams don't get picked automatically like in associations.

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by spartacus007

I wanted to use associations as a way to have sort of a "champions league." I can -- but the stats are really wonky. Instead of showing up in their own row like the tournaments do, they show up as playoff games in the league the home team is.

But just using tournaments doesn't fix this because the teams don't get picked automatically like in associations.

Same. I'd love associations to be improved. So many possibilities with it. Sadly I don't expect them to ever touch this feature again. They seem to have forgotten about it or at the very least abandoned it.