Online leagues?

[coljesep]

Are online leagues available with FHM 3? To the point where teams can export to an FTP like they can in OOTP?

[Guzzernaut]

No online leagues at all

[AlpineSK]

Online play was completely removed from the game.

[coljesep]

Originally Posted by AlpineSK

Online play was completely removed from the game.

Why?

It's so disappointing - I realize there are people who find enjoyment in playing a game against an AI... I personally don't understand the allure of that versus playing against real humans - but to each their own. But to take out the latter and ignore a good portion of the OOTP community is just mind boggling to me.

I hope that is a temporary situation and not a direction they intend on maintaining

[AlpineSK]

According to Seb, the percentage of players that preferred online over modern/fictional was "way below 1% in the case of FHM2" and the "vest majority" of players prefer modern over fictional and online games.

Originally Posted by Sebastian Palkowski

But at the moment I don´t see how we can add it in a form, that it even works. How do you handle all the events that require one (or all) GM´s to react? We already have some of them in the game and many more will be added in the future. It is not possible to "just ignore them", it is not possible to "just keep them open until the sim is over after 1/2/X weeks". If you have an idea how to handle it, just let me know.

Originally Posted by Sebastian Palkowski

At the moment we have no plans to add it back in. That might change in the future, we will then post about it.

Its definitely disappointing, especially considering how successful a piece of OOTP online play has become. I for one never realized how much fun and challenging it can be until I hopped into a league myself.

[coljesep]

I don't really get the reply by Seb that you quoted. I love ootp, I've managed online leagues for basically almost 20 years...there are hockey sims out there that handle management features just fine as it relates to online play. I don't really understand how games like Eastside can do it...but ootp can't?

The other stat to me is a basic misunderstanding of your demo. First of all, you don't have online players - because the feature wasn't available or didn't work well. Im not buying a game if it doesn't do what I want it to do....so I'm not in your 1% of users because I'm not a user, but would be if online play was capable.

Again, some people find enjoyment in defeating a programmed AI that is the same for everybody. To me, playing against real people is what makes ootp great - it creates a community of people across the globe...why wouldn't you want to promote that rather than play by yourself mentality?

If online leagues were capable, I would get you 30 new users in two weeks. How many other leagues would form because of it?

I simmed using a 1998 sim before converting to ootp in 2012...theres an online demo out there for hockey - but choosing to ignore it seems odd to me

[AlpineSK]

Yeah I was wondering about that first quote as well. Left me scratching my head. Never had that happen in the three years that I was part of an OOTPB league, and while "in game" is obviously very different, you'd think trading, free agency, waivers etc would be quite similar.

Its his baby though. We just need to roll with the punches and hope it eventually comes back.

[Lord PichuPal]

What I understand of the situation is online leagues were broken as hell in FHM 2, with all kinds of issues and bugs to figure out. Those issues would've taken up too much time to fix when they were busy making a new game mode and going through other things, so it was easier to just get rid of the online portion for the time being (because such a small number of people were playing it according to the numbers and polls) instead of have it there, untouched, and leave people to complain about the fact it doesn't work right.

Their goal is to fix it in the future and when they feel it's worthy of selling as a feature again, they'll put it back in the game. But it won't be in FHM 3 anyway. I'm not an online guy so I wasn't affected by it myself, but I've seen a lot of the backlash from people before and the reaction it got, and this was the general answer the devs have given. It isn't gone forever but it won't be back in this version.