Think rubber banding, part of the fun for the player is thinking they have a chance. Either by splitting up the players into leagues based skill levels (star craft 2), or fudge the game slightly (or significantly in mario kart's case)

I agree with you, but here's my core problem.

My gameplay involves 32 human players playing against each other in football for a title that only one can win. Each season takes a month.

That's 32 shades of grey, with 31 of those shades being losses.

How do you rubber band that? I'm about to build a facebook app for our game, and I'm trying to brain storm solutions to this problem.

The only answer I have so far is make 32 team leagues, with 16 fairly inept CPU players. But not indicate they are CPUs, so that humans believe they are beating 31 other humans, even though the reality is they are beating 15.

This cuts my problem by a lot, but adds overhead, and removes a lot of the challenge.

The problem is in seeing it as a single competition. Have small sub-competitions with a higher luck component, so that people can experience winning a game, or even a round on the way to getting good enough to win a whole season. Make those wins satisfying and people will happily take a beating overall.

The idea of several different goals is how the US football system works. Most games in the season 'count' by improving your seeding in the playoffs but it's also binary so you get in or don't. Adapting a similar system for video games could work vary well.

I would suggest banding things so 20 teams compete for a spot in the playoffs which consists of 16 teams. (aka 16 people get a win at the cost of 4.) And in the actual playoffs you only lose one game, so rank people based on what round they get to. Something like winner!, (A++) lost final game, (A+) final 4, (A) final 8, (B) got into playoffs, (Try again)did not get into playoffs.

The secret is letting people move on as soon as they can't win any more while making them feel like getting as far as they did is still worth something. Lost the first 6 games? Hey start over it's ok, I hope you learned how the game worked etc.

It's a good idea, but it's not football. We're a football simulation, and mucking with how a league works suddenly makes it something else.

A football like game. There's nothing wrong with a football like game, but we're a simulation.

Would sort of defeat the purpose. The way to do it in our case probably involves outside "goals" like...

"Obtain a Quarterback over 90 overall."

Or something similar.... Things you can accomplish, outside of the normal system.

A couple ideas: (1) do what you can to make sure the outcome is in doubt until near the end, and (2) arrange so that the person "in the lead" changes often. Only one person can win, but a lot of people can feel like they were close to winning.

If your players are mutually anonymous, have the worst player play against multiple other teams each week, soaking up the losses. Each player gets their own Potemkin village where half their opponents are actually copies of the worst player. Now you have 1 loser instead of 31.

Split into four ordered leagues. Let the leagues last one week. In each league, promote the top two and relegate the bottom two.

Right, but that isn't American football. That's something else.

Sell the pain. Football isn't for babies.

Speed up gameplay with UI improvements, etc, so that players can compete in more simultaneous (staggered) competitions, increasing their chance of a good score.

Do you have a tunable AI to test players against, for making sure they get into the right skill-group? If people are in a good group they'll enjoy a loss more than if they're totally outmatched but somehow forced to play it out. The game takes so long it'd be discouraging to try to learn it while losing badly. Maybe let people drop out at any point (to join a game starting today), and be replaced by a bot of their skill? This could also handle no-shows.

That sounds like a neat game, but there is zero information on the website. I went ahead and signed up anyway just to see what it's about, but I would not have if I wasn't such a football nut.

How is the game played? Is it like fantasy football? It there a screenshot of what the game looks like? Are real teams and players in the game? You should consider answering these questions on the home page.

That's a great idea. I will do that.

I am really quite poor at the design, and work flow. I mostly spend my time trying to make the most accurate game play as possible.

So I am usually doing statistical analysis on how much yac is the average gained for throws behind the back field, and things like that. Focusing so much on the details, I lose sight of a lot of the core things a website like this needs.

To answer your questions

"How is the game played?"

You choose a league, and then a team. From there, you are playing in a football league with 31 other people. The football year goes, Free Agency, Draft, Preseason, Regular Season, Playoffs, Repeat.

Different leagues have different rates of play, but I always play 1 spin a day. That's most popular. So every day 1 spin occurs. Most of the time, that is one game day. So every day, a new game is played. You check out the results, make adjustments. Do it all over again. Make some trades, remove guys because of injury. Sign replacements.

"Is it like fantasy football?"

No. It is more about the football management side of a real pro football team.

"Is there a screenshot of what the game looks like"?"

The game is the website. I think the most valuable thing here would probably be a link to what a boxscore looks like. What a gamelog looks like. Pieces of the game like that.

I have made some recorded sessions that I put on youtube, but it's sort of me talking over me playing.

"Are real teams and players in the game?"

This is coming with the start of me working on a facebook version.

How this works I am still working out. At the moment, it would be just allowing you to practice your team against real teams. Perhaps there's a ladder outside of normal gameplay to beat all the real teams.

Not sure. Lots of ideas. I could even run reality back from.. I don't know.. 1994.. and you could reexperience the drafts that occurred.

I really should answer them on the home page.. Not sure how they should look.

Again.. I'm not good at design, so I tend to focus on what I am good at, and the other stuff doesn't get done :)

You did a great job on the game. I've been poking around and it looks like it will be fun. I also see that there is a lot of documentation once I am signed in. Maybe just put some basic information on the home page. A few bullet points worth of content just to explain what it is.

Have you ever read "The Smart Money"? It's about some hacker gamblers who built a simulator and placed their bets according to its results. Ever since I read it I have wanted my own simulator to play around with. I'm not a gambler, but I thought it would be neat to make a game out of it. I don't have a background in statistics and realized very quickly that I would be in over my head trying to make one myself. I'm glad you did the work and I can just play!

No, haven't read the Smart Money, but I am working on adding gambling lines to the fake games. You'd be surprised how much you have to learn about gambling to do that :)

You could get some ideas from chess "swiss" tournaments and rating system. The idea is to couple players of similar strength in each round.

A very weak player will likely lose the first two or three matches in a row, but then have a real chance against some other weak player.