It seems to me Mike needs to accept that the current way things are being handled is detrimental to the health of his venture. I for one mentioned over a year ago that its hard to actually recommend the game to new players like I used to without upgrades and slipping schedules and bugs not being fixed. Sadly I haven't seen things inprove. So as someone who is frustrated about the state of the game at the moment, I was thinking about what could be impediments to things running more smoothly, things that maybe should be looked at critically.

1. Consider revising the current posted schedules. Why not turn home games on after 6:00 PM Thursday, allowing more time to make roster changes, etc, and acknowledging that few games are played before then anyway? Maybe end games around midnight Monday and let the robot play until morning so that staff time Tuesday can be spent updating stats and trades and such? Why not have the robot play unmanaged teams' home games ASAP on Thursday instead of waiting until Tuesday - its never made sense to wait until then? The specifics aren't that important, but just because the original plan was "end around noon Tuesday, start around noon Thursday" doesn't mean it has to stay that way if that no longer matches the schedule of the people who have to turn things on and off.

2. How much time is spent on updating the database for RealTime? Maybe instead of a weekly update a monthly update would be more appropriate and cost/time effective at this point. A monthly stat update, followed the next week by the monthly FA draft, seems like a reasonable enough schedule. I think it would be a fine compromise if it freed up staff time for other issues.

2a. An even more radical idea - is having both trad and realtime leagues a problem logistically? Maybe all leagues should become a hybrid - have drafts in June, start games in July with stats updated in August, Sept, and Oct, the playoffs would end around Spring Training of the next season, meaning there could be an active trading and player evaluation time period as baseball gets going.

3. Do we really need two sizes of leagues at this point? How difficult is it to maintain both in terms of schedules, coding, playoff setup, draft setup including Mike setting up FA and Rookie pick lists, etc? Maybe its time to contract all 24 team leagues to 20 team leagues.

3a. Why are there still Launch Leagues listed on the site? Delete them and clear them off the books. If it costs money to house such data, lets get rid of it.

4. In RealTime, maybe the monthly FA draft should occur 3 times a season - after 40, 80, and 120 games - this would drop a few drafts and reduce setup time, plus also spread out the talent a bit more so that poor but not terrible teams (under .500 but picking 6th or 10th or something) wiould have talent left when they picked.

5. If time is truly precious, maybe Mike should drop all trade approval, only stepping in when a league as a whole suspects foul play. Lets at least see how that goes for a bit, it can always be reintroduced if there are problems. We shouldn't assume without approval that cheating and/or bad deals will go up that much.

6. Finally, Mike needs to return to league-wide e-mails and maybe poll the managers over what we want to have focused on. One thing that I'd like is a weekly e-mail when all games are run and trades/stats are updated allowing roster moves so I don't waste my time and the servers bandwidth checking for results that aren't there. How many hits does the website get with people checking to see what has happened when nothing has? Maybe even an e-mailer that send the boxscore of away games to the owner as they complete so we don't have to check to see if games have been played.

6a. Finally II, maybe Mike should consider a one time yearly payment instead of monthly ones. Not only might t