PlayTheGame

And well deserved too. This is our second season and once again we have a great competition. Only change I would make is the reintroduction of the average goals for and against. after your defender has conceded one there is nothing to be gained or lost from more goals going in.
Otherwise fantastic stuff.

I would fully support a return to AGF and AGA. The minutes category has very little skill involved - more luck, and theoretically should be very tight at the end of the season between teams.
Still a great game though!

Agree with Mr McKeown's comments.Avge goals for/against should replace minutes which rewards time serving and not talent.However goals for/against should be on a team basis not individual ie just as subs get the team points regardless of the length of time they are on the pitch so they should get the team goals for/against. This avoids the daft situation where a sub can come on for the last 2 or 3 minutes and because a goal is scored in that time ends up with a goals for/against in double figures!!!

I second that notion of Average Goals. I didn't enjoy it at the time, as the people who stopped playing after a few months ended up at the top of that mini league but looking back, I do miss the tension during the matches.

I agree, it is well deserved.

Whilst I'm no so bothered about the AGF stat, I second the comment about AGA.

Mixed thoughts on AGF & AGA. Had players last season who came on and scored in last five minutes more than once and had a much higher AGF compared with their team mates. If we had a team average though all the subs who come on in the last five minutes or injury time at 4-0 would benefit on AGF / AGA having already gained points for the win, and clean sheet if a defender. Would this switch the onus for us Managers to just get squad players from the big clubs as we would benefit in two / three categories? Would we then sit there just waiting for the last five minutes and hopefully some easy points?

Minutes on the other hand allow Managers with players from lesser teams to watch the full ninety minutes with hopes of goal / assist / clean sheet and possibly still top a category - all for picking a player that actually plays every weekend - albeit with reduced chances of a CS or three points for a win.

Perhaps PTG could list the pros and cons for both and run a poll before end of this season. Could also do the same with any other proposed changes.

I agree with most of what is said above regarding minutes / AGA / AGF- these categories need rethinking. Maybe AGA could be somehow combined with clean sheets so that the score is AGA with an added bonus for a clean sheet. You need to find a way that the AGA scoring is only active if a player actually plays, rather than retaining a AGA 0 for benched players. I think AGF is not necessary as it is suitably rewarded through the goals and assists categories.

Some thing else I'd like to mention is the change in defensive scoring this season. I feel there is an unappreciation of a particular type of attacking defender as the category no longer includes successful passes. Similarly, defensive midfielders are not worthwhile because they make many tackles and passes but lack in the other midfield scoring areas.

I can see that an interesting solution to this problem might be an extension of the formation setting that you introduced this year to introduce a greater variety of different formations (5-3-2, 5-4-1, 3-5-2, 3-4-3 etc). You could allow players to be designated as wing backs or defensive midfielders and switch the set of categories that they score in. For example, a wing back uses one of your remaining starts from the left back tally, but actually scores and contributes to the midfield scoring, allowing a good player to be used as most advantageous rather than being stuck with a good player that is not fulfilling his potential because he is scoring wrong.

One other idea mentioned elsewhere is the idea that players have a value that rises and falls according to performance (linked to position in the ranking). Transfers could be conducted using monetary value rather than just straight swapping which effectively means in my league that hardly any transfers are ever made.

This could also address the problem of inactive managers - we still have people who are not playing and whose players have basically been removed from the game. If there was a better transfer system in place involving monetary values then maybe you could you buy a player out of his contract, re-activating him into the game.

I'm sure much of this is too complicated to implement but just thought I'd share a few ideas for next year.

Keep as we are with minutes on the pitch rather than average goals for and against. It's obvious that the best players in any fantasy league game are generally the big names at top clubs, and the least useful players are the lesser players at "smaller" clubs.

There needs though to be a balance between lesser players at big clubs and better players at lesser clubs. The current system benefits the former through minutes and the latter through points won (and clean sheets, even for subs coming on). It would be a retrograde step going back to the anorak-looking AGF/AGA, which only favours big clubs too. There needs to be an incentive to get players from lesser clubs - and it's minutes. well done - stick with it.