CSFBL

CSBFL, or Computer Simulated Fantasy Baseball League, is a web-based baseball sports management simulation, hosted at http://www.csfbl.com.

History

The game's officially recognized launch date is April 1, 2000; however, the first verifiable reference to it is August 22, 2000. The game has gone through numerous revisions. The current version of the game (generally considered version 4) was launched on April 1, 2002.

CSFBL is one of the first, if not the first, Massive Multiplayer Baseball Simulation. CSFBL has been featured on the Multiplayer Online Games Directory (MPOGD) and by Andrew Koch in his blog.

In March of 2008, CSFBL announced a cross-promotion partnership with the basketball simulation site BuzzerBeater in order to help both games increase their user base.

Gameplay

In CSFBL, players take ownership of a fictional baseball team, taking the role of the team's General Manager. There are also limited field manager features available, but generally they are secondary.

Each team is a member of a 24-team league, broken down into four groups of six teams (called "divisions"). Each season is roughly equivalent to a Major League Baseball season, with some minor differences. After each season, the top two teams of each division participate in 7-game elimination playoffs. The final two teams participate in the game's equivalent of the World Series.

During the season, the player must maintain his team's roster and lineups by promoting and demoting players, making trades with other players, signing free agents, and participating in an amateur draft.

On October 19, 2007, a member of the CSFBL community made a YouTube video that provides a brief summary of the game experience.

Types of Leagues

CSFBL contains 3 types of leagues: public, private, and premier. Any member can be in a public league, while private leagues are only open to members who are selected by the commissioners. Premier leagues are only minutely different from private leagues right now; however, premier leagues generally have the most competitive level of play.

Most, but not all, public leagues are "Greek" leagues, which means that their names are made up of three letters of the Greek Alphabet. For instance, a league may be called Alpha Beta Gamma, or Alpha Delta Psi.

The Future of CSFBL

Brian DeMarzo has announced a new version of CSFBL to be released to be called ComputerSims Baseball. It will include many new features, be a complete redo of the site, starting from scratch, and will have a significantly faster sim engine. DeMarzo has said that instead of a game simming every 5 seconds, it sims in well under a second, resulting in a significant speed increase.

It is hoped that this new sim engine will be able to get the full 8 sims/day sim schedule in. It is unclear when it will be released, but DeMarzo has been quoted that he hopes to have it finished by the end of 2008.

Criticism

CSFBL has endured some criticism from many people, including members. For instance, although in theory the 8-game-per-day sims should run 8 times a day, they only run 5 or 6, due to the server being overload. The game and forums run on just one server in Brian DeMarzo's basement and the currently CSFBL code is designed for only 1/10th of the traffic the game experiences currently.

On January 25, 2008, Demarzo responded to this overload by capping the sim rate at 4-games-per day for leagues that had previously ran 8. 4 and 2 game a day leagues were unaffected. Also, the community forums used by CSFBL have been known to be very buggy and unreliable at times. The game staff is in the process of replacing the forums to respond to this.

The CSFBL Community

CSFBL also includes community forums, which, as of March 2008 have over 11,000 registered users. .

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See Also

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