Happy June!

I'm excited to share the updates that landed during May. A lot has been happening behind the scenes, and one of the biggest areas of focus has been bringing true AI features into MyFootballNow. I started with some smaller additions that I hope improve immersion and make your leagues feel more alive.

First, if your league has completed its championship game, you may have noticed a new Game Articles section. This feature generates AI-written articles from the perspective of each team's local market, covering the championship matchup. I think it's a fun addition, and I hope you enjoy it!

If you'd like more articles throughout the season, you can enable them in My Account. This feature is available to all paid subscription levels.

Next, I've added AI-generated player images. Paid subscribers can now generate player portraits directly from the player page. This is something I've wanted to offer since the early days of MyFootballNow, but the technology has finally reached a point where the quality is high enough and the cost is reasonable enough to make it available. You'll start seeing these images appear throughout the site when they exist, so feel free to start putting faces to the players on your roster.

I've also added AI-generated team logos during team customization. Like player images, this is a feature I've wanted for a long time, but only recently has image generation reached a level where I'm comfortable putting it into players' hands.

Here are a few of my favorite logos generated during testing:

"Toronto (No Mascot)"


"San Francisco Jets"


"Chicago Hedgehogs"


"Miami Fighting Crabs"


"Charlotte Westies"


"El Paso Burritos"


Before anyone asks, "Why are you spending time on AI when there are bugs and features that still need attention?"—don't worry. AI hasn't been the only focus this month.

Here are the other updates that shipped during May:

• Player search is now significantly more stable
• Numerous dark mode improvements
• Fixed visual indicators for deactivated game plan rules
• Extensive War Room troubleshooting and fixes; it should now be much more stable
• Rule names are now included in game logs
• Game plan rules are now versioned, so game logs show the exact rule version used during the game rather than the current version (not retroactive)
• Game plan rules can now be reordered using drag-and-drop
• Player attribute searches now more clearly indicate the attribute values being displayed
• Simplified the player release process to reduce unnecessary clicks
• League listings and details more clearly identify roster-only leagues
• Added game plan rules to game log CSV exports
• Added a banner notification for pending ownership requests
• Fixed expanded "&" characters in game plan rule displays
• Improved transaction cache refresh timing after simulations complete
• Empty coaching positions are now indicated during coach searches
• Addressed all-time team loading issues, especially in leagues with long award histories
• You can now initiate trades directly from a user's profile card
• Added a numeric badge to indicate pending contracts
• Draft history is now paginated at 32 players per page
• Team roster sorting by attribute now defaults to descending order on first click
• All-time awards now display the years each player was active
• Added an "Only Under Contract" filter to team rosters

Thank you, as always, for playing MyFootballNow. I appreciate all of the feedback, bug reports, and suggestions that continue to help make the game better every month.

War Room is so much better, and for the most part working just right. The one thing I've noticed is that when you scroll down in the player list and add a player to the manual list, it scrolls the player list back to the top and you lose your place. The player list should stay where you were after adding the player.

On the game engine side, I would say a main focus needs to be on opening playbooks back up. Any team running a full playbook simply can't be competitive, because so many of the plays available just fail miserably almost every time used. I realize that is very vague, and doesn't offer anything on how, or what changes to make, to get this done, but I think it is a primary need right now to work towards getting there.

I'#m so getting an AI image for Thunderc o c k s...

I think everyone recognises that tbh. A "fixed everything" update though isn't going to appear or tomorrow or the next day, the game engine will evolve iteratively.

MFN-1 right now has a focus on passing and Zone defence. Gradually the playbook should get opened up more (even maybe, long passing....) but it'll take time.

Would highly recommend attention on the AI managers, for the team rosters and for the play calling. Now, even moreso, with leagues that only have a few human owners left, 10 or less, the inability of the AI manager to re-sign the teams highest rated players is not right. In addition, the AI manager then offering a contract to an average or below, older player also burdens the roster, and makes it weaker. This is consistent with all the AI managed teams. In MFN 7 for example, we have a flood of 90 rated players on the early FA market. They are all players who have finished their initial rookie contracts and were not re-signed, which is ridiculous.

Also, I had a strange occurence in the German League, where there were 4 contract offers made to FA1 players that I did not make. Also, two huge offers that I would not have made based on how I normally make an offer on a high rated player. The result is a salary cap deficit that has destroyed my roster. I will be dropping the team as a result, dont need the extensive repair job that it will take, and know what that entails, too much time and effort required to fix something that I did not cause.

Thanks for bringing back the void contract but right now it seems available for any player any time

Just checked, can confirm that. Looks like the game stage check missing from it.

Yikes, thanks for that report! Fix coming now. It's only cosmetic (the cuts and voids are queued identically and just processed differently in the game engine depending on the player's state)

On my special teams depth chart in place of the drop down to choose another player I see this message.

Depthchartdepth#addplayerfromdropdown"

In one of my leagues it's for kickoffs and field goal kicker. In the other league it's my punter.

Another issue I'm seeing is the not in depth chart option doesn't seem to be working properly, no players were appearing there but I know I had players not in the depth chart. I was looking to see what new players I hadn't activated because it's currently not visible from the team home page. All players still appear active on that page. I would love to be able to see which players are inactive from the home page by the darker shading like it is in the depth chart.