I'm not sure how many people are paying attention to this thread but I had another crazy idea, this time for a new type of online career mode. It's clearly going to take a long time for me to build a playable game (should have another update coming soon, still making some slow but fun progress) let alone an online career mode so if you like the idea, feel free to steal it for wishlist threads.
I'm calling it
Parallel Universe Mode - I couldn't help myself with the play on words. Here's how it would work...
The Solo FrontendAs a player you can select from 3 modes of play - Player, Coach or Front Office.
Player - Like MyPlayer or any other type of career mode where you use a single player and follow that player no matter the team or league. You'd work your way through chasing championships, records and achievements and when your playing career is over you can switch to one of the two other modes.
Coach - In this mode you would play games as the whole team like other typical league or exhibition modes. You would be in charge of setting game plans and lineups as you try to move up the coaching ranks and take new opportunities with new teams or even new leagues (along the lines of the College Hoops 2k career modes). As you develop skills and advance in the ranks your impact on your team grows. You can move from a coaching position to Front Office between seasons but they require different skills.
Front Office - In Front Office mode you would control the whole team for games but work your way from scout up through the front off ladder to GM. Similar to Coach mode, you can develop new skills have a greater impact on your team as you develop. You can move from one Front Office position to a vacancy with another team or move into Coaching between seasons.
The schedule would be designed so that in a given period of real time (i.e. every week or month) you have a certain number of games that you can choose to play or sim (in Coaching mode there would be special types of simulation with active game planning). If you don't do either, the games will get simulated for you after all the data from all of the parallel leagues gets aggregated for that time period. More on this below...
The Shared/Aggregated BackendAt the end of each time period all of the game data from your league and everyone else's leagues would get uploaded to the central server and aggregated to see which teams are winning the most across all leagues, which teams have the top scorers, best defenses, etc. Your player, your rosters, your art files, etc. would all be stored locally on your computer and wouldn't affect anyone else's rosters BUT league structures would be held constant across all leagues. So if there are multiple players using team #1 in league #1 (the Atlanta Condors in my current default setup) and they're all tearing up the league, that's going to improve that team in everyone else's leagues. You could change the name of that team if you wanted but everyone's data would be coded according to league number and team number. If there are a lot of people playing with a particular team at the college level and going undefeated, that team is going to be highly ranked in everyone's leagues and probably produce a lot of high draft picks.
This same concept would play out into the off-season. How well your team drafts or performs in free agency is likely to be decided by all of the players who are in Front Office mode. Their successes and failures will determine how successful your team is if you're in Player or Coach mode. What do you guys think? It makes sense in my head but I kind of feel like this trying to explain it...