It's Time to Bring Back Online Franchise in MLB The Show
Custom Leagues were added for MLB The Show 20 after Online Franchise was removed a few years prior. It's time to bring Online Franchise back.
After this week’s Feature Premiere about the changes coming to Franchise and March To October in MLB The Show 25, there continues to be one glaring omission in the minds of longtime franchise players. That, of course, is the lack of Online Franchise’s rebirth.
Online Franchise was last included as a game mode back in 2017 when Ken Griffey Jr. graced the cover. The mode was removed prior to The Show 18’s release, with SDS citing the need to "focus on [their] technology" when it came to the online aspects of the game. SDS had been criticized over the state of its online stability and game functions going back to the beginning of the PlayStation 4 era, and public opinion was that the experience did not improve much after they made 17 a then-current-gen only release on the PS4 system.
After a two-year hiatus from any sort of private, online league play with friends, SDS announced the addition of a new mode called Custom Leagues during the pre-launch cycle for MLB The Show 20. While there was anticipation that Custom Leagues could be a reincarnation of Online Franchise at the time of that announcement, the player base quickly learned that would not be possible with the way the mode is built.
WHAT CUSTOM LEAGUES ARE
Custom Leagues are a way for you to participate in multiple online seasons with friends. Users can have anywhere from 4-30 teams in one league, and there are a decent variety of settings that can be changed when setting up the league. There are different settings for how many games you play, the number of innings per game can range anywhere from 3-9 (we will come back to this), the DH rule can be turned off, umpiring settings can be adjusted, etc.
Those setting choices seem great on the surface. But some of them come with unintended consequences. Revisiting the note on how many innings you choose to play per game, stamina is only coded in the game in thirds. Three-inning games use the same stamina adjustments that you see in Diamond Dynasty in modes like Conquest, Battle Royale and Events. Games ranging from 7-9 innings use standard stamina, and games set from 4-6 innings fall in the middle.
So, if you set your leagues to have 7-inning games (which I did in MLB The Show 20 when I tried Custom Leagues with friends) that means, unless you absolutely shell your opponent’s starting pitcher or drive the pitch count up, there is a good chance that starters will throw a complete game with ease and only take two games before they are back to being fully rested.
HOW IT DIFFERS FROM ONLINE FRANCHISE
The first major difference between Online Franchise and Custom Leagues is how your teams are constructed from the beginning. Users have the option to start with their Diamond Dynasty inventory instead of using each team’s 40-man roster. If you go this route, there is an option to set a maximum level for your team’s overall rating, akin to how some Events will have overall caps.
Scheduling is another major difference between these two modes. In an Online Franchise, you have the opportunity to play the entire season’s schedule, including against CPU-controlled versions of unclaimed teams. Custom Leagues only allow user-controlled teams at the beginning, and instead of having a calendar to play through, users instead set a number of games (between 1-7) that they play to determine how long each "series" against each other lasts.
There is no regular season cap to go along with this, so in the extreme case in which you play in a league with 30 users and seven games against each person, there would be 210 regular season games before getting to the playoffs. Additionally, with Custom Leagues requiring only teams controlled by users to start, that means no form of playing against the CPU comes into play until someone leaves the league. If a true version of Online Franchise were to come back, I would like to see a scheduling system like the NBA 2K series, where you have a true schedule but can bounce around and play any game — user or CPU — at any time.
Transactions are also handled in a vastly different manner. The only forms of player movement you get in Custom Leagues are with call ups/send downs within your own organization (if you are playing with real rosters), switching players around your squad (if using your DD inventory) or by trading. There is no option to utilize free agency in any regard.
When it comes to trading with real rosters, you are only able to trade with other user-owned teams, meaning if no one picks the Baltimore Orioles, there is no way for you to try and poach Adley Rutschman to upgrade your catcher. The initial iteration of Custom Leagues in MLB 20 did not allow players to make trades at all since you were using your own personal inventory, although now the game menu does list trading as a possibility with Custom League squads.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST ITS POPULARITY
Since the removal of the official Online Franchise mode almost seven game cycles ago, there have been countless forums and social media posts both lamenting the omission of the mode and questioning how much it would even be utilized.
For starters, in my own opinion, there is no way that someone could take the popularity of Custom Leagues (which is minimal, at best) to attempt predicting how much usage would come with a true Online Franchise mode. They are just not on the same playing field, and it appears from the outsider’s perspective as though SDS recognizes this as well.
Where the Custom Leagues addition was posed as a major selling point in its first inclusion back in MLB The Show 20 — getting its own weeks’ worth of hype with the teaser trailer and Twitch stream — there has been seemingly no other mention of it since. The official game manuals for MLB The Show 23 and MLB The Show 24 do not even list Custom Leagues on the "More Ways To Play" page (official manuals for MLB The Show 21 and MLB The Show 22 appear to have been removed from SDS’s website), and it is even a task to try and find it in the game’s menu.
At this point, it seems like a safe guess to say that many casual players are not going to go out of their way to find Custom Leagues when they have the main draws of Diamond Dynasty, Road to the Show and Franchise readily available to enter on the main menu screen.
Additionally, all it takes to see how popular offline franchise modes are is to look at the return of the College Football franchise last year. Leading up to the game’s release, a significant amount of discourse was about hopes and questions about the inclusion of online dynasties so that people could participate in leagues with their friends. Its inclusion certainly contributed to the EA Sports title becoming the best-selling sports video game of all-time.
While there is still plenty of room for improvement, SDS has been making changes to the franchise experience. With the state of online play, the primary reason given for removing the feature back before MLB The Show 18’s release, also being greatly improved since the mid-late-2010s, there’s no better time than now to bring this missing mode back.
Here is hoping that, someday soon, we see the return of Online Franchise in MLB The Show.
Nick is an IBWAA member who has spent time writing for various sports websites over the last 12 years, primarily focusing on baseball. He is also an avid MLB The Show player and is believed to have been the first person in the world to get live series Kyle Hendricks to Parallel 5 every year since the iteration of the parallel system.