What's going on with sign-ups?

HD storage has never been cheaper than now

That is somewhat true. But in a production business environment it is still not trivial. Enterprise drives cost quite a bit more than the cheapo drives we put in our home desktops. Add to that with a system where you expect max if not 100% uptime you have to have RAID redundancy with it. Cost goes up some more. And those proposing a subscription seem to be ignoring the fact it would not be a small 10% or something increase in storage needs. Once you give me unlimited teams via fixed rate subscription you are going to be doubling, tripling, or more the storage needed. And when you start having databases for multiple game-years you multiply the required storage even more.

SQL and ORACLE DB servers can host multiple databases in the same server environment for no additional licensing costs.

There are other costs besides licensing costs. Each additional database brings increased overhead demands on the server. And we do not know what database they are using. There are many other databases out there and I suspect they are using one of those as both a full SQL server or Oracle database could be pricy. I suspect it is not an easy to work with SQL database or it would not take weeks or months to add a couple dozen cards to ATG which in a well designed SQL database should be a simple operation.

why keep ATG7 leagues active when everyone uses ATG8

How do you know nobody uses ATG7? I would expect if this were true Strat would have already eliminated these. Just because you do not do something does not mean the rest of us do not.

Plus the data footprint for a league in minuscule, so storage costs wouldn't even be in the equation.

And if this is really true then elimination of ATG7 leagues would not accomplish anything. Either there is a cost associated with additional games or there is not.

I am not saying I would be opposed to any of the ideas presented. But you cannot ignore the reality that they have to make a profit. Plus they have a limited customer base. This is a niche market. The original post for this thread referred to the problem of leagues filling slowly. Adding game-years further spreading out the customer base among those games will only make that worse.

I suspect it is not an easy to work with SQL database or it would not take weeks or months to add a couple dozen cards to ATG which in a well designed SQL database should be a simple operation.

Valen, SQL is pretty easy to work with, no matter what the DB is, it would be a handful of template insert statements to add a player. It takes Glen Head forever because it isn't a priority for them. It isn't about difficulty, it has more to do with their lack of interest or lack of ability. It would take an average to below average programmer about 40 hours to build a consolidated manager database, how long did we wait for that? Seriously, the manager database is a programming 101 homework assignment.

Valen, not trying to clash with you, but the interests of the community are not Glen Heads interests in my opinion. The items that all of us are asking for are straight forward for the most part. They just aren't on Glen Heads radar. The community doesn't have a voice at the table.

Again, just my opinion. I'm down on their management and lack of caring about the customer base, don't mean to take it out on the vets here on the boards.

I don't want to be banned, but I've made similar points previously, my posts were deleted and I was warned by SOM.

I have my degree in Computer Science, spent 5 years in development of Pure Web Apps, went to project management, and now work as Sr Systems Engineer.

So I will make one statement. The rate and which they make changes, "improvements" and updates to the site, would have caused people to to fired for being too dumb to work at any place I have ever worked. That leads me to believe they don't have anyone dedicated to be a programmer on the web side. They either outsource, or have one person part time.

whether feasible or not it still leaves the question of business model. they could not continue to pay out the same amount of credits if they drastically decreased the amount invested per team. heck, the top managers would bank so many credits they may never have to pay again after a one year subscription. if you remove the risk/reward aspect of it would it still hold a draw for people? if I had nothing invested in a team, and nothing to gain by winning, would I still spend my 15-30 minutes a day managing it? I doubt I would, especially if my team fell behind.

Valen, SQL is pretty easy to work with, no matter what the DB is

But how do you know they are using a SQL database? I can remember one place where I was the IT manager where we used a heirarchical database. And yes, you are probably right I cannot even spell it. Too lazy to check on the correct spelling. But I do remember how difficult it was to modify the Cobol that manipulated that database.

By the way I agree with most of your points.
But I do not agree subscriptions would be a viable business plan. And I do not believe that temporary game-year sets would be feasible.

What I might propose long term instead of game-year sets would be to eventually make available most if not all the players with more than say 400 PAs from every year included in ATG and allow single season subsets. That would accomplish the same thing and would in theory only be an increase in the size of the player pool. Primary cost there would be additional storage.