The crowd is watching
Reputation stopped being a readout of the standings and started paying out — plus every daily event now comes with a picture, and the football town got rebuilt from the ground up.
⭐ Reputation you can earn without winning
Fan reputation used to come almost entirely from weekly top-three finishes, which made it a slow copy of the leaderboard. Now the fans also pay you for keeping a settled, happy squad together — every long-tenured, happy player earns a little every week — for finishing better than your roster had any right to, and for the calls you make in daily events. Selling a fan favourite costs you reputation, so your roster marks who the favourites are and the release screen warns you before you let one go. Your weekly recap now itemizes every star you earned and where it came from.
🏅 Your standing is public
Your reputation tier now rides beside your name in the standings. A ladder nobody else can see isn't much of a ladder.
🎖️ Franchise Perks
Reputation now reads two ways. Your title — Newcomer up to Immortal — is for life and survives the offseason. Alongside it, a season-to-date meter fills four tiers a year, and every time you cross one the town offers you three perks and you keep one for the season. Early picks are things like a free scouting-board reroll every day, a quarter off roster-slot unlocks, or players who sour more slowly. Later ones get bigger: a rare-or-better name on the board every day, a position you nominate always on the board, room for a fourth coach, or a team-wide bonus that only pays while you roster no Legendary at all. They're genuinely different franchise plans, not three sizes of the same thing. Perks reset each season so nobody compounds power year over year; your title doesn't. Both meters and the perks you hold are on your town page.
🎨 Daily events have art
All 509 event cards now open with their own illustration, and each town's art looks like that town — brick and floodlights out on the moor, a harbor rink under bare bulbs, a dome the size of a city block.
🏈 Gridiron Heights
The football town we announced as Gridiron Hollow has a new name and a new character. The old version was a third small, nostalgic, faintly haunted ground, and the NFL is the sport that fits least — so it's now a billion-dollar downtown dome on Sunday night: ribbon boards, pyro, suites sold to people who don't watch the game. All 108 of its event cards were rewritten to match. It opens September 7, the Monday before kickoff, so there's a draft week before week 1 counts.
🃏 Events the room reacts to
About seven in ten choices used to move money and nothing else. Now most of them also move how your players and staff feel about you — the same call that fills the coffers can sour the dressing room, and it's on you to decide which one you're buying. More cards put fan reputation on the table too. Two things fixed while we were in there: one card could dominate your town's draws for a fortnight after any drop, so you'll see more variety, and a card that promised to "reroll" a skill was actually swapping one you already owned — the copy now says what it does.
💵 Contracts hold their price through a quiet week
Contracts now price off the better of a player's last two weeks. All-Star breaks and bye weeks used to drop the whole league to about a third of normal price — a sign-everybody window that showed up every break. Salaries were rebalanced alongside it, so the overall cost of a roster is unchanged.
🧹 Smaller fixes
Matchday Moor's stats feed started refusing us the week the season opened, so the town scored nothing for eight days and the draft pool was still last season's squads — both fixed, and the pool is current. Players who've left a league now show as unavailable instead of appearing signable. And rerolling a skill on one player now updates the reroll price across the rest of your roster instead of quoting a stale one.
Gridiron Heights opens September 7 — worth a look at the map before then. 🏈⚾🏒⚽
