So you want to create an online league for MLB The Show 16 for 29 of your friends, or just one other friend, but you are not sure what all the the options mean or how they work. Let us help you out and take you through setting up your league.

First, as you might imagine, you have to start up the game. Once you are on the main screen, select the “Franchise” box from the Game Modes menu. Use L1 or R1 to change your menu screen if you find yourself in a different screen.

Once you have selected the Franchise box, select “Online Franchise” from the pop up menu, then select “My Franchises”.

From here you will have the option to “Create a Franchise” or “Join a franchise”. You will see there are two slots to create and four slots to join.

You can only run two leagues at a time and be a member of four leagues at a time. So you can be the commissioner of two leagues and be a member of four, for a total of 6 leagues. If you want to be in more than six leagues, you need to get outside more.

Alright, now we want to select “Create Franchise.” This is where you are presented with a plethora of options for your league. We will list what those options are and what they mean for you.

Name: Pretty self explanatory. Give your franchise a clever name. You can choose anything you want, but we recommend something other than “Steve’s League” especially if you are looking to fill your league with 29 other owners.

Franchise Sign-up

This is where you decide how you want to allow people to join your league. Your choices are:

Public: Anyone who comes across your league online can join it. Personally, I don’t recommend this option. I prefer to at least do a little screening of people before I let them join my league. This helps with a couple things. If you have rules set up for your league (you should) you can make sure they understand those rules before joining. You can also use word of mouth from anyone else you are playing with. The sports gaming world is big, but it’s not that big, especially when it comes to bad apples in online franchises. Commissioners talk, as do other gamers. Make sure you are not getting someone you are going to have to replace in a week for being a jerk, or not being active. You are not going to be perfect, you will still come across players who don’t fit what you are looking for in your league, but it helps to weed out the rotten eggs early if possible.

Private: If you choose private, which I recommend, you will have to send out invites for people to join your league. We will cover doing this in just a bit. For all the reasons listed above, I recommend this way of inviting people to your league. However, if you are not interested in vetting anyone and want to save yourself a little (or a lot) of time, you can opt for public.

Division Type: Here you choose what kind of division setup you want to have. Your options are Round Robin, or Divisional. Each offer a very different feel for your league.

Round-Robin: Round-Robin allows for more schedule parity in your league. You will play more teams. Depending on how many teams you have in your league, you have the option between 6 and 30 in increments of two. The number of teams you select to be in your league also determines the numbers of games in your season which can be found in the bottom left corner of the screen labeled “Season Length.” The more teams you have, the longer your season. From there you select how many playoff teams you want to be able to make the playoff. You can choose between 2 and 8 playoff teams depending on how many teams are in your league. You may be asking yourself, why only 8 as a maximum if I have a 30 team league like they do in real baseball. The answer is, there is no Wildcard teams in the Round-Robin style. Everyone is in one big division. The top “x” teams make the playoffs. (Depending on your total number of teams) From here you choose how many games you want the World Series to be. The default is 7, which is true to life. Next is games per series. This will determine how many games you play against a specific team in a series. You can choose 1 game series or 3 game series. If you choose 1, you will play one game against an opponent, then move on to another opponent. If you choose 3, as you can imagine, you would play 3 games against that opponent and then move to the next opponent. Finally you have the series per opponent This determines how many times you play an opponent in a series, including interleague, divisional etc. The larger this number, the longer your season becomes. As you change this option, you can see the Season Length in the bottom left corner change. This is also impacted by how many teams you have in your league. The more teams you have the more opponents you can have the more times you can play them, the more games you play and so on.

Divisional – This is just like real life. You select how many teams you want in your league and how many teams you want to make the playoffs. In a full league, the standard playoff teams would be 10. You can make it as little as 2 though and only the best team from each league face off in the World Series. If you choose 4 playoff teams, you add the League Championship Series, 8 playoff teams includes the Division Series and 10 includes the Wildcard. You may also choose how long each series is from 1 game to 7 in odd numbers.

Total Games: This one is pretty self explanatory. In divisional play, you can choose how long you want your season to be. You can choose from 14, 29, 40, 82, 120 or a full 162 game season.

Schedule Type:

Open (Auto/Manual) – Having an open schedule allows for any game against any opponent to be playable at any time. The Auto or Manual part determines if the series is advanced automatically after a set number of days, or if it must be manually advanced by the commissioner. If you select Auto, you will have the option below to select the number of days per series. You can choose between 1 and 30 meaning that the series will advance every day, every two days, every three days etc. up to every 30 days.

Flex (Auto/Manual) – Using Flex scheduling opens a series of games in advance. In the auto setting, you can set the Days Per Series from 1-30 as well as the Flex Leeway from 1-30. The leeway is the number of future series that are open and available to play. Manual only allows you to set the amount of flex leeway there is and not the days per series as that is determined by the commissioner when he or she manually advances.

Series (Auto/Manual) Series is only one series at a time. All games must be played by all players in that series before moving on. If all games are not played, the commissioner must choose to SIM the remaining games, or “Resolve” the remaining games in which they choose a winner and a loser. Note: If games are resolved, no stats are tracked from those games. If you SIM a game, you do not have control over the winner, but stats from the game will be tracked as if it were played.

Minimum and Maximum Player Skill Level – This determines who is allowed to join your league. The game itself has a rating for your player level based on your achievements in the game. Everyone obviously starts out as a Rookie, but the more you play, the more modes you play like RTTS and others, along with the more games you win will increase your in game player level. (This is different from the game’s or your league’s difficulty level). You cannot have a minimum Player Skill Level higher that what your own is for obvious reasons. The league setup will not even select a different option if you are on Rookie. The Maximum Player Skill Level is adjustable. Ideally you want it at the highest, which is Legend, unless you want to keep very skilled players from dominating your league if most of your players are of a lower skill set.

Player Draft: Pretty basic here. Do you want to have a draft, or start using the standard MLB rosters.

DH Type: Auto is the default setting and most people stick with this. If you are playing in an American league park, both teams will have the ability to use a designated hitter. If you are playing in a National League park, both team’s pitchers must also hit, just like in real life. DH ON means every team in both leagues can use a designated hitter. DH OFF means that no team in either league can use a designated hitter.

Allow Trades: Do you want teams to be able to trade players. Simple as that.

Trade Approval: If you select Allow Trades ON, you then have the option to require approval of that trade. This means a trade is proposed and the commissioner has to approve or deny the trade. You can also assign other members of your league the ability to approve or deny a trade if you are not available to do so.

Allow Free Agents: Here you can choose if you want to allow members of your league to sign free agents from the free agent pool. It is common for many leagues to hold a (manually done) free agent draft at the beginning of a new league. Based on the lowest rated team to the best rated team, owners can select and sign a free agent from the pool just like they would a regular draft.

Allow Legend Free Agents: This option allows you to choose if you would like some of the great legends of the game to be available in your free agent pool. If you turn it off, only today’s players will be available in the pool.

Once you have chosen the options you would like for your league, just hit the “Options” button on your controller and your league will be created. Happy Commissioning!