As you mentioned, the Kenny B. Stopped incident has thrown a wrench into the schedule.
Before moving into 53-man roster cuts and limited free agency, I would like to do the following to make cheater-trades more difficult:
- write code to prevent trades with teams owned by bots
- write code to limit the frequency that an owner can change teams within one league
- write code to track trades between owners, to substantiate charges of collusion going into the future
- reallow owners to adopt abandoned teams
This shouldn't be too hard, but it's probably a day-long project.
Switching into 53-man roster cuts and limited free agency is almost ready to go. It will take maybe an hour, but I want to do it on a Saturday or Sunday in case something goes wrong. I have set a goal of getting this going by next Sunday.
I don't have a good answer for leagues with mostly abandoned teams. The game was envisioned to work when most teams in a league had active owners. The bot software and the concept of street free agents were designed only to keep things going, without really fielding competitive teams. Writing a decent AI for making intelligent moves in free agency and evaluating trades is a huge lift. Your suggestion about letting them retain their 0-year players is a good idea, and I will implement that.
The best outcomes would be for active owners to be concentrated in leagues with other active owners. The most active leagues are: Chiefs1, Raiders1, Bengals1, Bills1, Jets1, Dophins1, and Pats1.