The game is hard to understand, extremely slow to achieve anything, and unfriendly. When a game has those characteristics how do they expect to attract and retain users?
I can't recommend this game to a friend saying "check out this BB-manager game is awesome, but it will take you a half-year in real time to achieve anything, and in spite of 5 years of me playing there are things that I don't understand how they work, and the interface is not user-friendly".
Looking through the eyes of a new user:
1. The game manual explains the game in general vague terms and there are a lot of things left out. What's this? TSP: 96 (81 + 15)... I don't know, the manual doesn't say. Instead of a "manual" there should be a game guide like the ones in gamefaqs where it explains how to actually understand the game, including lots of tips of what to do and cautioning what NOT to do, maybe adding images for easier understanding.
1.1. Since the game wants to keep you in the dark and it also occurs in real days, if you want to see what something does or the effect of a skill or a change in your team, you have to wait days, weeks or even months to see what the hell does that do.
1.2. The manual should be easier to read and have a better learning structure. If I want to see what the player skills do, where should I go? Roster? Nope. Training? Nope. Tactics? Nope. Game Engine? Nope... There's no tab for players... go to Nomenclature!! Oh, yeah, very intuitive (that's the game in a nutshell, if you want to find out what something does go look in hidden place).
1.3. The game does a extremely poor job explaining how it works that people are forced to go into the forums looking for help, and seeing the same questions being asked a 100 times and with lots of speculative answers. And of course, speaking of forums those are not user-friendly, very hard to find something. We can't even see how many pages of answers there are in a post. I don't want to spend my time browsing through forums to see something that the game manual should explain.
1.4. One of the most important things in the game are the player skills, but again the game fails to really explain the impact of the skills in-game. Take for example: JS and JR.
Jump Shot: A better shooter will make more shots at all distances.
Jump Range: A player with a higher jump range will find that the effectiveness of his jump shot decreases less with distance.
In-game, it's not uncommon to see a player with JS:20 & JR:5 with 50%FG and 50%3FG, but a player (same league and aprox. same skilled opponents) with JS:15: & JR:12 shoots 40%FG and 33%FG, or another example a $15,000 player "humiliating" a $60,000 player... yeah, that makes sense.
1.5. New players tend to buy overpriced staff. The game shouldn't create those kind of staff in the first place, or there should be a cautionary advice of not to hired those. Kinda like a benchmark of range prices for the staff.