Based on the wide interest in the IRI and CC Fantasy FIRST drafts, there is clear indication that there is interest in Fantasy FIRST beyond the participants of Season Long Fantasy FIRST (SLFF). Participation in SLFF, not to mention competitive success, requires a large time commitment and creates a high barrier to entry.
I’d like to propose a more accessible variant of SLFF by reducing the number of drafts to one per week of competition season rather than one per regional and district area. In other words, instead of choosing from the pool of teams at each event/district, players choose from the pool of teams competing that week. It would use the SLFF rules set and scoring with minor adjustments.
Drafts would begin after Thanksgiving and there would be around one per week until kickoff, with another 2-3 drafts during the season before District/Half-World Championships. They would occur at around 9 Eastern (to be out of the way of SLFF drafts, which run from 7 to around 8:15). I am open to suggestions about whether to use a rotating day of the week or the same day every time.
Players form teams of 1-5 members to participate, same as SLFF.
Would anyone be interested in participating?
TL;DR SLFF except with a sane number (~8) of drafts
(Time for a little plug of a project of mine, sorry)
I’ve kinda been thinking about the same thing, and I kinda decided that the Chief Delphi format takes a lot of effort to maintain on the person running it’s part. As such, I’ve been working on an automated method to handle this, using a chat program called Discord (there is a very popular chat server for FRC on it, over 2000 members strong). I’ve got a significant portion of the coding done, hoping to add more options for single event drafting (betting on specific matches) and maybe even FTC support. It’s really meant for the more casual Fantasy FIRST drafter, saying you can start a draft for any event of TBA with only three commands. If anyone’s interested, feel free to join this discord server and I will send out updates when it’s ready. I’d also love feedback from anybody in proper SLFF (or Chief Delphi fantasy of any kind for that matter) about the way I’m implementing things.
To be fair, with this method shouldn’t you still be going through the same number of teams overall?
It might be easier to rank all the teams in a specific week, but I don’t know if that is the case.
What is the major difference that would cause this to take less time for the participants than SLFF?
The main reason is that it probably mimics the level of detail of an IRI draft. Assuming a population of teams is around 15, then each draft has somewhere around 45 or 60 teams; considering that on the average week, there are about 15 events, that means taking about the top three teams from each event. Compare that to the 30 teams per event of normal SLFF, and suddenly the task of drafting is much less daunting.
Gotcha, so I’d be picking my 5-10 teams that I get that week instead of picking until all teams that week are gone. I’d be down with that, that sounds way easier, although it gets rid of some of the cool parts of FF where you research and find teams you’ve never heard of.
SLFF is not for everyone. If you have the time and a good group, it’s a fantastic time. But there’s a middle ground for people that want to do FF, but don’t have a team or have the time for SLFF. We’re trying to fill that space.
I’d be very interested in competing here, and might even consider switching my team over to this platform. Reading through the rules of full SLFF had me very concerned about complexity, time spent, and with a more formalized setup I think this concept might be a little more the right speed for our team of all rookies to SLFF.
Here’s what I would say: do both. SLFF is comprehensive but if you take your work and then apply it to this draft, you’ll find yourself playing two competitions (or one and half) for the price of one. A team of four to five plugged-in people can easily tackle the challenges of SLFF, and this format can just be a bonus for the hard work.