NFFC Message Boards

Okay, now that we have unveiled most of our plans -- yes, hopefully another one or two surprises are still out there -- I'd like to make myself available in a Live Chat on the Message Boards to answer any and all of your questions. Tom and I have been busy, busy with the web site and with baseball and we apologize for being away so long. But starting now we are going to be available all the time and ready to get the 2010 NFFC season going.

I'll kick it off on Tuesday at 3 ET with a Live Chat. Tom is writing most of the content for our next Fantasy Sports Magazine and is still cranking out player profiles, but I'll make sure he's around to answer player questions and NFFC questions as well. We'll both be around to get this season started.

You can ask questions beforehand on the thread and I'll do my best to answer them when I can. I'm going to be available on the baseball boards tomorrow and I have some hotel contracts to work on, but I'll be here Tuesday for this.

I appreciate all of the input from our members since we unveiled the new web site on Friday. I took a little time off with the family this weekend, but saw all of the comments. When you see our next announcement, you'll better understand why we are expanding to more cities and how we think we can grow this space. After all, that's the goal each year, right? I mean, some people are talking like we're just trying to spread our 300+ members across more cities. NO, IT'S TO BRING IN NEW MEMBERS!!

It's great to have a parent company in Liberty Media that says they like what we are doing but they want us to be MORE aggressive. They want us to grow this space even more than we have been. So expanding to more cities, working with more contacts in each city, getting local media involved, and working nationally to promote our events is the goal to bring in new members. Everyone should be behind that goal.

I found it interesting that some folks on other web sites thought we were foolish in this economy to expand to more cities. Honestly, you'd think that EVERYONE would be happy that we are taking this aggressiveness to the industry. I mean, if we can bring in more players to this space by spending the money and resources to market to those areas, in time those players could expand their hobby to play in more events and contests, and become more serious fantasy players. Anytime another company does something innovative that helps our industry, I'm all for it because it doesn't take from my contest or products, it likely just adds to the player pool.

We know that even with our expansion we missed on some areas of the country, but there's a reason for each of the locations we chose and we'll gladly discuss on the rest. Convince me we should be somewhere else and we'll discuss. But right now we're focused on these locations, we're focused on growing our numbers in each event, we're focused on OUR games and not others in this space, and we're focused on bringing in many new NFFC members through Fanball's great customer list, magazines and other reaches. One new reach will be a great surprise to everyone in the industry and be great for our NFFC players. Stay tuned; should be announced soon.

Okay, so join me on this thread and we'll have a few answers to our madness!! Tom and I are back for good and we'll kick off the week in fine fashion with this Live Chat. See ya soon.

[ May 16, 2010, 06:42 PM: Message edited by: Greg Ambrosius ]

Football is in the air... Promotion is key Greg, make it happen!

Greg,

Are the slow drafts going to go live at some point in the near future?

You had previously indicated in another post that you may go ahead with a Slow Draft Championship? Is that still in the cards for this year?

Greg...I glanced at the signup page for the Ultimate and the Super and I noticed two things:

1) There's no option for phone-in, only for the cities.

2) It automatically adds a $50 event fee for each. It was my understanding that there would no be event fee for the Diamond, Ultimate, and Super leagues.

Thanks.

Originally posted by Trust In Bill:
Greg,

Are the slow drafts going to go live at some point in the near future?

You had previously indicated in another post that you may go ahead with a Slow Draft Championship? Is that still in the cards for this year? Wow, we did a 12-team auction league today for our next Fanball Fantasy Football issue with a $100 budget. Each team used that to acquire 16 players. I have never done one of those before, but I kept using NFFC dollars to try and figure out how much I should spend on each player, dividing by two!! Man, I got a spanking there. Lots of fun, but crazy teams. I couldn't pull the trigger on $30+ for AP, Chris Johnson or MJD, knowing that 30% of my budget went on one guy. But looking back, maybe I should have!!

Bill, good questions. We are currently creating our own draft room as you know, which looks similar to our NFBC draft room. We've made some nice tweaks to the room and it looks real good. I saw it when we were in St. Louis two weeks ago. It should be ready in mid-June and free to all NFFC members.

However, I'm not sure when the Slow Draft part of that will be done. So at this point I don't have a plan in place for Slow Drafts and it will be tough to plan a National Slow Draft Draft Champions contest. Adding the slow draft portion takes time and I'll have to check with Cory and John to see if that's possible with all we have going. I love those and I know our participants love those, so give me a little time and I'll find out shortly.

First the draft room for all NFFC signups and then we'll see what we can do after that, okay? Thanks for asking.

Originally posted by Shrink Attack:
Greg...I glanced at the signup page for the Ultimate and the Super and I noticed two things:

1) There's no option for phone-in, only for the cities.

2) It automatically adds a $50 event fee for each. It was my understanding that there would no be event fee for the Diamond, Ultimate, and Super leagues.

Thanks. Feel free to click on Las Vegas and I'll work with each signup on that part. That will be okay for now, but you are right we should add the Online option for those events.

No, there is no Events Fee for those. I'll ask IT to change that now. Even if you sign up tonight for any of those, I can take that expense out before we get payments since each of those are payable only by check. But I'll get that fixed now. Thanks for the heads up.

Greg,

I'm concerned over Fanball's software. I used their service in the past when I used to be commissioner of my hometown league and it was voted down after one year because of technical issues. But this was around 8 years ago.

I knew people who used Fanball just last year, and they said it was their one and only year using the service, because of the live scoring and speratic problems with the waiver wire.

I don't know if this is true, but someone said that WCOFF used Fanball at one time, and Fanball always promised to upgrade their software but never did....

When I met Ryan last year, he definitely left an impression that said to me that the NFFC will be bigger than ever imagined...With that, I hope the website has been upgraded to be more effecient to cater the larger audience, or if I may, the higher paying audience...

I heard that baseball had a rough start and there were some unhappy customers. Is there some way you can assure myself and all that may be thinking what I'm writing, that the service from fanball will be all that is expected from the NFFC?

As I'm writing this, I reminded myself to let you know. I can't sign in to sign up for the $850 NY Auction League at 5PM. I can sign in on top of the homepage...It even says "Welcome Marc Quitsch"...But I can't sign in in the middle of the page where it asks prior NFFC members to sign in there so you may register for an event. I know it's only MAY, but I thought we should be able to sign up by now. Another problem with fanball.

I'm always one of your biggest endorsers. I just want to be sure that I'm getting what I pay for, and with all I stated above, I'm not 100% yet.

Sorry for the negativity. I just really want to expect what we've always seen from the NFFC, under new management.

Thanks for your time,

Marc

[ May 17, 2010, 06:39 PM: Message edited by: Diesel ]

Originally posted by Diesel:
Greg,

I'm concerned over Fanball's software. I used their service in the past when I used to be commissioner of my hometown league and it was voted down after one year because of technical issues. But this was around 8 years ago.

I knew people who used Fanball just last year, and they said it was their one and only year using the service, because of the live scoring and speratic problems with the waiver wire.

I don't know if this is true, but someone said that WCOFF used Fanball at one time, and Fanball always promised to upgrade their software but never did....

When I met Ryan last year, he definitely left an impression that said to me that the NFFC will be bigger than ever imagined...With that, I hope the website has been upgraded to be more effecient to cater the larger audience, or if I may, the higher paying audience...

I heard that baseball had a rough start and there were some unhappy customers. Is there some way you can assure myself and all that may be thinking what I'm writing, that the service from fanball will be all that is expected from the NFFC?

As I'm writing this, I reminded myself to let you know. I can't sign in to sign up for the $850 NY Auction League at 5PM. I can sign in on top of the homepage...It even says "Welcome Marc Quitsch"...But I can't sign in in the middle of the page where it asks prior NFFC members to sign in there so you may register for an event. I know it's only MAY, but I thought we should be able to sign up by now. Another problem with fanball.

I'm always one of your biggest endorsers. I just want to be sure that I'm getting what I pay for, and with all I stated above, I'm not 100% yet.

Sorry for the negativity. I just really want to expect what we've always seen from the NFFC, under new management.

Thanks for your time,

Marc Marc, no worries for the questions. There's no question that half of my job this off-season is going to be winning back my most loyal customers. I've never seen so many areas where people are either doubting us or concerned about us. But that goes with new ownership and in many respects we probably deserve the scrutiny.

I have no problem addressing the back-end software. I too used Fanball's commissioner product last year for the first time in my family league and totally struggled with it. I won't deny that. I'm not very computer literate, but I know how to set football rosters and I'll admit I struggled last year. I know that product will be better this year, but either way it's not the product the NFFC is using.

Commissioner products are a BEAST because they have to take into account different options for every facet of the game, from lineup sizes to scoring, to league sizes, etc. Many companies struggle with new commissioner products out of the gate and Fanball was no exception. What we do in the NFFC is basically one set of scoring, one set of rules, and a few variations. We use a contest back-end, not a commissioner product. There are less programming nightmares involved with what we are going to set up for the NFFC back-end, if this makes sense to you. So comparing the two isn't fair at all, even though the same programmers are involved with both.

What we learned from baseball is that we need to showcase all of this to you weeks in advance of the season. We can't unveil it on the fly. So we have a goal of weeks in advance (I don't want to nail the date down just yet) for all NFFC members to see the back-end and we'll get that done. Many of the user features you'll be using for the NFFC are tested thanks to the NFBC. Yes, we struggled out of the gate in the NFBC with FAAB the first day, with standings the first day, with rosters because of FAAB. We really had our work cut out for us and I wish we didn't have a single hiccup over there, but we did. It was a rough, rough start. Hell, it almost killed me!!

But we made the corrections and have improved each day. FAAB took FOUR MINUTES to run this week. By 8:04 pm all leagues (180+) had FAAB results. We have an improved Conditional Bid process that works very good now and we created a one-page Free Agent Quick page that lists all free agents in your league ON ONE PAGE. You can even bid from there. The free agent lists aren't as long in football as they are in baseball, but this page is a great innovation that NFFC folks will love.

The Roster Grid and some other features are also better, but of course the road to improving all of this has taken a toll on some NFBC owners. Others have been patient with us and like the results now. But again, we take the blame for the early struggles. The good news for NFFC owners is that much of this is now ironed out and we'll show you what we have very soon. I think you'll like it and the good news is that WE ALL OWN this back-end, so every tweak we make for the better remains ours going forward. We want YOU to like the back-end because it's yours. When it's developed it's a savings for us, but it's also easier for us to improve because we own it and we want to make it better.

The draft software we'll use for all NFFC online leagues is also owned by us and you'll have free access to Mock Draft from this site by mid-June. The draft software allows you to have default Rankings or My Rankings, to sort by scoring categories and more. There are more stats per player than what you had on MDC.com. We're also going to bring traffic to this area to really help with the ADPs. Stay tuned for more info there because you'll like it.

Hope this helps. I plan on being here all day tomorrow to answer questions and get everyone on the same page...with every subject. I know the questions are coming and we'll get it all out on the table and hopefully move forward. You know me well enough, would I handle this any other way?

Thanks again. Great questions.

As for WCOFF, yes, they used TQ Stats for the first 2 or 3 years. CDM owned that. Their commissioner product had to be completely redesigned last year, so I'm not sure that part is relevent. But hope that info helps, too.

Greg,

When I go to the homepage, it flashes VERY quickly on the ticket where there is the deal for the Main Event doubleheader something about VIP?

Do you know anything about that, anything you can tell us about?

Originally posted by BillyWaz:
Greg,

When I go to the homepage, it flashes VERY quickly on the ticket where there is the deal for the Main Event doubleheader something about VIP?

Do you know anything about that, anything you can tell us about? I think you're imagining things Billy!! I don't see it when I go there, but no this isn't a VIP pass to a Fisher Party!! Nothing special to announce yet with that or anything else. Everyone is a VIP in our book who signs up early.

Are you Windy City bound again this year? If so, Rob is planning some fun adventures for the group, so bring lots of extra spare change.