Tom and I spent last week in St. Louis with the developers to put the finishing touches on all of the rules and prizes. We have unveiled some of the rules, but not all of them. We've also unveiled some of the host cities, but not all of them. In fact, we added one more last week. We have a surprise there as we are going to be more aggressive than ever and see if we can grow the NFFC by bringing the live main events to more cities. Stay tuned for that announcement, but I know you'll be surprised.
I'm also very excited about the upcoming announcements of the NFFC Diamond, Ultimate and Super Leagues. The payouts in those leagues are going to be unprecedented and we've offered more draft dates for those leagues, too. I'll likely unveil those plans before Wednesday.
Part of the delay was transferring all of the historical data from the STATS site to the new Fanball site. Part of the delay was our NFBC launch, which consumed us before Opening Day and unfortunately for the first few weeks after Opening Day. Part of the delay was a more aggressive change of plans on the venues and games. We always wanted to be live sooner, but this later launch was self-inflicted and hopefully you'll still be patient enough to wait this week before seeing everything.
Registration is scheduled to be live Monday, May 17th, but maybe we can get that sooner. We'll see. There are a lot of moving parts on the official signup links with the various cities and games and early-bird specials, so we apologize for that delay. But once we have everything in place, each year we'll be able to launch much sooner and never have this type of delay again.
We will have an early-bird special for multiple game signups through June 15th, so take advantage of that if you like. More details coming there. If you just want one game and still want to sign up early, we won't hit your card until July 15th, just like in the past.
As we've mentioned in the past, we'll have our own Mock Draft Lobby on your League Home starting in mid-June and we'll be able to create our own ADPs, mock drafts and more. We'll also host all of our online drafts there so that you will be familiar with the same draft site and default rankings. And our back-end will be done by Fanball, taking much of the software we created for the NFBC for a familiar look and feel here. The game engine is obviously very different for football, but we will get that designed well before the start of the season so that you can give us input, provide suggested changes and more. We won't last-minute the launch of the NFFC game engine.
It's going to be a great week, even though I turn a year older on our launch date. This year I turn one year older, but I feel like the last year aged me by a decade!!
Wow.Thanks for being patient all and get ready for the Signup Thread to begin. I'm taking names and telling everyone about you!!
Time to get it on and get the NFFC rolling. Let the games begin.[ May 14, 2010, 05:18 PM: Message edited by: Tom Kessenich ]
