WERE REGULAR SATELLITE LEAGUES CUT?

Erok · Post by **Erok** » Wed Jun 23, 2010 4:47 pm

It appears so unless I am missing something. I am shocked that the $125- $1,000 regular satellite leagues have been cut. Can someone please confirm?

BillyWaz · Post by **BillyWaz** » Wed Jun 23, 2010 10:54 pm

I think they are trying to promote the online championship. By not offering satellites, it forces you to play at the $350 price point.

I truly wish Greg and Tom were in charge, and since they aren't maybe the guy behind the curtain (Ryan Houston) could answer some questions??

Dare to dream.

TamuScarecrow · Post by **TamuScarecrow** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 12:17 am

Billy is 99.9% correct here IMHO and any satellite-type leagues are going to be on an as-requested basis aka 5-City Auction Challenge I am trying to form.

Billy, is it time for Toto to pull back the curtain yet?

Bah, Humbug.

Coltsfan · Post by **Coltsfan** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 1:45 am

I did find the nffc main event on the fanball page. You just follow these easy steps.

1. Go to fanball.com
2. Click Football
3. Click real leagues
4. Click Football live draft 8 cities.
5. Then wait for about 15 seconds for the link to open.

It looks to me like this contest is somewhat of an afterthought to fanball. They don't even bother to advertise or market the NFFC name.

I'm sorry Greg and Tom but I'm just not feeling the love from fanball. I sure hope that everything gets turned around soon. I hope that there is a satellite schedule for us this year. I hope the draft software is up and running on July 6th. I sure hope the past customers will follow to fanball. It may be premature to worry but when I'm looking at the chicago auction league and there are only 3 names it worries me. In the past I remember wanting to sign up early to make sure I have a spot. Now I'm wondering if I need to go somewhere else (Vegas?) in order to get into an auction. I'm worried that having so many other cities will dilute the player base in Chicago to the point that we won't be able to fill the dc or auction leagues. Those are my concerns and hopefully a month from now they will be completely unfounded.

Wayne

TamuScarecrow · Post by **TamuScarecrow** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 2:01 am

Wayne, I just tried to send you a PM so let me know if you got it or not.

pizzatyme · Post by **pizzatyme** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 3:44 am

Originally posted by Coltsfan:
I did find the nffc main event on the fanball page. You just follow these easy steps.

1. Go to fanball.com
2. Click Football
3. Click real leagues
4. Click Football live draft 8 cities.
5. Then wait for about 15 seconds for the link to open.

It looks to me like this contest is somewhat of an afterthought to fanball. They don't even bother to advertise or market the NFFC name.

I'm sorry Greg and Tom but I'm just not feeling the love from fanball. I sure hope that everything gets turned around soon. I hope that there is a satellite schedule for us this year. I hope the draft software is up and running on July 6th. I sure hope the past customers will follow to fanball. It may be premature to worry but when I'm looking at the chicago auction league and there are only 3 names it worries me. In the past I remember wanting to sign up early to make sure I have a spot. Now I'm wondering if I need to go somewhere else (Vegas?) in order to get into an auction. I'm worried that having so many other cities will dilute the player base in Chicago to the point that we won't be able to fill the dc or auction leagues. Those are my concerns and hopefully a month from now they will be completely unfounded.

Wayne Wayne, it an unpopular opinion that I share with you on all accounts, unfortunately!

Greg Ambrosius · Post by **Greg Ambrosius** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 4:57 am

Originally posted by Erok:
It appears so unless I am missing something. I am shocked that the $125- $1,000 regular satellite leagues have been cut. Can someone please confirm? Yesterday Fanball unveiled their Draft & Play games and began taking signups for those. They have 10-team and 12-team versions that aren't exactly NFFC-style games, but they are affordably priced and seem to fill up quickly. I think the first drafts will begin on July 6th. Honestly, the NFFC didn't fill a lot of satellite leagues before Aug. 1st recently and this may be a good venue for folks looking for pay leagues.

Yes, these are straight serpentine drafts and they are only 10 and 12 teamers, but the payouts range from 75% to 80% and again they should fill up quickly in July. Here are some options:

$25 per team: $175 for first place, $50 for second (75%)

$50 per team: $360 for first place, $100 for second (76.7%)

$100 per team: $750 for first place, $200 for second (79.1%)

$250 per team: $1,800 for first place, $600 for second (80%)

There are even $10 leagues available in 10 team and 12 team formats.

All price points also have Draft Champions games with the same payouts. These drafts are 25 rounds, serpentine and your optimal scoring lineup consists of 9 starters (only 2 WRs, not 3 like in the NFFC and non-PPR). We will add links to these games on our NFFC home page soon.

It would be very easy for me and Tom to designate a date and time where we can fill any of these offerings up with NFFC guys and get you signed up once we have a full league. Or we can designate a date and time when folks want to start drafting and mix you in with other Fanball players. The bottom line is that all of these are available now and we have a chance to have more July drafts than we have in the past.

We can talk about the next step of offering NFFC-style satellite leagues and seeing if we can get 14-team Draft Champions Leagues with 3RR. We're talking about the Slow Draft software, too. So while we don't have anything down in stone yet for satellites, it doesn't mean we're not finalizing all of that yet. But not having MDC available means that we've had to build all of this ourselves and not all of it is ready for primetime, as they say.

Our first satellite league last year was July 26 and we had only three that month in total. So let us see what we can get done and post any offerings here soon. The draft software has to be done, tested and perfect or we'll just run right back into what we started with baseball. Sorry for the delays.

Greg Ambrosius · Post by **Greg Ambrosius** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 5:19 am

Originally posted by BillyWaz:
I think they are trying to promote the online championship. By not offering satellites, it forces you to play at the $350 price point.

I truly wish Greg and Tom were in charge, and since they aren't maybe the guy behind the curtain (Ryan Houston) could answer some questions??

Dare to dream.

Well, I'm not sure this is exactly true. While yes we hope to continue our growth in the $350 Online Championship, we realize that not all of our guys will move to the 12-team format even if we don't have any 14-team satellite league offerings. So we're definitely not trying to "force" anyone to play one game over another.

As you know Billy, the landscape for satellite leagues has changed this year in a couple of ways. WCOFF did an exclusive deal with MockDraftCentral.com after all three high-stakes events used MDC.com in the past. It was a strategic move primarily to affect competitors since WCOFF is already using RealTime for their draft software. We were already going to build our own draft room, but in baseball we did still use MDC.com until we were up and running. Now we can't do that and neither can FFPC.

We'd love to offer dates and times for 14-team drafts, but right now we are doing all we can to make sure the software works first. There's more testing being done so that it debuts better than baseball did. We know it's going to work because baseball really tested everything for us on the draft software side, but there's still a lot of programming to be done with 3RR and the specific scoring rules we have in the NFFC.

I wish we had software available now for every different game we are offering in 2010, but the bottom line is that we don't have the draft software ready. And there isn't an alternative for us right now. So we're trying to make our July deadlines, get these national contests rolled out and then take it from there. The demand for 14-team satellites didn't pick up the last two years until early August, so hopefully before then we'll have a plan either way on whether we can unveil a full slate or not. And the key will be whether there's demand for it or not as last year our total number of satellite leagues fell by 19 even with software in place all off-season.

So it's not as bad as you think, but the software is key. And unfortunately we're not there yet to unveil a full slate of satellite leagues in early July. It would be foolish to offer those games without a tested site. If the demand is there later, then we'll plan accordingly.