NFFC Off-Season Chat With Greg, Tom & Darik

[eliasond]

Have you got the dates and location set for Vegas yet? I'm assuming Labor Day weekend and the weekend after at the bellagio like usual but thought I'd ask to make sure before I start booking travel.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Have you got the dates and location set for Vegas yet? I'm assuming Labor Day weekend and the weekend after at the bellagio like usual but thought I'd ask to make sure before I start booking travel.

Yes, definitely set with the dates:

Friday-Saturday: Aug. 31st-Sept. 1st in Las Vegas (TBD)
Friday-Saturday: Aug. 31st-Sept. 1st in New York City (Hotel Penn)

Thursday-Saturday: Sept. 6-8 in Las Vegas (TBD)

We had a fantastic baseball event at the Bellagio this year with the finest space we could get for three days. We are optimistic that we'll have space at the Bellagio for football, but we haven't finalized things yet. I'll be in touch with my sales rep there this week for more details, but I think it's looking good again.

And we'll see if we can get a room block this year for those who want to stay at the host hotel. Stay tuned.

Schedule of Events for both weekends is very similar to past years. I'll roll that out on Monday.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Okay, so here's the latest update on the launch of the NFFC: We are using all resources to make sure the launch of the NFBC season goes well and thus can't quite launch the new NFFC site just yet. I know that's not the news you wanted to hear today, but there is some good news in this update.

We finished baseball with over 10,000 teams, while launching all of the new software for the Draft Room, FAAB, Set Lineup, Live Scoring, Live Standings and everything else. While we did have a few server hiccups -- including one on Sunday -- the software has more than held its own. We ran FAAB this Sunday with more than 25,000 claims, and while it took an hour to run, it ran as expected with no issues.

Now we are fine-tuning everything on the site, from Live Scoring and Standings to a new Team Stats page and Set Lineup. Not everything was being displayed and we are adding features thanks to the smarts of our players. They certainly remembered more than we did, so we have to complete this To-Do List right now. This isn't something that we can just push off and come back to later. Let's get all of those pages right first.

While that's not good news for NFFC owners, there is good news here. Everything we are learning about the design of these in-game pages will have been vetted and improved before football gets going. And the new Draft Room already has multi-round Queues that allows you to set different Queues for as many rounds as you'd like. We also have 1 Round Auto that can be expanded to as many rounds as you'd like. And the player default list is updated each day with the latest ADPs, which really keeps drafts moving along. The 4-Hour and 2-Hour DCs worked perfectly in baseball, and soon you wonder how we ever survived with the 8-hour clock. The new setup for our ADPs, which lets you sort from any time period to any other time period, while sorting by contest format, is really, really nice. We are even making that available to the public free so that they can use it for their own drafts.

We'll make sure we have Live Scoring and Live Standings as good as it can be when we launch. Set Lineup and everything else will have been fully tested by our baseball owners and ready to go out of the gate.

And once each site is fully done, each year rolling over to the next year will be so easy. The NFFC won't launch this late again. I know it's a pain in the ass this year, and we know we have to be live before the NFL Draft, but it's going to be a strong site once we launch.

Sorry again, but we'll provide updates as soon as we can. Hopefully we'll have very good news shortly. Thanks all.