Curtis Lemansky wrote:on the things that are discussed:
1) A slow offline draft is possible on Fantrax with picks trading also done through the system on Fantrax. As you may recall, we already did this for 3 years here in FFL. However, it did not provide any more excitement or participation / activity than the current live draft. The things that people are missing here (people commenting on picks, discussing trades during draft) are still missing when you do it on Fantrax even though Fantrax provides a messaging chat room for this, it doesn't come close to replacing the banter and conversation on this board at its heyday.
2) Slow offline draft on the forum is also possible but it will take a full commitment from everyone as it takes around 1 to 1.5 months. Additionally, as someone has pointed out, the banter had already scaled down significantly even in the last years of the slow forum draft, after some members left the league (including fraaan).
Now if a significant majority is enthusiastic about it and some are willing to step up and help out in recruitment, updating the draft board and notifying other GMs for 1 - 1.5 months, I am willing to give it a go next year. Again, if I commit 1 - 1.5 months of my attention to it, I better see some strong commitment and willingness to help out. Right now, even for recruiting, nobody is lifting a finger, or bringing anyone and I have to post basically at 3-4 places and try by myself to recruit people to keep the league going. I have absolutely zero interest in moving to a slow offline draft if I am going to be the only one who is going to assume the burden of the work whilst the banter will remain at the level of the last few years we did it here.
I think what people need to realize is we are 10-15 years older than the "good old days" you are reminiscing about and while it is perfectly fine to remember those good fun days (trade talks on MSN messenger that went on for hours, waking up to 3 lowball fraan offers, etc.), our lives are also significantly different than then, with our time right now committed to other stuff. Even for fantasy basketball, people rather spend their time and focus on paid leagues. So my point is, that the part of our life where we can commit 1 month to 1.5 months of our attention to fantasy basketball is more or less done for the majority and even if we go back to the slow offline draft next year, it will probably be not what it used to be in terms of banter, conversations, commentary, and responsiveness.
With that being said, I will reiterate what I said before: if the majority of the people are willing to commit approximately their half August - full September to it and willing to step up to help out with the work, including but not limited to recruiting, I am willing to give slow offline draft on this board another go next year.
These are some excellent points, and I 1000% agree. When this league started, I was in my 20s and working a boring job in which I sat in front of a computer all day with nothing better to do. Now I'm in my late 40s and am a department chair at a university (thus my team name). My free time has shrunk, and to be honest, every year I question whether I'll play fantasy bball at all the next year. But I still have time to keep up Fraan's low-ball trade offer tradition alive while I'm playing with you all.
For what it's worth, I agree with Gokce that the banter died well before we started drafting on Yahoo. Even when we used the RealGm board, people were painfully slow in making their picks and many had to be reminded several times that they were up. Fantrax was probably the best drafting system because we could trade picks, and I'd vote for that option next year, but Gokce is right that we had zero to no banter when we used Fantrax all those years ago.
This is all to say that I don't think the draft type will change our engagement. We'd have to turn this into a paid league (Sly used to provide a $75 gift to the winner. He was way too generous for way too many years), and if we did that, I'd be out. I have no interest in paying to play this game. I enjoy that it's a free diversion from the stresses of everyday life. The other thing that ensures engagement is the relationship between the managers. My leagues at work tend to be more active because we see each other so much. Maybe we could consider doing a Zoom call during the draft this year or next? Some way that we can all at least see each other once in the season? Just an idea.
All this being said, I'd be ok helping to promote the offline draft next year if everyone else was on board. It's a ton of work, but if everyone is actually active, it'd be easier. I'd also be interested in using Fantrax next year so we can at least trade draft picks. With either option, we probably need to start in September...but, as Gokce pointed out, most people are MIA from August-October in this league.
