Fixing process to join High Score leagues will make them better
I like the new High Score format for fantasy basketball and would like to give some feedback to make the experience better in the future.
I played Yahoo fantasy basketball many years ago, both Roto and H2H and enjoyed them. But I found the daily lineup management too much to keep up with at this stage of my life. I have enjoyed the weekly format of fantasy football. When I read about the new High Score format I was excited to try it as it looked like an enjoyable format that would require less time to manage competitively.
I originally tried to join a public league by picking a date and time I wanted to draft. I did research and set up my pre-draft rankings. I expected the league to fill when the draft time approached, but to my surprise no other teams were added and the league was deleted. I tried again, but there were no more options for that day.
I finally saw that there was an option to join an on-demand draft and joined a league later than I had planned. I wasn't able to set pre-draft rankings so it was a little chaotic trying to set my queue in the order that I wanted. I noticed that only a couple of others teams seemed to be actively participating in the draft.
Now that league play is underway, I am enjoying the gameplay as I expected. However, the other teams in the league seem to be dead. I am used to some managers abandoning their teams through the season, but I have never been in a league like this before. Only one other manager has made any moves. They seemed to be confused the first week and were trying to stream players without realizing they would lose the points that had already been scored. So they would remove players from their lineup even after they had scored 60+ points. They now seem to have given up and have injured players left in their lineups. One other manager moved all their players to the bench after the first two weeks and is scoring 0 points. The rest of the teams have had no activity since the draft and most have injured players putting up 0 points for the week. The game is definitely less enjoyable when no one else seems to be trying.
I didn't understand why the league was so dead until I started searching for High Score strategy and found threads on reddit where many people were complaining about being added to High Score leagues they didn't want to be in.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasybball/comments/1oa78pg/randomly_got_added_to_a_yahoo_high_score_league/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasybball/comments/1obv3si/how_many_of_you_guys_got_added_into_random_yahoo/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fantasyhockey/comments/1oba0bx/anyone_else_get_randomly_added_to_a_yahoo/
I have two suggestions:
1. Make it easy to close/cancel any invitations to on demand drafts and include a confirmation screen in case someone mis-clicks.
2. If someone joins a league to draft at a particular date and time, fill any empty spots remaining just before the draft time by allowing managers to join the league through the on demand system.
Kevin Wilkins
shared this idea