Quote:
Originally Posted by Solonor
We haven't messed with feeder leagues in our online league. How is that working out? Does it make the league files any bigger? Does it just make the draft better (or worse)? Should we add them, do you think?
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It does make the league files somewhat larger, yes. How much so depends on the size of your feeder system. Ours isn't enormous so the size increase is manageable (at least in my opinion). I'd definitely recommend testing it out on your end just to be sure you're okay with the extra size, of course.
One key to keeping things under control is to find the right feeder roster size balance. Our draft is exclusively populated through the feeders (no generated players), so not enough players is obviously bad because we won't have enough for 20 rounds of drafting. Too many, though, and the free agent pool gets overloaded with undrafted players. After some testing I've found that, using our settings, roster sizes of 31 keep things at that perfect balance where there's just enough graduating to fill out the draft. That keeps the free agent pool (and league files) from getting bloated.
In terms of what it does for the draft, it's been a very positive experience for us at least. I won't say everyone in the league monitors the feeders closely, but certainly a number of owners have taken to following rising high school and college stars. Some owners have even developed specialized "feeder beat writer" personas for articles on those leagues.
Personally, I think it's a lot more fun to follow these guys for a few years instead of having them just magically appear in the draft pool. You get neat situations like we had recently with stud SP
Markus "Fireworks" Hancock. He was so dominating and so obviously a #1 draft choice that people began trying to pry away the first pick in the '08 draft from the Tempe Knights
months before the draft pool was even released (incidentally, Tempe never caved and his since aggressively promoted Hancock all the way to the majors just a few months removed from the draft).
Anything that gets owners interested and involved like that is a plus in my book. So yes, I'd say give it a shot. There don't seem to be too many online leagues using feeders, so if nothing else it'd be an extra distinguishing factor (just in case playing with
hobbits wasn't distinguishing enough already).
