If there were a way to describe the talent (write ups, graphs) and make the info more readily available (live and career statistics), it would add a much greater effect to the development of players and image of teams. Yeah we have most of these things but they don't typically relate relevant information or interesting information at that. It's been stirring in my head for awhile now, I just don't have the capacity or time to research into it.

imo, i think the reason there isnt much player (its not worship but I cant think of the right word). Is because the NA TF2 scene is so tight-knit, take for example if you love comp CS:GO and you meet someone like GeT_RiGhT you'd be like, holy shit, you youre awesome and super good. But with TF2 if you were to meet someone like b4nny youd be like oh shit, youre pretty alright, whats up. I dont know, there isnt much "stardom" in this community. And I think its better that way.

scout: cw, b4nny
pocket: lansky
roamer: blaze
demo: duwatna
medic: shade

lets go

wow i bet if that was a real team they'd win every lan without much contest

haha that would really blow to watch that team at lan multiple times in a row

good thing all the good players are well spread out in invite and we don't just have one dominating team

i upfragged you, my friend :)

I think you're wrong - I think plenty of kids idolize these players.

It's worth noting that a fantasy league was proposed for UGC Plat Highlander, and it never quite took off. Code was written that parsed logs, but it never went very far and was quickly abandoned. Probably lack of interest.

I'm sure that if someone really wanted to do this for ESEA, though, and had the passion to make it work, they could. I just don't think it's going to make any money.

It's definitely possible to make one, and quite a bit simpler than UGC because of how accessible stats are on the ESEA site.

The difficulty comes down to setting a format - how do you draft players onto teams (given that an Invite team dies each season), how do you regulate which players will start (so that a team can't start 6 medics or something ridiculous), how do you award points for stats, etc.

Would it be a cool project? Definitely. I would love to contribute to making this happen, but the issue is (as always) having the people who can dedicate their time to seeing it through to completion.

I believe scoring system was a large conflict with the dead UGC one. You can award for points or ubers or frags or whatever, but you basically run into a situation then where the week's top scorers are the players who played in the longest matches. Where a 5-0 roll may have an average of 20 frags a player, an hour-long close match may be more like 40. So which is more impressive? And if you lost a long 5-4 match, should that be more valuable than rolling a team 5-0?

Correct me if I'm wrong (since I haven't played it before), but I believe fantasy sports is purely based off of stats and doesn't take into account which game a player is playing in (so Tom Brady won't be penalized just because the Patriots are rolling the Raiders or something like that), and as a result part of the strategy in fantasy is starting certain players based on how you think they'll perform that week. I would think a TF2 fantasy league should work the same way.

Again, I'm nowhere near an expert on fantasy so feel free to call me out where I'm wrong.

Teamliquid has a Starcraft fantasy league. It's based on purely wins since it's a 1on1 game but it could be a useful to look at. Basically, they assign points to certain players based on how good they're expected to be, and each fantasy league participant is assigned x amount of points to allocated for x number of players for their team. The system doesn't have individual leagues for a group of friends but rather, is one big league for all participants.

Some friends did a Plat Fantasy League, it fell apart because the logs weren't compatible with the code stuff.

You're right. But what I'm saying is TF2 matches are entirely dissimilar to sports such as hockey or football. Both sports play to a given time - not a given score. There is no mercy rule in pro sports like there is in TF2.

Therefore, a quick 3-0 into half and a quick 2 after half could be a 20 minute match - whereas a golden cap match could run well over an hour. This goes well beyond time differences you see in, say, football. The average NFL game features 11 minutes of the ball being in play, according to the Wall Street Journal and other studies.

Long vs. short TF2 matches tends to skew stats. I am speaking from experience of seeing the UGC one go for a few weeks.

Didn't TurboCop, kip and a few people do that 2 seasons ago?
The major issue wasn't necessarily logs, it was the integration of google docs in tandem iirc.
If the next iteration of fantasy tf2 properly read and integrated the logs it'd be fine.

What I am describing isn't a technical problem with a league or whatnot.. those are separate. I'm sure we could make an ESEA league work technically speaking.

I am speaking to a complaint some had with that league - finding a fair system of point scoring that doesn't just reward playing the longest.

Yeah, that'd be tricky

The stats you can pull from ESEA include time, so you can always do stats like kills per minute, damage per minute, ubers per minute, etc. if there's a major issue.

I've been thinking about doing something like this, a problem I have is the drafting process. As a filthy Euro our fantasy games usually revolve around having a budget and fantasy players have a value, and you buy them into your team, and can continue to buy and sell as the season goes on.

Is the draft system completely necessary or would the budget idea be OK? If not, how does a draft system even work?

Because time varies the only way to even things out really is to go per-minute. But then you get a problem with values ranging from things like 0.3 to 0.9 (or even smaller fractions for ubers), which is an ugly and unintuitive way of assessing stats.

A better way might be to normalise the stats as if a match had lasted x time, but that creates a break between reality and the fantasy points that isn't easy for people to follow.

It can work either way. In a draft system, players are distributed to the teams via a draft (where players pick in a predetermined order), and then players can be traded during the course of the season. There isn't any concept of money in such a system.

Marginally relevant, there's a fantasy LoL league with a $1,000,000 prize pool. Not sure if anything from there can be adapted to TF2 but it's worth a look.

Interesting, they use a budget system with fantasy dollars and salaries.