(S27) Ultimus Week

[Troen]

8) Write about a potential new recruitment strategy for the league. How can we attract more new players, and what can we do to retain them better?

In a completely unbiased suggestion, I think that the approach used for the S22 recruitment class on reddit was just about optimal from a 'when to approach other sites' interest. The post went up a week after the super bowl - enough time for the post-game analysis articles to finish up but before the offseason FA moves and mock draft had all gotten really to swing into gear. I presume that was more coincidence with the timing of the league offseason than a deeply planned strategem, but I think it worked super well to hit a lull in reddit activity which let it attract a lot of attention. However, there's only one super bowl each year while there are more like 6 offseasons, so that plan can't work out every time. So, from an actionable recommendation related to this, I think that the timing on external league recruitment posts should be considered strategically to try and hit maximum visibility.
While I think the timing of the recruitment post was great, my personal experience is that it led to a lot of excitement in the short term - creating a player, trying to figure out how everything worked, etc. - but then there was a lot of nothing to do for weeks. Improving that is a lot harder - recruitment is designed to get people in over the offseason so that there's time to process them, fix any mistakes, and all that, but it felt like there was a ton of twiddling thumbs after the initial rookie tasks. I think there are a lot of possible options to improve that but unfortunately not a lot of easy ones. Here are a few more concrete ideas to try and keep players who create accounts more interested so they stick around.
First idea: For rookie tasks, have people look over their posts for it before the player's first updates. I found in my old thread looking at the S22 class that a ton of players didn't do the rookie tasks correctly. I think those were the first non-instant claim tasks that I ran into a rookie and so I along with a lot of other people put them on my update page once I finished them. Only after I went and began looking at what other players were doing did I understand the 'post and then link to claim page in update thread' approach to everything. Having members of the rookie team looking over update pages before the updaters' normal cadence could help people understand what's going on and maybe re-engage anyone who left.
Second idea: Another post-rookie task time sink for new players. I think the wiki page is conceptually a decent idea for that but it took approximately 8 years to get that graded (completely unrelated to the giant backlog of pages I'm sure). In a world where someone else does all the work for me, I think some sort of team builder/testing game could be neat (maybe integrate with dotts? and giving all new players a free pack?) Imagine being able to create teams of players and see how they'd do against other teams of players in a really simple game/simulation thing. And of course the crazy out-there idea would be something like OOTP's perfect league but that's a whole nother quarry of marbles.
Third idea: Less time from recruitment posts to something happening. What if the prospect bowl was 3 times per week of the offseason? I'm not on the sim team so it's easy for me to say that. But as a goal, try to get new players from creating a player to seeing that player play against other rookies in 3 days or less (worst case eg create on friday, see player in a sim on Monday). Sure, those games might be for temporary teams and not count, but it seems like it would help to me. Also, getting new players into a team discord soon seems like a great way to keep them interested.
Fourth idea: Do DSFL teams proactively invite new creates to a public part of their discord servers? If not, why not? Seems like an easy way to get people more engaged, though I guess I could see it being overwhelming to have like 10 new servers all at once.

11) What is it that keeps you interested in the league? Is it your love of dot football, your locker room, a specific job or role you play, or something else? What do you like most about it? What could be improved?

A large part of my enjoyment comes down to the complexities of how it works out as a system. I spent a lot of my early time in the league analyzing the players based on the data available (the TPE tracker is amazing, especially with its history). Understanding career arcs, salary cap limitations, trying to see how TPE and player numbers going up actually led to in-game stats and wins is all really interesting. Even just seeing a "sport" league where player movement is driven much more by entertainment and personal interest rather than money as in the professional league is really interesting. The game played in the ISFL itself is far enough away from NFL football that I don't know that I really learned much to make watching that more fun directly and honestly I'd say this is basically a different sport for all it's related conceptually.
Beyond the league rules and what strategies and tactics evolve out of that, the sim itself is of course another fascinating element of the league. In a lot of ways I could say it's detracted from my enjoyment of the league with its tiebreakers in S26, its clock management that's somehow inferior to Andy Reid, and its insane punt decision making. But like I said - I think it's just best to accept that it's a different game. If an NFL team is down by 1 score with 2 minutes left on their own 10 yard line, they have a solid chance. If an ISFL is in the same position, they pretty much need a giant play immediately or they're in trouble. So in that sense, the ISFL is unrealistic to football, but I'm just considering it "different and y'all have to deal with it" rather than something that should be improved.
Some of the things that I think could be improved boil down to automation/integration. As long-term ideas/rhetorical questions:
* What if players didn't have to post claim/updates and instead had access to a webpage showing their available TPE to spend? And available TPE was automatically updated when eg the predictions were done because those are done with forms that know your username? The ISFL is an impressive feat of operating in a forum, but I don't think a forum is the best way to do a lot of these things. However, it would require a lot of time and testing (and trust or more work to make all the info publicly visible) to move to what I'm suggesting.
* Similarly, what if fantasy was like NFL fantasy with a website showing available players for your groups, points in real time, etc. (well actually realtime would probably be impossible but...)
* I mentioned this above, but what if there was a way to play games with your dotts cards and/or any snapshot of players. The fullest version of this (actually letting you sim the games) seems like it would be hard for anyone other than the sim devs, but maybe there's a way to get historical exports of players for the sim? Or of dotts cards? I have no cards and I haven't bought the sim so I don't know if these are realistic ideas but they seem neat conceptually.
* Seeing stats and how my team/player do is always something that keeps me interested, even like this year where we were terrible. The new sim index with its individual player stats is really cool. What if those were updated to pull in historical info for S1-26?
* Could the sim index automatically put things like stats leaders into the wiki? That would be cool too.