Tier 1
Task 7: Interesting league issue - football knowledge, and musings on how to increase it!
Across all of the various servers that comprise the ISFL/DSFL, the majority of our users are already quite familiar with football, either because they are fans of the sport in general or because they enjoy playing sports management sims. We also have a fair number of users (such as myself) who joined the community on an invitation from a friend, and come from an alternative background (for example, dungeons and dragons) where they may have some knowledge about the sport, but may be lacking an understanding of certain aspects of the game (anything from basic rules to the way that certain stats are measured). Since we are all beautiful, smart humans beings, we cannot help but gain some knowledge simply by hanging out on the server, or reading enough media articles written by friendly community members, but sometimes we might be a little bit shy about asking obvious noob questions when we don't fully understand the nuances of a particular play in a game, or when we can't look at a prospect list and gain the necessary insight to say whether we think x player should be picked over y. This lack of knowledge can also contribute to an aversion to contributing media articles out of embarrassment, or turning people towards writing more roleplay-focused media posts (which isn't necessarily a bad thing by any means, it can just pigeon-hole people into contributing similar content over time). I know I've been a little bit guilty of this with my Bertie interviews over the course of season 42.
To help address this, I'm wondering whether it might be a useful/fun thing to have a 'football academy' channel on the main server (or maybe just on the rookie discord server) where once a week, someone introduces/explains a play (either by text or video) that occurred in one of the weekly games in the DSFL or ISFL. It could begin with, say, a breakdown of offensive plays employed by one of the teams, and gradually increase in complexity over the season. We could incentivize participation by including it as a media category, and either have it supplied by one of the teams concerned (the particular player voted in on their own team server, or decided through some other means such as lowest TPE). There could also be consequent follow-up point tasks, such as voting for the best/most helpful explanation over the course of the season, or it could be included as part of a mentor badge qualification on the main isfl discord server or rookie discord server. It would also hopefully be pretty entertaining for teams to see one of their teammates' videos about their performance, and could be part of a team's internal year-end awards.
This could be combined with a wider effort to link our activities on the server with other virtual or irl football fan activities, although obviously we'd want to make sure that any activities such as game watch parties don't fall afoul of forum/server or general discord terms of service clauses. Over the last few months we've had a couple of fun community gaming nights which have met with pretty universal approval (even though I wasn't able to attend myself), and it could be worth thinking about including more of these types of events via the sport we're all enjoying - football! Apart from the tos-related issues, there are some potential roadblocks to doing this, chief among them being additional moderation/hosting duties required from team/league leaders, so it's not something that would probably happen immediately, but maybe we could start to think of ways to enable this without overwhelming our already very passionate league management folks.
Anyway, thanks for listening - have fun out there!
Task 7: Interesting league issue - football knowledge, and musings on how to increase it!
Across all of the various servers that comprise the ISFL/DSFL, the majority of our users are already quite familiar with football, either because they are fans of the sport in general or because they enjoy playing sports management sims. We also have a fair number of users (such as myself) who joined the community on an invitation from a friend, and come from an alternative background (for example, dungeons and dragons) where they may have some knowledge about the sport, but may be lacking an understanding of certain aspects of the game (anything from basic rules to the way that certain stats are measured). Since we are all beautiful, smart humans beings, we cannot help but gain some knowledge simply by hanging out on the server, or reading enough media articles written by friendly community members, but sometimes we might be a little bit shy about asking obvious noob questions when we don't fully understand the nuances of a particular play in a game, or when we can't look at a prospect list and gain the necessary insight to say whether we think x player should be picked over y. This lack of knowledge can also contribute to an aversion to contributing media articles out of embarrassment, or turning people towards writing more roleplay-focused media posts (which isn't necessarily a bad thing by any means, it can just pigeon-hole people into contributing similar content over time). I know I've been a little bit guilty of this with my Bertie interviews over the course of season 42.
To help address this, I'm wondering whether it might be a useful/fun thing to have a 'football academy' channel on the main server (or maybe just on the rookie discord server) where once a week, someone introduces/explains a play (either by text or video) that occurred in one of the weekly games in the DSFL or ISFL. It could begin with, say, a breakdown of offensive plays employed by one of the teams, and gradually increase in complexity over the season. We could incentivize participation by including it as a media category, and either have it supplied by one of the teams concerned (the particular player voted in on their own team server, or decided through some other means such as lowest TPE). There could also be consequent follow-up point tasks, such as voting for the best/most helpful explanation over the course of the season, or it could be included as part of a mentor badge qualification on the main isfl discord server or rookie discord server. It would also hopefully be pretty entertaining for teams to see one of their teammates' videos about their performance, and could be part of a team's internal year-end awards.
This could be combined with a wider effort to link our activities on the server with other virtual or irl football fan activities, although obviously we'd want to make sure that any activities such as game watch parties don't fall afoul of forum/server or general discord terms of service clauses. Over the last few months we've had a couple of fun community gaming nights which have met with pretty universal approval (even though I wasn't able to attend myself), and it could be worth thinking about including more of these types of events via the sport we're all enjoying - football! Apart from the tos-related issues, there are some potential roadblocks to doing this, chief among them being additional moderation/hosting duties required from team/league leaders, so it's not something that would probably happen immediately, but maybe we could start to think of ways to enable this without overwhelming our already very passionate league management folks.
Anyway, thanks for listening - have fun out there!