Launching the Patreon Fantasy League (Sep 11, 2024)

Hey everyone!

We're very excited to announce that we've started testing the Patreon Fantasy League with our patrons!

Here's the gist:

• We're making season long fantasy for Smash where you build your team and cheer for them at every major they attend

• This will be difficult because unlike other Fantasy sports, your team members aren't guaranteed to attend events

• So, we're playtesting this with an Alpha season and focusing on listening to our patrons to help us make the league more fun. We'll also be building out various features around Fantasy and changing the rules as we go!

How does team building work?

As hinted at above, we've had to get creative with how team creation works so that you can have a team you root for even when your individual players aren't guaranteed to attend events every week. 

Our solution is to have a starter team, substitutes, and last minute backup players. This graphic explains how it works:

As shown in the graphic, your team is composed of players spanning the whole Lumirank top 150. This means you'll be looking for top players who are in their prime and those with the potential to be the next rising star (like Shadic from last season!)

What are the rules?

Beyond team creation, the rules are pretty straightforward:

• The league runs on B-tier events and up

• Your players get points from good placements, outperforming their seed, and getting good wins (by rank and by seed).

• Backup players only earn you 50% of points

• Winner is the team with the most points on the leaderboard at the end of the season
  

The rules are simple and are subject to change as we continue to play out the season. The exact weights of just how many points you earn per win/placement are also going to change a lot.

We also don't have a specified end date for the season. All our focus is on learning, improving, and finding the fun so that we can run a great competitive season in 2025.

But wait, why a leaderboard?

We wanted to start with leaderboard fantasy because it

• Allows the most number of players to play in a single league

• Is more forgiving for players who create their team late

Because of these qualities, leaderboard fantasy is the most intuitive place for us to start. Once this is in good shape, we'd like to add support for smaller fantasy leagues where you do proper team drafts and get squared off against other teams in your league (ala ESPN or Yahoo Fantasy).

So what's next?

For fantasy, the obvious next steps are:

• Adding team management so you can choose who your backup players are

• Add projected points for players + teams

• Add fantasy support to the app and the event pages

Seasonal fantasy is something that we've always felt has been sorely missing from the Smash scene. We hope you join us in this journey and help us shape what our fantasy league becomes.

Thanks for reading this and we hope your team wins the league!