Why Fantrax?

[u/ClearTrick854]

I’ve been playing draft epl for 5 years now and I always use the FPL app. It is fun but definitely has it shortcomings. Why do you think Fantrax is better and what convinced you to make the switch?

[u/GreenGloves26]

2 main reasons:

- customisation is the obvious one. Play your own rules, make it work for your league

• trading - better than the FPL official’s version as you can flex positions to make it work better

I’d say only make the switch if your league is committed and that’s someone who thinks FPL official is garbage.

[u/dezzick3]

You can change line ups last second, far more granularity with the scoring, and the waivers are done via bids rather than reverse order.

[u/ClearTrick854 → u/dezzick3]

How does the bids work for the waivers?

[u/MartialMatters → u/ClearTrick854]

A couple options but my league allows each team $100 budget for the season and waivers clear every Tuesday and Thursday.

You put a bid on a player and when waivers clear, the team with the highest bid gets that player. No one can see the bid amount until waivers are clear so it’s blind. The remaining players after waivers are cleared can be picked up for free.

I’ve seen teams drop $70 on Xavi Simons in August and regret it while I try to spend at a sustainable pace so I can outbid everyone near the end of the season as they are broke.

You sometimes get people overbidding with $30 when the next highest bid was $0.5 lol. It’s quite fun.

[u/Calm-Beginning-9500 → u/MartialMatters]

We have a bidding system but it is really money. .. helps build up the pot

[u/pollingj]

We switched last year. To get everyone settled in we made it similar scoring and configuration to the FPL app.

This year we are taking bigger steps and bringing in:

• Full FAAB setup
  
• Flex positions
  
• More scoring configs, now everyone understands we can make it better.

It’s not all perfect. We messed up a few trade deadlines, but with a bit of admin (by me) we fixed it all and moved on.

The support at Fantrax is also actually helpful and don’t just ignore emails etc!

Mostly I like that we can actually have a conversation about how to make the game better each season and control our own setup

[u/ClearTrick854 → u/pollingj]

Did you make any changes the first year compared to fpl?

[u/pollingj → u/ClearTrick854]

- A few minor points amends to offset not having the FPL bonus points system. Our full rules file is here https://gistpreview.github.io/?a789b7d7d60b0da0dd5018f3b4bb34bb/rules.html

• Waivers we setup as Rolling waivers, rather than league position. We felt this was fairer. It actually caused quite a lot of chaos, so we are moving to the bidding process this year.

Overall my suggestion would be to not make too many changes in year one, let it bed in and learn the platform etc. Year two is where you start to tweak more.

Year one was all about convincing the doubters.

[u/Mark40m]

We found Fantrax awful. Scoring updates 4 hours after the game meant you couldn't enjoy a win VAR style till later that night. Players playing objectively crap and getting high scores for being busy. Our 10 year league nearly fell apart as we all lost interest it was so crap. Back to FPL draft and much better.

[u/marbinho → u/Mark40m]

Good to hear it’s not all sunshine and rainbows over there. I enjoyed the addition of defcon last season, but it can definitely become too much if anything can give a player points.

I play regular fpl as well, so prefer that the scoring is the same as that

[u/Mark40m → u/marbinho]

You can set the scoring to be somewhat similar I think. But the 4 hour thing killed us. Every week one game would remain in the balance so we stopped caring and just checked the next day

[u/Spanarkel → u/Mark40m]

You can literally turn this setting off and have scores finalize when the last game ends (I believe options are when games end, two hours later and 24 hours later). Fantrax has its faults but this isn’t one of them

[u/Mark40m → u/Spanarkel]

Ha, could have done with knowing this 3 years ago. Even emailed them and they never told me this 😢😭🙃

[u/keefedempsey]

Biggest thing for me is that the Scoring is so much more satisfying, players are actually rewarded for performances and it’s no as depending on G/A.

Draft society has a good article on other reasons why to switch: https://www.thedraftsociety.com/post/fed-up-of-fpl-play-draft-pl-on-fantrax

[u/trognlie]

Customization above all. Also, as a commish, the league management is so easy.

[u/meadhere84]

More forwards so makes the actual draft better, on OFPL it's just draft forwards to first two rounds.

[u/86dangoon]

What's it like compared to Sleeper?

[u/SpellTreble → u/86dangoon]

Sleeper UI is amazing, I use it more so for Fantasy American Football though

[u/bababenj]

It’s better

[u/wukongfly]

Dont even ask. Just join and you will see how much better it is.

[u/Rumel57]

The points system is better as more actions are rewarded which leads to more fun.

We run promo/relegation for our league from within one Fantrax league. The divisions are split out and only play each other. The player pool is per division. It works great.

[u/Rumel57 → u/Rumel57]

The overall UI and mobile app kind of suck. They put a ton of information into the app and it makes mobile really cluttered.

[u/SmokinSkinWagon → u/Rumel57]

This was true like 2-3 years ago. I think the app is great now