Talk Fantasy Football

Hi all,

With Gaixo winning the recent presidency election, I have taken over as TD for the rest of the term he was serving. I've opened a thread on the NAF site where you can ask me anything you like ('AMA' - if logged in the thread is here: https://member.thenaf.net/index.php?nam ... pic&t=7147), so please feel free to pop over!

You can of course also find me here, or via PM, or by any other means. Feel free to chat tournaments with me any time you like.

Cheers!

Phil.

Hi there!

Background information - I'm a coach in the USA North East and have been a NAF member for only one year. I run a large 3 day gaming weekend focused on 40K, Age of Sigmar and 9th Age age but with Blood Bowl added this year. Last year we had 219 total registrations over three days.
I'd love to hit more Blood Bowl tournaments but it seems somewhat hard to figure out from available information which events are within a reasonable couple hour drive. I find the pull down for USA on the NAF tournament listing pulls out lots and lots of events. But there isn't any easy way to figure out which are close by or not and it appears at least on my browser that I can't just use the back button to go back to the previous full list after looking at a specific tournament listing.


For me the most powerful function of the NAF is helping players to find other players to play games whether that's at Tournaments, Leagues or the player finder. Tournaments being the most pertinent to this discussion. I think there are a lot of potential first time tournament goers out there post BB2016 who aren't aware of events close by. That's a problem we should remedy as the more people can find games the more invested they become in the system and the more likely they get others around them involved.

Questions:
1) What do you think are the 'best practices' in advertising tournaments? Should every tournament have a thread on the NAF forum? Are there other venues that you would suggest for TO's to use to get the word out. What's the best way to get that word out (effectiveness in reaching more people/utility to potential players)

I notice very a small subset of North American tournaments registered with the NAF create announcement/discussion thread on the NAF website. I wish more did as I find it hard to use the database to effectively figure out what tournaments are close to me. Similarly I'm not seeing most of them use the BBC FB group or Twitter to reach other players.



2) Are there any easy tech solutions in the NAF tournament database to allow a search by distance function for events?
In example something like this: https://www.the-ninth-age.com/index.php?user-map/
Or is there something that would allow the tournament listings to show more detail on their location inside of a country?

Hi Gnin, like this? https://www.thenaf.net/tournaments/info ... ments-map/

Errr yes. . . .
I know I'm new to Blood Bowl and the NAF but sheesh didn't know that existed!

I think there's a lot of stuff on the NAF site that isn't easily apparent if you are 'newer'

Gary

It's true. I've tried over the years, but not been v successful in making it navigatable. Anyway, back to Phil...

Hi gjnoronh, thanks for dropping in. It's always great to see / talk to new coaches and new TOs.

1) If you want to tick every single box, the best way advertise your tournament is to post a thread on your national or regional forum, a thread on TFF, make a Facebook event / a post in your regional Facebook group and / or BBC and post a thread on the NAF site. It depends where you are in the world as to what combination of those things is most effective. As an English coach, a thread on TFF is sufficient for me. I make a thread, Al adds it to the UK tournament calendar, done. A similar method seems to work well in places like France and Italy. An American, I think (and someone please jump in and correct me if I'm wrong) would be best served by advertising in the local Facebook group. In short, it depends where you are, but best practice would be to do all of the above and work out where you get most traction for next time.

That sounds a mess now I write it down (and probably is a mess), but it seems to work OK for coaches currently in the system because everyone is used to their way of doing it. To your point though, it is probably tough for a new BB2016 coach to work it all out. As you say, we very much want to be bringing these coaches into the fold and making connections.

2) Mike has linked you the map, but I agree it's not super easy to find (not a criticism). It would be nice if the location of every tournament pulled through onto the tournament list page on member.thenaf.net to make browsing easier, perhaps we can look into that?

The dream is a shiny new NAF website featuring a buzzing forum and exhaustive tournament / league listing pages so a new coach can immediately identify what Blood Bowl is near them and immediately engage with local coaches / LCs / TOs. A true one stop shop, as it were. In reality, a new site appears far away, and the regions now all have their own forums, customs and tournament calendars. Getting them to abandon those and come together would be tough, behaviours are difficult to change.

What we do have is an army of fantastic people. We are very lucky; if a new coach posts here, drops into BBC, happens across the Reddit, BBTactics, etc. then there will be someone that is either staff or otherwise passionate about the NAF to point them in the right direction (this is commonly Mike, his enthusiasm is infectious). While word of mouth / help isn't as efficient as just having a perfect, well used, central resource, it's very effective. I hope we catch a high percentage of people that look for the sort of information you're asking about. I agree our resources could be better, but I think we have the next best thing with our people.

Probably a bit of a ramble. Thanks for the question, and I hope you get to many more tournaments!

gjnoronh wrote:
I notice very a small subset of North American tournaments registered with the NAF create announcement/discussion thread on the NAF website. I wish more did as I find it hard to use the database to effectively figure out what tournaments are close to me. Similarly I'm not seeing most of them use the BBC FB group or Twitter to reach other players.

I might be pointing to the obvious and considering the size of the United States it might not be super useful compared to the map, but some of us like a list. All NAF sanctioned tournaments would be on this list, which can be filtered on nation: https://member.thenaf.net/index.php?mod ... ournaments

Or: Go to https://member.thenaf.net and click tourneys.

I think the issue that gjnoronh has highlighted is that he / we can see lots of USA events on that list, but the USA is a big place and it would be nice if the list had another field for city or state?

This one has City on: https://www.thenaf.net/tournaments/info ... urnaments/

It does. Because I don't look at it often, that page was not front of mind when answering gjnoronh. Did we ever get closer to adding filters?

I don't have any ideas off the top of my head for making the NAF site(s) more easily navigable for new coaches. It would be good to hear from more people like gjnoronh, I suppose. What don't we currently provide that people would like to see? I suspect you (Mike) have gathered plenty of this feedback, but it never hurts to get more.

Not sure how that map is populated but it's not hyper accurate, unfortunately.

For example, if one zooms in on Bournemouth, my stomping ground, you will see my next event, Exiles Open 10. But the map points to Block of Holding 2. Whilst I am running both events the actual location pin for Exiles Open is in the wrong place and Block of Holding is missing.

Purplegoo wrote: It would be good to hear from more people like gjnoronh, I suppose..

I'll see if I can get some of my noobs to drop by here or on the NAF thread.

Purplegoo wrote:What don't we currently provide that people would like to see? I suspect you (Mike) have gathered plenty of this feedback, but it never hurts to get more.

Absolutely. I have the impression that it's all there (and filters and things would be nice, but need tech skills that I don't have, and no-one is jumping at the leash to implement), but it's not always obvious.

lunchmoney wrote:Not sure how that map is populated but it's not hyper accurate, unfortunately.

Yep, I've asked Elyoukey to have a look.

lunchmoney wrote:For example, if one zooms in on Bournemouth, my stomping ground, you will see my next event, Exiles Open 10. But the map points to Block of Holding 2. Whilst I am running both events the actual location pin for Exiles Open is in the wrong place and Block of Holding is missing.

And if you click on it, although it says (incorrectly) Exiles Open it goes to the Bag of Holding events webpage.
I found it works better if you put in the latitude/longitude of the event - I know it originally failed to find both the ARBBL Open and Pick'n'Mix when I first tried the addresses (to be fair, I haven't tried since, as I just copy the lat/long from the previous events).

It's like our excel sheets at work, seems to work when it wants to, not when you need it to.