1) Weed out 'zombie' accounts!
It is infuriating how much the overall rankings are distorted by the number of 'non-playing' accounts cluttering them up. Many managers accidentally get locked out of their accounts, or just give up on the game at some point in the season,.... yet their teams remain in play forever. There is no good reason for that. (Well, except that FPL's executives probably feel that artificially inflating the number of managers/teams may help to entice more and bigger sponsorships... But surely sponsors can see through this horseshit: it is obvious that the number of active players in the game can't be anywhere near the headline figure of 10-million or whatever.) I would simply require a log-in every week, to confirm entry of your team for the next gameweek (even if you're not making any changes to it). Of course, people do occasionally just 'forget' to tweak their team for a week, or might run into real-world distractions like a health crisis of some sort for a few weeks; so, we might allow a 'grace' period - perhaps 3 or 4 gameweeks,.... before an account with no recent sign-ins is deleted. (Most kind souls would be inclined to allow team scores to continue to be counted during such a 'grace period'; but I'd take a hard line on that, and suggest that if you don't actively 'submit' a team for a gameweek, for whatever reason, you should get nul points for that gameweek.)
2) Make a space for the most popular 'side-games'
On a related point to that first item, another major source of distorting clutter in our game is the number of people who are not actually playing the main game, but various little riffs on it. The main one, of course, is 'Weekly Win', where people are just chasing a one-off high score, and don't care how many transfers they use to achieve it. There may be variants, like 'Daily Win' or 'Early Lead' (chasing the best score on the first day of the gameweek) too!! And then there are some people who play a kind of 'Monopoly' where amassing squad value rather than points is the aim. There is no reason why these major alternate competitions could not be identified and accommodated within official side leagues (and let people have separate teams for them, if they also want to play the 'main game') - just as there are already separate 'game areas' for Fantasy Draft and Fantasy Challenge games. If you make it easy to enter these games, and offer some decent prizes for them, that should draw people away from trying to play them within the main game. However, I'd also be quite happy to see players expelled for 'suspicious behaviour' of this kind, or at least discouraged from pursuing such variants by placing a cap on the number of paid transfers - 'hits' - that can be used.
3) More and better prizes!
It is ridiculous, really, that such a massively popular game, which is now regularly attracting well over 10 million sign-ups each year, offers such pitiful prizes. Rather than having huge cash prizes for the top few positions, though, I'd prefer a wider distribution of incentives, to share the goodies more generally: with multiple prizes - weekly and monthly - in all the major 'public leagues' as well as the 'Overall' competition. It's not so much to ask, is it?
4) Do something about the 'Bonus Points System'
I've been saying quite often in my weekly roundups that 'BPS is broken'. There is a remarkable degree of general agreement among the FPL community online that the present system of calculating bonus point allocations is deeply unsatisfactory. It's utterly lacking in transparency (they only reveal the BPS figures for the 'leading' players in each match, not for everyone; and they don't give any detailed breakdown on how these totals are reached). And it doesn't appear to be at all consistent or fair,... or consonant with common sense: very often, players who've had outstanding games - indeed, who are, by general consensus, the 'Man of the Match' - get no recognition under this system whatsover. That can't be right. Moreover, this season we've seen a fair bit of flagrant skullduggery with the manipulation of the system: BPS results have frequently been adjusted - without explanation, and sometimes quite a long time after the end of the match in question - apparently to produce a less controversial allocation of extra points. Some have suggested such radical 'fixes' as replacing BPS with a third-party player rating that would more closely accord with the general perception of relative player performances; others propose abandoning 'bonus points' altogether, and allowing all players to earn additional points for specific useful game contributions, such as 'key passes completed', 'duels won' or 'balls recovered'. I see some problems with either such approach; I'd prefer to attempt an overhaul of how the BPS is calculated, and improve its clarity and consistency of implementation. [I might have a whole post on this soon... Here it is.]
5) No more silly innovations
For the most part, we like the game as it is. It does not need any injections of 'novelty'!! The 'Assistant Manager' Chip foisted on us this year was a game-distorting aberration. It offered such a huge number of potential additional points that it was very difficult to ignore (anyone who - like me - nobly tried to do without it, in protest, probably lost at least 30-50 points on most of those who did use it; more, probably, than you'd get from both of the other bonus chips combined); and this now makes it impossible to meaningfully compare this year's scores to performance in earlier seasons. Moreover, this new chip was awarding points for things we'd never previously earned points for; it was, in effect, a completely different game - crudely grafted on to our beloved Fantasy Premier League. We do not want this kind of change in the game. We do not want the 'Assistant Manager' Chip in the game again next season (except as part of Fantasy Challenge, perhaps...) - or anything else of the kind.
Oh, and don't get me started on the UI! That is a whole other post in gestation as well.....
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