With the greatest respect to those who are critical, and I admit I am extremely biased here as I was one of the founding players way back when - but you're wrong.
Yes - I suppose it is archaic in it's essence, but I find it's simplicity one of it's greatest appeals. It was never designed to be a complicated game - otherwise people like
@Porthoz would never be able to play it. Granted - he's still rubbish, but he tries so hard. Bless his soul. I'm getting off track...
It was designed to be immersive, but not time consuming. If anyone can remember the old school VRL website made by Coxy around 2005-2006, it was basically made to replace that after stats providers decided to become massive twats. It was designed to replicate the real NRL, that's why we only reward tries, goals and field goals. That obviously rendered certain positions useless, so we scaled statistics to award forward tries to hard working forwards, and try assists to halves and fullbacks - which is what they mainly do in the real NRL.
You spend all your time in the preseason researching players and team changes and put it all into a draft that takes 3-4 weeks and then you have your own special squad to call your own for the season. It feels MORE like being a coach than SuperCoach or fantasy because you're the only person who has your players within your own conference and you can choose to focus on try scoring backs or consistent forwards.
You feel better when you beat your opposing coaches to a player you have your eye on - and you know that you've just annoyed 7 other people at once. You feel great when you take a chance on a rookie late in the draft and he turns into a star. There's a much greater sense of accomplishment when you do well because you know that you drafted the best team when you compare it to SC or Fantasy when there are thousands of others with the same players as you.
If you're worried about the best players never being available - there are only ever 2 players in each team that you are unlikely to ever get, and that's the marquees. Keepers can only be kept for 1 year and they they have to go back into the player pool. Yes - it does make it a bit more challenging for newer players, but you get the advantage of picking from the entire pool of players that aren't already marquees AND get early draft position. I can safely say Payne Haas will never be available though. This is a Broncos forum after all.
All you need to do during the week is check teams lists and name your squad of 17 (plus 2 emergencies) before the kick off of the first game of the round. On Wednesday night there is also waivers to be done, so if you want to make changes to your squad you need to PM the person looking after waivers for your conference who you want to dump and who you want to replace them with. There's more on this in the rules page. It's literally less than 10 minute work per week and then you're free to enjoy your weekend.
PLUS - you get to trash talk all year via the forum.
