Fanball/NBCSports is not(in my opinion) a legitimate Fantasy site

Well its been a while since I've had enough to say that it didn't fit on twitter, but this has just gotten me so angry that I had to share with everybody. I have been the commisioner of our fantasy football league for 6 years now. For that entire time we have used www.fanball.com to run the league. Although a few other team owners have had some minor complaints over the years I have found fanball to provide the best features for the money paid.

However this year the website has become an NBC Sports website instead of independent(at least it was never branded as anybody else's before), and everything has fallen apart. The site has become extremely annoying to navigate, which if that was the only problem I'd be ok with it. More importantly they took away at least 5 key features that I used on a regular basis. And most important of all is that they have all of the scoring messed up.

I had been kind of annoyed up until the scoring got messed up, but really I pay them $70 a year to manage our league. At a minimum I would expect that when I pay somebody to manage a fantasy league of any kind that the website provides accurate rosters/free agent lists and accurate scoring of the games. Why should I pay somebody $70 a year if I have to manually maintain the data in Excel spreadsheets.

So what drove me to writing this blog: customer service. Just absolutely terrible. I have sent several emails into their ticketing system and have yet to get a response from them. Even a response saying "hey sorry about that we'll take a look" would be better than the silence that I have heard from them this year.

And I'm not alone, I spent some time last night digging through the websites forums and discovered post after post of users complaining that the basic functionality of scoring, and in many cases rosters were broken in their leagues. Every one of these post is accompanied by a note saying that they have filed many tickets with fanball only to hear complete silence in return.

I am on the verge of being forced to spend $200 on a midseason league on cbssports.com. If any one of the free websites supported our scoring system I would have moved the league there after all of the problems in week 1. But since there is much effort put into drafting a fantasy team changing the leagues scoring/roster rules midseaon is just not an option. If $70 was worth the effort I'd seriously be considering contacting a lawyer right about now, because I would consider this year a serious breach of contract, as I, along with every other fanball user, has paid for services that are not being provided. Seeing as how I'm nowhere near knowledgeable in law I probably using the wrong terminology, but you get my point.

For those of you in the league that are interested below is the latest ticket that I have sent to fanball, and hopefully I get some sort of response from that one.

Dear Fanball,

In League ID xxxx we have lost all of our stats from from weeks 1 and 2. This is very disappointing for a few reasons, first and foremost because of the fact that there is no win/loss record from week 1 & 2 it shows every game as a tie. Secondly our total points on the year are messed up and as we have rules based on points leaders throughout the season this is very difficult to maintain. Thirdly when looking to free agents we need to use different resource to determine what players have done up till now because of there are no stats.

I payed your company $69.95 to provide this information to me and my league on a daily basis. Seeing as how the first 4 weeks of the season have been totally wrong I expect to receive a refund for a quarter of the cost of the league($17.49) as the first quarter of our season has been abysmal. If "nice" features are not working that is annoying, but I can understand it. In this case I do not feel Fanball has provided even the most basic service of tracking our scores correctly this year. Without tracking of the scoring a fantasy football website is absolutely useless. If this problem does not get resolved by the start of the 5th week of the season I expect Fanball to pay for my league to be set up on a website that can provide the services that I paid Fanball to provide.

Thank you,
Jason Burich