The Korean Football Association launched the beta version of “K League Fantasy” on the 19th.
K League Fantasy is an online game that allows users to create fictional teams to compete. Users build their own teams by collecting cards and compete against other users. There are already online competitions in sports such as the National Football League (NFL), National Basketball Association (NBA), and English Premier League (EPL).
In K League Fantasy, players are first randomly selected from a pack of cards. From there, they form a 14-player squad (11 starters and 3 reserves). The sum of these players’ stats is the score of your club. 안전놀이터
Players’ stats fluctuate based on their actual performance. You need to strategically predict which players will perform well in each round.
There are also differences from traditional fantasy leagues. The nature of fantasy leagues is that once you’ve finalized your roster, there’s not much for you to do. Usually, fantasy leagues have a set budget to choose from. As a result, big-name players are highly sought after, especially strikers in soccer. In fact, Son Heung-min, the EPL’s “top scorer” in the 2021-22 season, always had the highest share in fantasy leagues.
However, this focus on one player makes it difficult to choose who you want for the remaining positions. It’s hard to build a balanced roster when you have so much to invest in one position. There’s not enough content to keep you entertained on non-match days.
The first thing we did was introduce a card pack system. You won’t be able to pick up all the players you want at once, but you’ll be able to open a steady supply of card packs to improve your roster. This gave players a chance to experience a variety of players instead of just randomly adding famous players. In addition, it was possible to purchase card packs with points earned at events such as integration with the K League membership application ‘Kick’ and authentication of actual steps and intuition. It was also designed to be a “participatory event” that encouraged offline activities rather than just lying down and building a team.
There’s also the familiar ‘chance item’ element of card games. There are five tiers for each player. We gave additional stats to the top tiers, which are hard to find, to create variability. It is an element that stimulates users’ desire to collect.
K League Fantasy is still in beta and not all features are available. Only the rankings of all users are publicly available, with no intra-league competition or 1v1 elements. However, just four days after the beta launch, 3896 owners are leading their teams.
Meanwhile, the target number of users for this year is 20,000, according to Jeong, a professional in the strategic business team of the Korean Professional Football Association. The full version will be released later this year. It will be interesting to see if online and offline competition can become a part of the daily lives of K League fans.