Fantasy Drafts Coming to Madden NFL 13

Hey Madden fans, I am pleased to announce the details around the online Fantasy Draft feature, which is now available as part of online Connected Careers in Madden NFL 13.  We are also looking into adding similar functionality into offline Connected Careers in the future, and thank you for your continued feedback.

It was always our goal with Connected Careers to create a strong core experience that could be built upon for years to come.  Our team is focused on providing fans with a live service for Madden NFL and we are excited that online Fantasy Draft is the first additional feature delivered for Connected Careers.  We look forward to continuing to build upon Madden NFL 13 in the future.

To access Fantasy Drafts, you’ll still choose to be a coach in Connected Careers. The commissioner, or yourself (if you’re playing alone), will then choose to “Start Your League” from the Connected Careers main actions menu. Once that option is selected, you will be prompted with the option to “Start Season” or “Start Fantasy Draft”. You’ll want to make sure that all of your members are in the league before starting or else they’ll miss out on the experience.

Once you start the draft, the draft order for the first round will be completely random, with the rest of the draft following the traditional “snake” like a fantasy draft. Each participant will have 45 seconds to make their picks and the draft will consists of 54 picks per team. So, you’ll need to cut one player before the start of the season. You will have the option to pause the draft or simply auto pick the rest of the draft at any point if you and your friends only want to draft a certain number of rounds.

Once the draft is completed, the league will move on as you’re accustomed to in a typical Connected Careers league. It is worth calling out the salaries of the players drafted in the Fantasy Draft will all be the same per round so that everyone is on an even playing field. Contracts start at 5 years/12M per year for a first round pick and ramp down to 1 year/500K per year. Another cool feature about this new setup is that you’ll still be doing your annual draft and adding the dynamic rookie draft classes with backstories into your league each year. There’s much more that you’ll find along the way, but I wanted to give you the basics.

As always, we appreciate the feedback and will continue to monitor our social channels, forums, and our Game Changers site for additional feedback throughout the year. For our fans that continue to ask about roster and player editing in Connected Careers, I can tell you that based on your feedback, the development team is currently exploring the potential option to include additional functionality in Madden NFL 13 in an upcoming title update. We’ll update you with more information in the coming weeks after the team has time to investigate and assess the situation.