wobnam wrote:Anyway, at this point it's just an idea, so we'd love your input on how to do it and/or whether it's something you'd want to be a part of.
I think it's a really neat idea, and the suggestion to have only one person buy the sets and handle the shipping makes a lot of sense.
Since you asked for input, let me suggest a few things.
(i) Choose someone to buy the sets who has access to (relatively) cheap Lego prices and shipping costs. This obviously varies by country, and it would be worth keeping in mind. It's also something that could easily be overlooked.
(ii) It might be wise to determine some sort of public way to set the draft order. There may be hurt feelings if someone hosting the draft draws a high first pick, and that could turn unpleasant. I think there are online dice rolling programs that allow you to record your results (they're often used by play-by-post online roll players). You might want to look into that, or think of some other public way of setting up the draft order.
(iii) Look into how drafts are conducted for online sports fantasy pools. This seems like the closest analogy. You can dictate that those participating must be online at a certain time (probably a weekend, given the potentially wide disparity in time zones), and then give each person five minutes to make their decision. Chat would work, but it might be more fun to watch it unfold on the forum. Alternatively, you might want to look into seeing if there was any custom software for running fantasy drafts. Surely that must exist and could be easily customized for your purpose.
(iv) Don't by the sets until after the draft actually takes place. Even though everyone will have the best of intentions, it seems that emergencies frequently interrupt these sorts of things. You don't want to buy six sets, for example, and have only five people able to participate in the draft. This creates money problems (refunding the money collected from the sixth person who had to back out, collecting just a bit more from those who did participate to cover the now extra set).
(v) Be firm. Set the date and time, and expect people to show up then. If they do not, for whatever reason, then they are ineligible to participate this time around. Otherwise, trying to sort out the individual schedules of an international group of people would be a nightmare.
(vi) If I may be so bold, I'll even offer a suggestion for the set to choose. The Cannibal Escape turned out to be a very pleasant surprise for me when I picked one up on a whim a few weeks ago. It's chock-full of very interesting and useful pieces in handy colours. I'll just toss that out there.
Hopefully some of these thoughts will turn out to be useful to you. Even if they don't, I hope you'll enjoy the whole event.
