FanDuel Rebrands, Complete with New Logo and Customer Bill of Rights
Daily fantasy sports leader FanDuel unveiled a rebranding on Monday, showing off a new logo, color scheme, and a user Bill of Rights as the National Football League season approaches.
FanDuel customers will first notice the updated look of the site. The script “FanDuel” has been replaced with stylized block lettering and new shield logo, incorporating the letters “F” and “D,” is front and center.
“We wanted our new logo to represent everywhere we’ve been and everything that lies ahead,” reads the new FanDuel brand page. “That’s a lot to pack into one image. But after changing the face of fantasy sports, we’ve grown to enjoy a challenge. We chose the shield — an age-old athletic emblem — to pay homage to history’s strongest leagues, teams, and competitors. As we move into this next era of fantasy sports, the FanDuel Shield will lead the way.”
The brand page displays an animated .gif of different iterations of the FanDuel shield, as well as a background showing what appears to be sketches of various attempts at the new logo.
Additionally, instead of black being the primary color of the FanDuel site and lobby, blue is color of choice.
But that’s all just superficial. What FanDuel seems to really be shooting for in this rebranding is a new emphasis on its games being fair and player-friendly. Whether this is being done out of the goodness of the executives’ hearts, out of pressure from legal battles the company has faced, or simply as a public relations move, they do seem to be good changes.
Highlights include:
Beginner Contests
This feature was actually implemented at the end of June, but FanDuel has chosen to make customers fully aware of it this week. The lobby will list contests open only to players who have both entered fewer than 51 contests and do not have an “Experienced Player” indicator next to their name. “Experienced” players are those who have entered more than 500 contests and/or have won more than $2,500 across six contests. “Highly Experienced” players are those who have entered more than 1,000 contests or have won more than $1,000 on four separate occasions. These players will all have icons next to their names in the lobby so that others can have idea who their opponents are.
Contest Entry Limits
One of the big problems with DFS has been that deep-pocketed users, typically those who are also the very best on the site, have been able to enter large-field, guarantee-prize-pool contests as many times as they wish. This gives them a huge advantage over novices or players on a budget when it comes to grabbing the top finishing spots. Naturally, someone paying for just one entry in a contest will have a drastically lower chance of winning the top prize than would someone entering 1,000 slightly different but optimized lineups.
FanDuel is fixing this problem somewhat by instituting entry limits. The maximum number of entries per user per slate is 5,000. At entry fees of $10 and lower, there are limits of 500 entries per slate for NFL contests, 250 for NBA, 250 for MLB, and 250 for NHL. That still seems like a lot, but power users will at least now have to consider spreading out their entries across many contests. Granted, for the big NFL weekly contests, there will still likely be high rollers with 1,000 entries or more.
There are also limits put on the number of head-to-head contests players can enter per entry fee, per slate. This should somewhat mitigate the problem of expert players creating tons of contests and just waiting for inexperienced victims, sort of like “bumhunting” in poker.
No Third-Party Scripts
FanDuel has now banned all third-party scripts, no matter how limited their functionality. Scripts have been quite controversial, as they give people the ability to do things like create and enter hundreds or thousands of lineups in an instant as well as edit thousands of existing lineups with one click of a button. While these scripts weren’t exactly a secret, most players, those who just play recreationally, typically don’t know about them or don’t have the time to learn how to use them properly, once again, giving the experts much bigger advantages than they would already have just because of their skill.
FanDuel is now providing everybody its own lineup tools that provide similar functionality to those found in popular third-party scripts. Again, this isn’t exactly new – this policy was put in place earlier this year, but with the rebranding, FanDuel has chosen to emphasize this new “level playing field.”
“The past year has been tumultuous for this industry but FanDuel has emerged stronger than ever and we are ready to lead the industry forward,” said Nigel Eccles, CEO of FanDuel, in a press release. “The new FanDuel brand reflects our commitment to transparency, innovation and enhancing the user experience. We are confident it will showcase what we have to offer to all sports fans.”
As a topper of sorts, FanDuel has introduced its user Bill of Rights:
1. You have the right to a level playing field.
2. It’s your money, not ours. Plain and simple.
3. You deserve to know the rules before you play.
4. You get to choose how you play.
5. You should know who you’re up against.
6. New players have their own place to play.
7. Your questions deserve honest answers.
8. You should get what you expect when you sign up.
9. You will not play against an employee.
10. You control how much you play.
Each point has a more detailed explanation on the FanDuel website, but there isn’t really anything groundbreaking here, other than maybe the company actually being committed to laying these guarantees out and hopefully sticking to them.
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