Overall a great experience, but if you’re looking for suggestions, here it goes:
Auction went smoothly, no failures at all, just one 2 sec pause that I noticed. I have a 17" laptop and could not fit all I wanted to see on a screen with browser (Chrome) maximized without scrolling (vertically). It really should and could fit. There is some wasted space that could be condensed. The +2 and +5 buttons make several auctions go much quicker. Appreciate the improvements!
I don’t think auto-nominating the top player in the watchlist is a good idea. If the person had to step away for a couple minutes while his pick was nominated, there is a decent possibility he won’t return fast enough to participate in the bidding for the player. Ergo he loses the player who was his top pick without getting to bid.
I’d like to have a feature where you can skip your nomination without waiting for the clock to run out. Sometimes it gets towards the end of the draft and I’ve run out of players I’ve decided to nominate but I like to stay in the draft in case someone else nominates a player I’m interested in.
This kind of feature would have negative consequences to the game. I wrote a bit about it last year.
http://about90feet.com/2016/03/26/enforcing-nominations/
Skipping your turn to nominate in the auction draft on purpose is definitely against the spirit of the game and should be treated as such by league commissioners.
Hm. I read your post; I’m only in one league and didn’t realize it was that rampant of a problem. Maybe there’s another solution, like automatically ending the auction if everyone misses their nom. twice in a row or something (or booting owners who miss 3x in a row, etc.). Maybe my specific case doesn’t happen enough to change what’s already in place, though.
Hello,
I just got done drafting and I have to say, how can the experience be so bad when we all pay $$? There is no place, that I could find, that told you what positions you had filled and where you needed more. The draft window was so big I had to scroll constantly between searching for players and I wouldn’t be able to see the current auction.
Sorting through the available players is a nightmare. Are they sorted by your rankings of them? I seriously could not figure it out! Somehow Adam Jones was like the 100th (Ok maybe exaggerated) outfielder. Why can’t you sort alphabetical?
I don’t expect much to be done, but it feels good to vent. This is my 2nd year on your site and it seriously has the feel of a site from 1998.
Another helpful item would be to be to see who is on the other teams in the draft window so that way you can formulate nominating people that you don’t want, to desperately need and gauge the auction price off that.
I was in a draft on Sunday (3/19) at 8pm ET- everyone was present but as soon as we started five guys went “offline” and said their draft room froze. We all had to refresh the page periodically during the draft to make sure it didn’t freeze on us (still happened to me several times, anyway). I had it happen to me when our draft started last year, too, so I was prepared but several of the guys who were bumped this year had no idea about the problem (and our Commish didn’t pause to wait for them) so they were pretty upset by the time they came back.
I’m not sure if it was a heavy draft night and maybe that was why, or if there could be a reminder on the draft page that you may need to refresh if it freezes up, or that there’s enough communication about this (apparently common?) issue with leagues/commissioners to begin with. I was in another draft earlier in the month and there were no issues, but it’s been twice for me in this particular league where the room has frozen up and bumped people offline.
Other than that… my biggest gripe with the draft software is that you can’t pre-set any auction values and have a computer auto-bid for you if you can’t make it or get bumped from the room. I’m actually someone who likes to pre-set values, and if something happens it’s a nice peace of mind to have my work as a back-up. But as it is now, if I can’t make a draft I have to either quit the league or try to find someone who could draft for me. Making it possible for a customer to stick with a league he’s already paid for by being able to set his own pre-draft auction values when he can’t make a draft should be good for business…
I’d love to hear directly from the people who had issues. I’d like to hear what browsers they were using, etc. The server was in good shape on the 19th, but it was the busiest night of the year so far (the 26th will be busier).
I’ll post a note in our league message board. My page didn’t freeze when the draft started, but it did for me several times during the draft. On that night I was using the most recent version of chrome.
I believe I am one of the people with issues from the 8pm Sunday night mentioned above. I was in the room, some chat messages came through, and it appeared everything was fine. I was searching for players, filling my watchlist, etc. while I waited for the draft to start. I thought it was strange that around 8:08 pm the auction hadn’t started and there were no recent chat messages (but other page functionality was fine, so there was no apparent problem). About 5 minutes after the last chat message I saw, I tried to type a messages asking what the holdup was and it didn’t post. Only then did I know there was a problem, so refreshed. At that point, we were on our 4th nomination.
The only problem was that since it was before the auction had started, there is no way to know it’s frozen. Mid-draft, at least you can see that either the nomination or bid countdowns have hung up. It was really unfortunate for me, because I had the most money to spend at auction (and many positions of need) and the three players I missed were a $23 Strasburg, $19 Lindor, and $23 McCutchen - prices I would have gladly paid.
This happened a couple other times during the draft, but it was not a big deal since you can see from the clocks that it’s frozen. For what it’s worth, I also had a draft on March 16 at 8 pm and had no issues - same computer, running an updated Chrome on Windows 10. Overall, I think Ottoneu does a great job; this is a somewhat minor hiccup on an otherwise excellent site.
A few replies to some recent feedback:
Re: The two posts by @toughguy5128:
Players are ranked by average salaries with an ownership percentage minimum (see: Top Free Agents in draft room). So that’s why Adam Jones was lower down, there were a lot of OFs that other owners pay more.
A majority of desktop users use a 1920x1080 resolution, at which size the draft page fits pretty much perfectly. I’ve added some tracking around screen resolution and browser size on the draft page and I’ll be making some tweaks to address other often-used resolutions for drafting, because I agree, that hopping around on that page sounds frustrating.
I think adding current roster overviews for each team would take up some of the valuable real estate on this page, but if there is anything currently on the page that feels unnecessary, I’d love to hear about it.
Re: @ballnglove82 and @Zeezil feedback on the draft room freezing.
I am not sure what exactly is causing draft rooms to freeze. It doesn’t sound like it is browser-related. I’ve made a few changes to prevent a permanent freeze if and when a freeze does occur, so it’ll be more like a blip and less “missing 10 minutes of draft”, and I’ve started poking at some server tuning to see if something is going on there. Your feedback has been really helpful, so thank you for getting back to me.
Here’s an idea, although someone may have already mentioned it: Is there any way to link the team’s watch list with the draft window’s? It would just make draft prep a little easier to not have to re-populate that list when we get close to draft time.
This was mentioned here:
I prefer separate watchlists because in-season targets are very different than auction draft targets for me. The auction draft page opens up right after the keeper deadline, so I don’t have much problem with prep. However, this idea has been kicked around a little bit and I’d like to hear from more people on it:
i wouldn’t mind being able to import/export between the two lists, but I add dozens of players to my draft watchlist and not nearly as many on the one on my team page. at the end of the draft, there are usually guys in my draft queue that I do not want/need to watch and there are guys who have been removed from my queue (cause they were drafted) who I still want to watch. so…to me they are not the same at all
I think it might be a good idea to remove retired players from the Ottoneu rolls. In my draft that just finished, both Marcus Thames and Vlad Guerrero were put up for auction, when Eric Thames and Vlad Jr. were who the nominators really wanted. It’s a bit ridiculous that guys like Greg Maddux and Barry Bonds and any number of very retired players can, in theory, be nominated for auction.