Ottoneu State of Union (May 27th, 2016)

Hi everyone,

I know I’ve been relatively radio-silent for the last few months, so I thought it would be good to write up an update on what I’m working on and what the community and ottoneu users can look forward to over the next few months. As always, you can reach me via email if you have any thoughts, questions, or concerns.

Fundraising

The main project I’ve been focused on since the start of the baseball season has been fundraising. Ottoneu is raising money to make what I like to call Quality of Life improvements to the site, as well as a marketing push (shout-out to @bdmorris.jr). I can’t go into too much detail in a public forum, but I look forward to writing a post-mortem when the whole process is complete. I will say it takes up a lot of time and brain space - more of the latter than I expected!

Football Improvements

I think most Ottoneu veterans would agree that baseball auction drafts went, on a whole, much smoother this year. The new message system is a big improvement over the previous one as well. I’m actively working on bringing these and other, smaller baseball improvements over to the football platform. If you’re thinking about playing football this season, rest assured that the site and the experience will be very similar to baseball. If you’re not thinking about playing football, maybe you should! With college players as prospects, full keepers, auctions, and a fun head-to-head regular season, Ottoneu Fantasy Football is significantly more engaging than single season offerings.

User Profiles

One of the most important factors in finding a new owner or putting together a new league is understanding who you are playing with. With that in mind, I’m working on building out user profiles for all Ottoneu users. There are a bunch of different things you might want to see on the user profile pages of you and others - leave a comment and let me know what you think is must-have! Tip of the hat to @luckystrikes for ‘strongly encouraging’ (is that fair?) me to prioritize this project.

Playing Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball

A month ago, my team was in 11th place and I was looking to sell.

Without making any major moves, I’m in first place today and looking to buy. I bring this up for two reasons:

  1. Don’t sell too early. I’ve made this mistake before and I almost made it again this season.
  2. I’m spending more time on the Ottoneu Fantasy Baseball site this year than I have in a while!

This second point is good for you, because it results in ‘polish’ improvements to various parts of the site. Of course, if you see something that looks a little off, let me know! I use the site the way I use it, and you might use it differently.

So that’s what is going on with Ottoneu right now: fundraising, football improvements, and polish. Improvements will be coming fast and furious once these existing projects wrap up, so get excited Ottoneu fans: things are going to keep on getting better. Have a great long weekend, and good luck with your Ottoneu teams!

2 Likes

Thanks for the update @niv. Regarding Ottoneu profiles, it would be nice to see owner profiles that include full names with both the team names and Ottoneu ID’s. Would also be helpful to have optional fields to add email addresses, Twitter, Slack, and maybe even phone numbers. I’ve also heard a lot of requests to upload custom team logos and a brief bio or description. I’m sure there are other basic elements that should be considered but hopefully that’s a start.

Niv made changes this off-season to how the auction draft room works when nominations are missed