I’ve given this a lot of thought and am sympathetic to the underlying problems being raised here. However, I am not sure auto-nomination would solve all these problems, and in fact would probably create more problems than its worth.
- I’m concerned about what happens if a team does not have anyone in their nomination queue. Early in the draft, this isn’t a big deal, but also it isn’t really a big deal if they miss their turn to nominate - there are plenty of players that teams want to roster and missing your turn to nominate is a disadvantage early on. Automatically nominating one of the top 100 or so FAs automatically after 30 seconds instead of just going to the next team seems like almost no gain in terms of ‘keeping things moving’ and could result in players being nominated automatically that teams wanted to nominate themselves, which is negative for the teams that have prepared with a good watchlist and are ready to nominate players. At the end of drafts, forcing a team to take on a $1 player because they took slightly too long (either on purpose or by mistake) to nominate someone is a very imperfect solution to the larger point I bring up below.
- I’ve worked closely with a visually impaired Ottoneu player who is a tech advocate for accessibility, and he’s given me very positive feedback on the accessibility of the draft page. If someone is having issues using it, I’d like to hear about that feedback more directly rather than paper over any issues via automatically nominating players.
- The draft watchlist exists precisely as a safety net for those who may panic as their nomination timer winds down. We talk about this in an upcoming episode of the Ottobot Podcast, but that watchlist exists independent of the regular watchlist precisely to give you a huge list of players to nominate at any time.
To address late-draft scenarios, if a team is consistently missing their nomination turn but continue to bid on other auctions, they should be marked as ‘done’ by the commissioner. There is an advantage to not nominating for the requisite $1, especially when you get towards the end of your cap and roster limits, and the solution is to either require nominations (Commish Tools) or mark a team as done with the draft if they continue to not nominate players. If this is happening by mistake, well, this is what the watchlist is for - click on one of the top players lists, click the star next to all of the players who show up, and now you are ready to nominate someone if your turn gets under 5 seconds.
Auto-nomination as I understand it would still take the full 30 seconds of a team’s nomination timer, negatively impact teams that have prepared for the draft by automatically nominating players that prepared teams wanted to gain the advantage by nominating with an initial bid themselves, and would have more downside at the “dollar days” portion of auction drafts than simply marking a team as done that misses their nomination turn. I am not sure it would save much time or directly address the underlying concerns (30s is a short time to pick someone to nominate and it is hard to find the player I want to nominate!) that I think is underlying this request.
I thought about this a lot but I still may have missed something, especially on the time-saving front, so if you have further thoughts please share them. I’m not by any means saying “no” to this request, I’m just not sure auto-nominations in the auction draft are the right solution.