Hey Niv,
We had our draft for league 220. Just wanted to let you know that it wasn’t super smooth. Main issues below:
Thanks for this update. I’ll investigate why FAs didn’t update faster.
The clock can be affected by a variety of things, including connection/latency. I’ll check out if I can recreate it.
Gotcha. It was being experienced by almost all of the teams in the draft. So don’t think it was an issue on any individual’s part.
Was there any pattern to the clock issues? Perhaps when auctions were ending? Not much has changed on that front since last season and most drafts did not have major clock issues last year.
For draft results, the URL changes based on the season, so I would make sure any Google Sheets are using the URL with an explicit “season” url parameter, i.e. https://ottoneu.fangraphs.com/1/draftresults?export=1&web=1&season=2020. 2020 draft results only become available after the first auction draft auction is completed, and I am not sure what kind of caching Sheets is doing on their end, so I can’t really speak to this working in real-time.
I’ll investigate why players showed up as free agents when they weren’t in search, so if anyone in your league who had this issue could give me more details, that would be great.
Hard to nail down timing on the clock issues. I personally had them during nominations and when players were up for bidding, all throughout the 30 seconds. Sorry I can’t provide anything more specific.
On the players as free agents, all I can remember is that like 3/4 through the draft, well after most of the top guys were gone, if you clicked on the “top free agents” for, say, shortstops, Manny Machado and Xander Bogaerts would show up as FAs. They were some of the first few guys off the board though.
I’m actively investigating the issue with top players as well as clock issues. I’m currently not able to replicate the top players issue; when a player is won in the draft room, they no longer appear in positional top players for me. I will continue to investigate. I am seeing in rare occasions the clock skip a second, as well as the clock updating a little erratically, and I am investigating why.
I’ve verified that draft results on our end are updating in real time, i.e. once an auction is done the draft results page updates with that auction’s results. The delay here may be related to how often Google Sheets checks for updates on external sources.
I’ve made a couple code changes to address both the top players not updating and the clock being a little erratic (for a lack of a better description).
Please use this thread as you draft to let me know what the experience is like this year. Thanks so much for the early feedback!
Thanks Niv!
Were you able to replicate the top players bug? Or was that just me?
I wasn’t, but I added some extra precautions to mitigate the kind of behavior you described.
Just had a little chat with @ship, who is drafting right now and was running into issues. Sorted out a really big problem with the latency of the draft that should help going forward.
Cool. What other issues was he running into?
Sounds same as you, significant lag, more than I was seeing in my testing.
I’ve spent the last couple of days following early auction drafts closely and checking on performance. Yesterday we had 2 drafts complete without any negative feedback, which I take as a good sign. Furthermore, I’ve made some site improvements that should speed up search considerably and improve performance across the board. This should positively impact the clock performance in the auction draft room.
Those of you drafting this week, please let me know how your auction draft went and if you ran into any issues. I’ll continue to monitor, of course, but first-hand feedback is always helpful.
Had another auction last night that went super smooth. Thanks Niv!
Really great to hear this. I’ve made some server configuration changes and will be upgrading some older front-end libraries this week; both will help draft performance. I’m continuing to monitor auction drafts, so please reach out if you have consistent issues with your league’s draft.