I’ve just rolled out a brand new Auction Draft server and client for the 2019 season. The Auction Draft is now powered by WebSockets, which removes the need to connect to the server every time it tries to update. Long story short, the draft update response times should be under 50ms now, down from 150ms. This is a considerable performance improvement that will make the drafts feel smoother and more responsive.
I’ve added some other features to the Draft client as well:
There is now a 3 second gap between an auction ending and the next nomination period beginning. This will allow the client to separate out the “your turn to nominate” sound from the “end of the previous auction” sound. This also gives owners a chance to reset context after an auction ends, while only adding a little bit more time to the length of the auction draft.
There is now a 0.2 second bid protection. Bids put in within 0.2 seconds of the previous bid will be rejected. This is an attempt to protect against two bids coming in quick succession, driving prices up accidentally. As you all start drafting, please let me know if 0.2s is too short a time for bid protection.
Per some conversation in Slack and this wishlist item, there is now an “Import” link next to the Watchlist header. This will import your regular season watchlist into your auction draft watchlist. These lists are still managed separately, but this gives owners a bit more flexibility in how they want the watchlist to work for them.
Team names are more clearly highlighted for owners so they can see if they are winning an auction or if it is their turn to nominate.
There have been a number of memory usage improvements to the client.
The draft room becomes readily available after the keeper deadline, so you can try out some of these improvements tomorrow. If you have feedback, please use this thread and I’ll respond as quickly as I can.
Thanks as always for your support.
EDIT Oh and @YankeeShep snagged a Genie badge for the Import Wishlist request.
During my football draft this past season, the draft chat would reset anytime I clicked on a link or refreshed the page, erasing all prior conversation. Is there a way to retain all the commentary as drafters enter/exit the draft room throughout the course of the event?
The chat is purposefully transient - we don’t really save those chat logs.
The baseball draft is set up so that all links open to new pages and the new backend changes mean that you should not have to refresh the page as much as you did in year’s past. I’m planning on porting these changes to football this summer so that the draft experience can be more continuous, which means losing the chat history less often.
I can also look into making a change such that the last few available chat messages are loaded if you happen to refresh the page. Since we only store draft chat messages for ~10 minutes, there may not always be messages available to load, but it would add to the sense of continuity.
I got some feedback regarding the bid protection, mostly that 200ms wasn’t quite long enough. I’ve upped the period of time that you cannot bid after another bid to 300ms (0.3s).
That might be helpful, it would make experimenting with pre-draft lists easier and a fresh list could be imported prior to the draft.
Are the notification sounds a new addition this year? I don’t remember any sounds in my previous drafts, is there a way to test if the sound notifications are working?
Some random draft room observations:
The draftroom watchlist is imported in the same order it appears on main list. This could be useful for pre-draft sorting.
If you delete a player from the Watchlist in the draftroom, but the player is still on your “main” watchlist, re-clicking import will add the deleted player back at the bottom of the draftroom list.
The opposite is not true. If player is deleted from the main watchlist, re-importing the list in the draftroom will not remove the player.
If you don’t have sounds, you should make sure your web browser is allowed to play sounds on our site. The instructions are different for each browser, but browsers have gotten pretty good at blocking off sounds. There are 4 distinct sounds and they are totally new this year, so if you aren’t hearing them, it’s because you aren’t allowing Flash and/or audio on Ottoneu. There were sounds last year too, but there were only 2 distinct sounds and they played over each other a lot.