Development Update, January 2019

Happy New Year!

Fantasy baseball season is sooner than you think. The MLB regular season starts on March 20 when the Mariners take on the A’s in Tokyo. Time to fill out your leagues and schedule your auction drafts!

December was pretty successful:

  1. Teams can withdraw from leagues that have not drafted yet automatically and receive a full refund. This was a pain point for a few leagues last year and should make it easier to join a league, knowing that you can drop out if the auction draft scheduling does not work out.

  2. Baseball has a richer set of playoff options. Make sure to go to your Commissioner Tools and set up the playoffs the way you want them to be before the season starts!

  3. Various wishlist items were addressed, including improved Watchlist UX and a GS cap setting for playoffs.

In January, I’m going to try to focus on some QOL stuff.

  1. I’m working on some speed and stability improvements to the auction draft.
  2. I want RFAs to be clearly visible in the auction draft room.
  3. I want to make the Trade Status & History page easier to navigate. I’ll have to explore what is possible on that end a little bit more.
  4. I’m going to try to finally address the lack of a unified date picker
  5. I will continue exploring options on improving how to navigate the Transactions list

Let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback, and thanks for your support!

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Will it be possible to have 14 or 16 team leagues with price tiers other than $20? Other is that something that you might look to incorporate in future years after seeing how the 14/16 team leagues do at the $20 level?

Would it be possible to allow users to set their local time zone so that times shown on the site are in that time rather than Eastern for everything?

There is a Time Zone wishlist item that you should give a Thumbs Up to if you’re interested in that feature. It is a lot of work but I am interested in undertaking it sometime during a season.

Yes, if those size leagues are compelling to some users this year, there will be prize tiers for them ahead of next season.

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RFAs are now displayed in red on the draft page, in the same way they are displayed on the search page

UPDATE @Artman44 received a Genie Badge for suggesting this improvement.

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Thanks for the regular updates. Your transparency and accessibility are completely without parallel in the fantasy sports hosting market, and very much appreciated.

Of the things you listed, it seems like #1 is by far the most important. In my opinion, the next most significant thing, which isn’t on this list, would be to improve the reliability of the starting/benched indicators on the Lineups page during the season, and integrate postponement data. The DFS sites all do this very well, so hopefully there are some good data providers out there.

Thanks for the kind words. Being a one-man shop has some advantages, chief of which I can communicate directly and be more available than I could if there was more of a need to coordinate on the Ottoneu side.

In terms of starting indicators, the data feed switched mid-season last year but wasn’t fully implemented until September. I feel confident that the accuracy of our starting pitcher indicators will be much higher in 2019. As always, once the season starts, if you see issues, please post them to the forums so there is a permanent record of them for me to see.

I am limited in engaging with new data providers, but I hope to have some new information about game delays and postponements during the 2019 season.

For the leagues that have set a GS cap, is it possible to have the Roster Organizer page reflect 5 SP slots rather than just 2 still?

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Thanks for this reminder Bryan. I moved your post over to the dev update for January so I can track your request/suggestion as part of my work this month.

For #1 is that for both new and established leagues?

Only for new, startup leagues.

Tonight we’ve rolled out a date picker for the Lineups and Daily Stats pages. This date picker also can be used to set dates when looking at Graphs on the Standings page.

On the Daily Stats and Lineup pages, you can click the current date at the top of the page to load up the date picker, and use that to find the date you’d like to jump to.

This addresses a Wishlist item from @FinoBall (who now has a Genie badge) and an issue I’ve been tracking since 2015 (!).

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A post was split to a new topic: How to withdraw from a new league?

A post was split to a new topic: Display Watchlist players differently on Auction Draft page