I want to reiterate/clarify some of the procedural stuff we do in the leagues I run.
We do commissioner approval trading. Practically speaking, we’re all trusted, competent players here, and no one is going to deliberately tank or pass their good players to someone else or do any of the things that a default league has a voting veto system for. Generally, all trades are approved as soon as I see them. In the event that there was a funky trade, I’d bring it up for discussion in the league page. Fast tracking trades has obvious benefits. Under a 48 hour trade window, trades for the games on Sunday have to be made at a corresponding time early Friday afternoon. So you have less time to negotiate and work out trades, and you also have less up to date information about potential injuries and such, which often play a factor in why you’re making that trade in the first place. Approval trading means you could make a trade right up until the start of the game, giving more time to negotiate and the most up to date information.
By default, I approve all trades as soon as I see them. However, this could potentially provide difficult edge cases close to gametime. Occasionally someone will want to agree to a trade before the games, but not actually want the trade to go through until after the games. So by default, I will not immediately process trades that occur less than 24 hours before a game that one of the players is involved in. I say 24 rather than 48 because I feel that anything more than 24 is sufficient time to manage your roster, and make your intentions known if you hadn’t intended the trade to go through. So if you want a last day trade to go through, both players should come to the thread and post their intention for the trade to go through immediately.
In such a case, it’s possible that I may not immediately approve the trade (if I’m not here), or perhaps I approve it 4 hours later, but one of the trading players is unavailable to adjust their roster after the trade processed. This is unlikely but possible, especially if someone agreed to a trade sunday morning. If this happens, then simply have both people come to the thread and state their intentions. Give specific intentions like “When this trade goes through, I want to bench player X and replace him in that slot with player Y from the trade”. If people don’t post on the thread whether they intend for a trade to go through or not, trades will be processed ASAP more than 24 hours before the game, and with less than 24 hours to go, not fast tracked.
I know this sounds a little complicated with the caveats, but it really isn’t. The system has been working fine for us, provides a ton of flexibility, and rarely gets tested with edge cases. If you just let your intentions specifically and clearly be known, everything will be fine.
Another thing, sort of related. I will honor specific intentions regarding gametime injury decisions in the event that you can’t make it to the computer before the game starts. It has to be clear and specific “If X is active, I want him to start in my RB spot, benching Y” - it has to be an active/inactive thing, “starting” is too ambiguous. I think we’ve done this all of twice in several years, but I wanted to let people know the rule is there if they want to use it.
Something else. We set these leagues to have the latest possible trade deadline in the year (this year it happens to be Nov 29), but when I copied the settings from last year to this year, it didn’t automatically adjust the trade deadline, but rather put it at the default. I just noticed this now. So I’m changing the trade deadline in all my leagues to be the 29th, as was originally intended.
Any questions?