While I’m at it, here’s how we’re planning on conducting the league. If you have any objections or suggestions, feel free to voice them.
The auction will be conducted on ventrilo, free software available for the PC and MAC that has both voice and text chat components. Those with a microphone are welcome to use it, but those without one can still listen, and type what they want to say.
There will be a randomly determined nomination order. When it’s an owner’s turn on that order, he will nominate a player to be bid on, with a minimum bid. The bid will be up to the owner’s discretion - you don’t want to start out with your maximum bid, generally, because you might overpay and it doesn’t leave much room for auctioning. Start with a reasonable number. For instance, we know Tomlinson is going to probably go for more than $40 - so there would be no point in starting at 1, going to 2, 3, all the way up to 40. The person nominating him could start the bidding at 35 or 40 to get the ball rolling. The minimum bid will be $1. Amount of starting money will probably be $200, but until we know the league size and roster size, still under discussion, we’re not sure.
Players will be able to freely bid in voice and text, with minimum bid increases of $1. Once the bidding has clearly slowed down, I’ll say “current winning bid on [plaer] is [amount] by [owner]… 5…4…3…2…1” - and if at any point someone bids while I’m counting down, the bidding will reopen until things slow down again and I repeat the process until we have a winner. I’ll then write down the winning owner, the amount they paid and subtract it from their total. There’s no requirement to bid at any particular time - it’s perfectly valid if your first bid after sitting out of the action is the winning bid. However, try not to go too far with this - I don’t want to restart a countdown on a player 5 times because no one wants to bid until the last second.
At any time anyone can ask what players they have (although I suggest you write it down yourself) or what someone else has or how much money they have left. It’d be helpful if you kept track of some of this yourself, but I’ll have all the data in front of me and nothing will be secret.
In the event of a tie - that is, more than one player sharing the highest bid on a player, but no one is willing to go higher, the winner will be the nominating owner or the closest person after the nominating player in the nomination order. That is… if the third person in the nomination order nominated the player originally, he would win any ties, followed by the fourth person in the order, and the fifth, wrapping all the way around so that the first and second person in the order were the last two. This seems like a fair system because the order of tie breaking priority advances by one person every round.
Rosters can fill up unevenly - one guy can have all of his players while others don’t. When a player reaches a full roster, he is then excluded from the nomination process and bidding - his draft is over. This way towards the end of the draft only players with roster spots will do nominating and it’ll speed up the rest of the draft… and besides, if someone’s filled up their roster, they’re probably happy with what they’ve got and wouldn’t want to bid on anyone else anyway.
At the end of the draft the initial waiver priority order will be determined by how much money each player has left. The person with the most money left over will be at the top of the waiver list. I don’t encourage anyone to save money, because having a better opening roster is superior to having a good waiver priority.
You cannot sell back players after you’ve drafted them, and you cannot bid more money than you actually have. The rosters will be locked until after the first week of scoring, so that if you fail to fill up your roster with the money you had, you will have to go with empty slots in the first week until you can fill them up with free agents.
During the season, we’ll use a non-locking waiver wire for free agents explained here: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=8926493&postcount=3.
After the draft and the waiver priorities being set, money will have no use in the league. It will be a normal fantasy league.
Anything I left out? Any suggestions, questions, or complaints?
