I really liked the divisions last year. They’re small enough to add an element of “Team Q made the playoffs over in Div. 3?!? I had 4 more wins than that jagass!” Frustration is kind of the name of the game here. If it were 2 divisions, I think it’d take all that fun out of it.
I’d like to join. At first, I didn’t want to get sucked in, but it looks like I can make the draft.
So, I’d like to give it a shot.
mtrg
I’m making a very similar post in the all my leagues, so if you’ve read it in another thread no need to reread.
I plan to use the Free Agent Aquisition Budgets style of waivers rather than standard rotating lists. Everyone starts with $100 plus whatever money they have left over from the auction. We also use the yahoo system to give everyone a fair shot at grabbing free agents on game day, detailed in a post I made last year in the league:
"Yahoo now supports automatically putting all players on waivers from Sunday to Tuesday to do what we did manually - prevent the first person to their computer when a player goes down from getting their backup and instead giving everyone a chance to make a claim. The difference in this case is that it’s built in to the yahoo system, and we’re using a silent auction style bidding system for players. You start with $100 + whatever money you had left at the end of the draft. In the event that there’s a tie, there’s also a rolling waiver list that works like a standard list where you get sent to the back every time it resolves an issue. Having no other real criteria, I also set the initial waiver priority list by the amount of money people had left after the draft, and in the case of a tie, reverse nomination order. The issue should rarely come up, though as there won’t be that many ties.
There’s one catch with this system. Since Thursday and Saturday night games fall outside of the Sunday 1pm-EST till Tuesday night automatic waiver period, a player could conceivably pick up a breakout performer from the those games before the Sunday till Tuesday waiver period. This goes against our system, so I’m creating a rule regarding this: If you want to pick up a free agent from a Thursday or Saturday night game after that game has begun, you have to wait until Sunday at 1pm EST and put in a waiver claim like the rest of the free agents. Premature pickups will be reverted. "
The other issue is… last year I took my leagues off trading with a league veto period and went to commissioner approval. The reason I did that was because essentially no one was willing to veto any trades anyway, and that we’re all serious players and we’re not gonna do some goofy Randy Moss + MJD for John Carlson deals at the end of the year as part of some weird griefing.
And a benefit to this system was that I could fast-track non-controversial trades. You could negotiate saturday afternoon and still get the trade processed before the games sunday morning, whereas with the vote system, no matter what the trade will take 24 hours to process. If there was something fishy going on, I could choose not to fast track it, and get league discussion on the issue and allow people to vote on it. But that never came up.
There was an issue last year when someone was pissed that I fast-tracked a trade that ended up working against that person (the team they faced benefitted from the guy they received that week). IIRC, I ended up pushing every single trade made before Sunday through before the games on Sunday, so everything made it through. I think it’s a better way to do it because you can still do trade negotiations later in the week and still have them count, or it’s possible some injury situation may occur less than 48 hours from the game of the player you want to trade for to replace the guy, etc.
Anyway, unless there’s objection, I want to make it clear that I plan to do it again this year, and any reasonable trades will be pushed through before the games of the players involved. If there’s some sort of controversy I can slow the process down and allow the group to discuss and even veto.
So - in summary: I propose the gameday free agent->waiver system we used last year - and that we used in previous years, only manually. Furthermore, I propose that we use Free Agent Aquisition Budgets rather than straight waivers. I also plan to run the league trades on commissioner approval and quickly approve all routine trades. Strange trades will take longer and come up for discussion.
Any issues?
We’re at 15/20. We still have a few weeks until the draft so there’s no urgency yet, but I’m going to allow people to recruit outside the SDMB. If you happen to have a friend that’s interested in the league, and you’re confident they’ll be an active owner - that they can attend the draft (important) and not abandon their team, you can go ahead and give the league info to your friend. Make note of their entry and team name in the thread though so we know who’s who.
4 slots still open - anyone is welcome, even fantasy newbies, so long as you’re available for the draft and will stick it through the season.
Based on the time the auction draft took tonight, I think we might want to move the start time up a bit. Would a time of 8:30 or 8:45pm on Tuesday, Sep 7 work for everyone? If not, speak up soon - I need to reserve a draft slot quickly before they’re all taken up. I want to make sure we have enough time to finish the draft without keeping people up too late, although I know some west coasters might not be able to make it home by 5:30 or 5:45 PST. Please tell me if the earlier time doesn’t work for you.
Works for me, course I’m on Central time. Are you still looking for additional members? (Edit: Looks like we’re still three down. I’ll proselytize and see what I can do.) Oh, and won’t an auction draft for 15 players X 20 teams go for approximately forever? (So we might need even longer than you’re anticipating?)
Never been in an auction before, though I’ve read up on the particulars, so how long does it take to draft each player? 10 seconds? 30? A minute? We could be here awhile, even taking into account that a lot of players are going to end up going for a buck.
We do have 3 slots open. I sent out an invite tonight to two people from our auction league and I think at least one will take it. But otherwise we’re still on open invitation.
The minimum draft time on each player is 30 seconds, unfortunately. For contested picks that’s fine, but often you’ll have a player clearly only one guy is interested in. There needs to be a “not interested” button so that everyone checked it we’d move to the next pick, but there’s not.
IIRC the draft last year took around 2.5 hours, which is unusually fast for a league of this size since my 12 man snake drafts last over 2 generally. With auction we’re probably looking at more like 3.5. I didn’t really do the math before now… it seemed like ESPN’s drafting app went faster, but I can’t identify why - don’t they both have 30 seconds per pick and go back to 10 seconds if a bid is done towards the end?
If the long draft is a problem, you could draft most of your roster in the first 2 hours and put players in your nomination queue or pre-rank your wanted sleepers and have the computer finish up the draft for you.
I’ll try to figure out if there’s something we can do to keep it speedy.
Edit: One thing we can do to keep the ball rolling is to keep a nomination queue. People too often get surprised when it’s their turn to nominate and have to look through their list - if you have a few players queued up, we won’t waste much time on that part of the process.
Scratch that. It’s not a 30 second minimum. It used to be (IIRC), but yahoo changed it so that bidding time can be 30, 20, or 10 seconds.
The timer automatically resets to 10 seconds if a bid is made with less than 10 seconds on the clock. So you can’t win ebay sniper style, the other guy will always get 10 seconds to decide whether to up the bid once more.
Given that, we may want to run the bidding at 10 seconds. That way relatively uncontested bids won’t take that long, and picks that erupt into a bidding war will just reset the timer to 10 seconds every time someone bids anyway. This combined with making sure everyone uses a nomination queue could get the draft down to around 2 hours and 30-45 minutes.
New time would work for me, too. In fact, it’s actually better for me.
Any time on Tuesday, Sept 7 works for me. I took that day off from work.
If youse guys are desperate for an owner, shoot me a PM. I can most likely make the draft.
Yahoo has so many slots per time slot available for leagues to draft so they don’t overload their system. A few days ago when I asked if switching the time was okay, they still had 8:00, 8:15, 8:30, and 8:45 open - so I figured there wasn’t a rush and there’d still be one open after I asked people if they had a time conflict… but now there isn’t. In fact there’s nothing between 6pm and 11pm open right now.
So Tuesday at 9:15pm ET it is. As long as people have a nomination queue so they aren’t scrambling for 10 seconds to pick someone to nominate, I think we can keep the draft pretty timely.
Hamlet, we’re 3 days out and 2 owners short. I wouldn’t call that desperate yet but you’re welcome to join if you’d like. If on Monday night we have 19 players I’d definietly call that desperate and I’ll PM you if that happens. Otherwise we still have open registration for the last two slots.
League # is 14354 and the password is cecil.
Edit: I was going to arrange divisions like they were last year, but we’ve had so much turnover that would only be half-assed. Do we even want divisions on at all? They’d be arbitrary. On one hand they’re kind of fun because you’re not rooting against other teams specifically but on the other hand they’re sort of arbitrary and can result in people getting screwed out of the playoffs. I’m indifferent, maybe slightly leaning towards no divisions.
We’ve got a little under 48 hours to grab one more recruit. Hamlet said if we were desperate for an owner, he’d play - so we’re sitting at 18 now, and if we get our 19th, he’ll fill in that 20th slot. Otherwise we’ll have to run the league 18 handed, which is doable, but doing the max players is preferable.
So would you guys try some hard recruiting with your friends? Just get anyone who’s reasonably committed and interested, non-SDMBers are fine for the last slot.
Looks like we’re full.
I was going through last year’s divisions seeing if I could make them as close as possible - but we’ve had so much turnover last year that’s somewhat impractical. And I don’t know much about most of the new players, so I can’t come up with a logically themed way of making the divisions. So I just turned them off, and we’ll have a standard non-divisional league. Cool?
I guess, but I really like divisions. Make’s things feel more real.
I’m completely neutral about divisions. I’m just really looking forward to this draft.
I like divisions in theory if there was some logical ground on which to divide people. Maybe FF experience level, or grouping friends together, or something - but with this group of people I can’t come up with any logical way to group people, so divisions seem arbitrary and unnecesary.
Arbitrary? Probably.
Unnecessary? Nah.
Divisions add something to a league, especially this big, and the rivalries will develop over the season. If they’re balanced, perfect. And if one division so happens to be strong teams, and another weak teams, it makes the competition more fierce in the strong and still interesting for the weak.
Please bring back divisions