New Mock Draft Site

KJ Duke · Post by **KJ Duke** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 1:39 pm

Originally posted by Greg Ambrosius:

But not customer friendly? Explain.

For years I heard from NFBC members who said that STATS sucked. That MDC sucked. Now I guess we suck. Greg, this site has many of the same issues as MDC which I've spelled out before, as others have. Nothing has been changed that I can see, and no indication anything will be changed.

1) The layout stinks. There are completely unncessesary things on the draft page, and things we want to see that aren't there. Ideally we could see the last 2 rounds of picks, at a bare MINIMUM 1 round, while we're looking over the player lists. Instead, the same mistake as with MDC - show something like the last 7-8 picks. Seriously, WTF? That's the most important thing on the page!

2) You can't see the full chat box and the time clock at the same time. Has this been fixed yet, will it be fixed?

3) Whose idea was it to put a rules tab in the draft room ... same goes for the ad (although at least the ad has a purpose).

4) Will the clock accomodate slow drafts by showing hours as well as minutes? Again, same problem as MDC.

5) Have better auto-pick tools been built-in to accomodate slow drafts?

If the draft room works better technically, great! ... but the above are customer-friendly issues (among others) that seemingly haven't been addressed.

KJ Duke · Post by **KJ Duke** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 1:42 pm

The disappointing thing is that this change has been built-up as fixing the shortcoming of MDC, only to find that it has many of the same shortcomings as MDC.

[ March 17, 2010, 08:32 PM: Message edited by: KJ Duke ]

eddiejag · Post by **eddiejag** » Wed Mar 17, 2010 2:48 pm

I ALSO NOTICED that you cant see the clock and the message board at the same time.Im sure that can be fixed.MY partner and myself could find the a to z place and it cost us PHILLP hUGHES ,we looked everywhere for him in both sp and rp and just fiqured he was gone and of course 3 rounds later he goes off at round 21.

Still we will fiqure it out.Also we cant find last nights draft either.Im going to give Geoff a call tomorrow and get in.

GoodnGodless · Post by **GoodnGodless** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 8:40 am

I wonder if folks could have the ability to check out individual completed Satellite drafts? It would be kinda like providing ADP no? Team names should protect folks in the Sat Leagues who do not want to be id'd for some reason.

Geoffrey Stein · Post by **Geoffrey Stein** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 9:04 am

Originally posted by GoodnGodless:

I wonder if folks could have the ability to check out individual completed Satellite drafts? It would be kinda like providing ADP no? Team names should protect folks in the Sat Leagues who do not want to be id'd for some reason. All satellite results will remain private on a league-by-league basis -- team name or no team name.

husky88fan · Post by **husky88fan** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 12:30 pm

A useful feature with the rankings system is the ability to specify a player's rank by clicking his name. This makes tweaking a breeze.

Frostbite Nogoodnik · Post by **Frostbite Nogoodnik** » Thu Mar 18, 2010 4:51 pm

I noticed the clock chat box problem as well. I changed my screen resolution from having a height of 900 to having one of 1024.

While this did make my screen look a litle different and may have changed my desktop a bit it still fixed the problem.

The alternative would be to have the layout of the draft room be changed so that everything is shorter.

Greg Ambrosius · Post by **Greg Ambrosius** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 1:52 am

Originally posted by KJ Duke:

quote:Originally posted by Greg Ambrosius:

But not customer friendly? Explain.

For years I heard from NFBC members who said that STATS sucked. That MDC sucked. Now I guess we suck. 4) Will the clock accomodate slow drafts by showing hours as well as minutes? Again, same problem as MDC.

5) Have better auto-pick tools been built-in to accomodate slow drafts?

If the draft room works better technically, great! ... but the above are customer-friendly issues (among others) that seemingly haven't been addressed. [/QUOTE]KJ, our focus right now is building the draft software for our satellites and online championship drafts. We do not have Slow Draft features built into the draft software yet and will first do that for football. The mock draft software will be available much sooner for football and hopefully we can run all of our NFFC Slow Drafts there. But we had no intention of accomplishing that in time for baseball here and thus you don't see any of those features now.

Greg Ambrosius · Post by **Greg Ambrosius** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 1:57 am

Originally posted by KJ Duke:

The disappointing thing is that this change has been built-up as fixing the shortcoming of MDC, only to find that it has many of the same shortcomings as MDC. KJ, like everything else, it's a work in progress. We didn't build this to fix anything involving MDC, we just feel strongly that it's best for this business to own its own back-end software and its own draft software. We want to keep everything on our site, owned by us, run by us, constantly improving it by us. You point out design features that could be improved or upgraded and we can look at all of that. But functionally, it's working well and allowing folks to sort by categories, load in their own rankings while also keeping default rankings there, etc, are an improvement. Yeah, we can improve the que, the layout of the clock in relation to the chat room, add hours for Slow Drafts, etc., but at least it's working well now and drafts will be loaded into team pages much more easily and quickly.

Again, keep the suggestions coming and we'll look at all of it before football season. We'll keep tweaking the draft software until it's perfect for our users. And we have lots of great ideas heading into football that will bring in so much traffic it will be the top mock draft site in the industry.

KJ Duke · Post by **KJ Duke** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 7:43 am

Thanks Greg, my main concern is that issues relating to layout get lost in the shuffle and deemed unimportant.

I agree with you on the business end of it, makes perfect sense for your guys to control that - and the first payoff seems to be automatically loaded lges which I'm sure we'll appreciate as much as you do.

See you at the auction in a few hours.

Sebadiah23 · Post by **Sebadiah23** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 9:32 am

Concerning the business aspect, it's disappointing that NFBC is now non-amicable with Rotowire, through a series of events not under Greg's control. But business is business and the rotowire site and podcast suffers for me as a result unfortunately. For me and all the Jed Lapdogs of the world. We just want all the roto sites to get along. Now we have two different industry ADPs like this is the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war all over again.

Fanball, you can be Blu-Ray. Do it guys.

-Craig K.

Greg Ambrosius · Post by **Greg Ambrosius** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 10:21 am

Originally posted by KJ Duke:

Thanks Greg, my main concern is that issues relating to layout get lost in the shuffle and deemed unimportant.

I agree with you on the business end of it, makes perfect sense for your guys to control that - and the first payoff seems to be automatically loaded lges which I'm sure we'll appreciate as much as you do.

See you at the auction in a few hours. Unimportant is certainly not the right word. It's a time issue now and we can't make these design issues for baseball. We can tweak before football if needed.

See ya at the auction. Come early everyone!! It's a walk to DaVinci 4!!!

Greg Ambrosius · Post by **Greg Ambrosius** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 10:23 am

Originally posted by Sebadiah23:

Concerning the business aspect, it's disappointing that NFBC is now non-amicable with Rotowire, through a series of events not under Greg's control. But business is business and the rotowire site and podcast suffers for me as a result unfortunately. For me and all the Jed Lapdogs of the world. We just want all the roto sites to get along. Now we have two different industry ADPs like this is the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war all over again.

Fanball, you can be Blu-Ray. Do it guys.

-Craig K. We get along fine with Rotowire.com. They have allowed us to run all of our Slow Drafts there and many of the early NFBC Satellite Leagues. This is just a business decision to have our own draft software, which is something Fanball does for all of their games and third-party customers, too. It only makes sense to do it for our own NFBC product, too.

This is a big industry. We all have different business plans, but we can still get along and be sociable to each other. Fanball and Rotowire.com are certainly that and this draft software won't change that at all.

Ryan C · Post by **Ryan C** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 11:18 am

Originally posted by Sebadiah23:

Concerning the business aspect, it's disappointing that NFBC is now non-amicable with Rotowire, through a series of events not under Greg's control. But business is business and the rotowire site and podcast suffers for me as a result unfortunately. For me and all the Jed Lapdogs of the world. We just want all the roto sites to get along. Now we have two different industry ADPs like this is the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD war all over again.

Fanball, you can be Blu-Ray. Do it guys.

-Craig K. I was going to respond to this - but I felt it best to let Greg address it first. Now that he has I'll add that as a Rotowire subscriber - I can say that I haven't seen or heard anything to indicate that there is any animosity from Jeff Erickson or the Rotowire staff toward the NFBC or fanball.

Craig - do you know something that we don't - because it seems that you think this means that Jeff won't be doing NFBC related stuff once the season starts. I enjoy that stuff as well - and while I admit I haven't been listening to the podcasts I would be surprised if he's not doing his regular FAAB columns and other stuff once the season starts.

Sebadiah23 · Post by **Sebadiah23** » Fri Mar 19, 2010 12:37 pm

Erickson dropped out of the contest and hasn't mentioned NFBC once on the podcast. I'm reading between the lines but the lines are shouting in my face. Hopefully I'm wrong.

bvoorhees13 · Post by **bvoorhees13** » Sun Mar 21, 2010 7:51 am

Was there an issue with the draft software? I drafted in a $250 satellite last Tuesday and just assumed the roster would be available instantaneously when the draft was over as with any draft software (its not like they have to be manually entered). I remember last year it took a day or two and its fine as long as we have a few days to prep for the first faab.

Geoffrey Stein · Post by **Geoffrey Stein** » Sun Mar 21, 2010 8:17 am

Originally posted by bvoorhees13:

Was there an issue with the draft software? I drafted in a $250 satellite last Tuesday and just assumed the roster would be available instantaneously when the draft was over as with any draft software (its not like they have to be manually entered). I remember last year it took a day or two and its fine as long as we have a few days to prep for the first faab. There is no issue with the software, the tech team is putting the final touches on the commissioner end, and your rosters will be up soon with plenty of time to prep for the first FAAB period.

Tax Man · Post by **Tax Man** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 8:17 am

how can we print the draft results off of the draft room site? i did a satellite last week and wanted to print the results

Don M · Post by **Don M** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 3:28 pm

I see that the 1st ADP is on the draft site, are you going to change it to 2nd ADP?

Money · Post by **Money** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 3:36 pm

I absolutely agree with this. The object is to have the best fantasy baseball player win. Just put the info out there in the order it was received rather than participants having to spend time looking looking for the discrepancies. Go ahead and call me a sheep. It's (ADP) simply a gauge.

Thanks.

Don M · Post by **Don M** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 3:38 pm

You have Nathan in ADP, going in round 6, and screwing up mock drafts.

Money · Post by **Money** » Mon Mar 22, 2010 4:06 pm

They need to change the default to the second ADP.