What Technical Improvements Do You Want In '15?

[Greg Ambrosius]

With a new season upon us, it's time to start up this thread again and find ways that can save you time during the off-season and during the season so that you can play in more contests. We spent a lot of time on the new FAAB last year and hopefully that did save time for folks who got used to it. Now going forward we are looking for other ways to improve your enjoyment of our contests.

We have a busy schedule ahead of us with Registration going live this week and the new Online Draft Room opening in December. We also have the NFBC Cutline to set up, so the IT guys will be busy. But it never hurts to put ideas in front of us if it can improve the product, so let's do that here.

What technical improvements would help you in the NFBC? Could we help on the mobile app? Could we do better when it comes to watching or managing multiple teams? Post your suggestions here and I'll create a wish list and To-Do list for the future. Thanks all.

We know one area of concern involves the Draft Champions Leagues and making it easier to set up separate Ques for future rounds. We are on that and I believe In the new online draft room we are looking to add a feature where you can set up Ques for each round, kind of a 1-Round Auto for each upcoming round, which should help that product out. If you have more suggestions for any of the contests, post them here. Thanks.

[JohnP]

1) Re-design of Home Page

Keep Site News for important announcements
Keep League News for team interaction
Keep Standings
Add FAAB Balances
Remove Free Agent Wish List (seems like a waste of space to put this on home page)
Remove League Transactions (pretty sure everyone just goes to transaction tab for transactions)
Remove Player News (does anyone use Stats as source for player news?)

Just my opinion.

2) FAAB

Seems like there is plenty of room to have two tabs instead of three (fantasy stats, overview stats, etc.)
Would be nice to see the player dropped on the "FAAB results" page - team, player added, player dropped, win bid, runner up bid.
Would be nice to have FAAB results immediately upon running. Why the delay always?
All numeric values in columns should be to the same decimal place (example - percentage owned column - 35.7% is fine but then 35% should be 35.0%. Ha - my pet peeves are showing up .

3) Draft Room

Lots of things could be done to draft room. Been awhile but I can remember a couple of items...

- player eligibility needs to be spot on
- player list needs to be as exhaustive as possible
- would be great to improve chat area - one of the funnest parts of a slow draft

Those are a few to get the discussion rolling!

[joshguy]

Something simple but would be a huge help...make it possible to have ytd standings viewable by the period. As it is now you can't figure, well you can but a pain, how you're trending in the league. You can only view the period by itself.

Also, the live scoring is a joke. Takes forever to load. Only loads hitting. Then it will load pitching, then take away hitting. Then it will take away all your hitters except for one. Then it keeps doing that, over and over.

How about a function where one can access their other teams by the player. So if melky Cabrera goes down and I need to change him out for Fridays lineups, I know exactly which teams to go to.

[meanguy]

Auto draft for slow drafts per round- to be able to set 2 different rounds but different pre draft lists (if you needed 2 different positions)

[Bronx Yankees]

Auto draft for slow drafts per round- to be able to set 2 different rounds but different pre draft lists (if you needed 2 different positions)

I just want to second this one, or what I think is meant.

In slow drafts, it often is difficult for folks at or near the end of the snake to use the auto draft function. For instance, let's say I'm drafting 15th, the draft is at about the 10th spot, but it is getting late on the East Coast and I want to call it a night soon. At the turn, I want to grab a catcher and a relief pitcher. Right now, I cannot really use auto draft because if I put only one catcher in the queue, I might not get him, but if I put two catchers in the queue, I might get stuck with both, which I don't want. Thus, it would be great to be able to set-up two queues, one for my first pick and one for my next pick. Alternatively, maybe the queue can be done with conditional picks, which allows for different queues for the second pick depending on who you get with the first pick.

Mike

[Bronx Yankees]

Another potentially nice improvement to auto draft would be the ability for it to be turned off if there is no one left in the queue. For instance, my understanding is that if you turn auto draft on but your queue is empty when the draft gets to you, it automatically picks the top player left on the default list. Assuming that understanding is correct, some may not want to use auto if they can't or don't want to load enough guys in the queue to avoid the risk of getting stuck with a player from the default list. Let's say the draft is five picks from me, I'm about to go into a meeting, and there are three guys I really want with my next pick. I would use auto draft if I could load those three picks and, if they all are taken, the auto draft is turned off automatically and I simply make my next pick when I'm available. During drafts you sometimes hear that other players are going to be unavailable for x hours and the draft is too far away to use auto. With this suggested fix, they might be willing to use auto if they were assured that they'd either get one of their top two or three choices or the feature will be turned off, with no risk of getting that random player at the top of the default list.

Mike

[JohnP]

Once the draft is over it would be nice if the draft board stopped refreshing. Very frustrating to scroll down to look at some later round picks and then suddenly the board refreshes even though the draft has been done for weeks.

[viper]

Setting up lists in DC leagues is very very time consuming. I prefer not to combine hitters and pitchers in my lists so I create a separate list of just hitters and another of just pitchers. I have to renumber all pitchers to very high numbers to separate hitters and pitchers. Doing this I lose the general area of where pitchers go when I put in there actual spot in my personal lists. I have no idea how to resolve this but it is a pain. I realize that copying in personal list is all but an impossible programing task so I won't even suggest it.

This is more critical in DC Express leagues than slow leagues. I will likely signup for a March Express league in early January (or sooner) so I have time to set things up.

Also, it seems you can only have one default list. I would really like to have at least two default lists with the ability to check both during a slow or express draft.

Finally, is there a way to print/copy the entire default list which eventually becomes your actual draft list.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Auto draft for slow drafts per round- to be able to set 2 different rounds but different pre draft lists (if you needed 2 different positions)

Thanks for the suggestions so far. All sound good. As for this one, since it was mentioned a couple of times, I did put in my post that the new online draft room will have this feature. Look for that in December when we roll that online draft room out. And the coding for the new draft room will be HTML, so easily drafting on iPads should be available then. Hope that helps.

[Bronx Yankees]

Auto draft for slow drafts per round- to be able to set 2 different rounds but different pre draft lists (if you needed 2 different positions)

Thanks for the suggestions so far. All sound good. As for this one, since it was mentioned a couple of times, I did put in my post that the new online draft room will have this feature. Look for that in December when we roll that online draft room out. And the coding for the new draft room will be HTML, so easily drafting on iPads should be available then. Hope that helps.

Greg - That's great news. Sorry I missed it in a prior post. Definitely should help more folks use auto draft (or at least take away some excuses). Also, that is great news about the new draft room. Although I use a PC while at work, I use an iPad almost exclusively when at home, and so getting this improved really is a big help.

Mike

[mrogovin99]

It would be great when drafting using multiple devices if the auto-pick selection was retained across all those devices. In other words, if I activate my auto-pick using my iPad, and then check the draft's progress on my phone an hour later, my auto-pick will remain on.

[Rog]

This may seem odd and more so referring to the non slow drafts.Lets say I have already done 4 drafts or so and in my fifth draft I like to pull up all the draft boards from my previous 4 and have 5 separate windows open with the 5 separate draft boards and current draft room.If anything gets refreshed or you try to check on any player all the draft boards resort the same one.Is there anyway to keep that from happening? I know that seems silly but since we are asking.

[Greg Ambrosius]

This may seem odd and more so referring to the non slow drafts.Lets say I have already done 4 drafts or so and in my fifth draft I like to pull up all the draft boards from my previous 4 and have 5 separate windows open with the 5 separate draft boards and current draft room.If anything gets refreshed or you try to check on any player all the draft boards resort the same one.Is there anyway to keep that from happening? I know that seems silly but since we are asking.

You are correct. Only 1 board is visible at a time. I will definitely ask about this and see if the new online draft room can allow multiple boards open at once. Good question.

[Greg Ambrosius]

It would be great when drafting using multiple devices if the auto-pick selection was retained across all those devices. In other words, if I activate my auto-pick using my iPad, and then check the draft's progress on my phone an hour later, my auto-pick will remain on.

Sounds reasonable. I will ask.

[GLG20]

Not sure if this has been suggested before, but it would be great to have an Export feature from the "My Teams" page -- with the idea being that you could capture all your current team rosters (both starters and bench) on one Excel at any given time. As it stands now, an owner with multiple teams (or at least I) might have trouble remembering not only if I own a particular player, but (a) which team it was on and (b) whether I had him in the starting lineup.

To me, this would really seem to help those with multiple teams and day jobs that inevitably get busy on Monday/Tuesday (and Friday) afternoons...

[Deadheadz]

Once the draft is over it would be nice if the draft board stopped refreshing. Very frustrating to scroll down to look at some later round picks and then suddenly the board refreshes even though the draft has been done for weeks.

It should be very easy coding to add a toggle switch for the user. Seen this option on many other sites.

[Yah Mule]

This may seem odd and more so referring to the non slow drafts.Lets say I have already done 4 drafts or so and in my fifth draft I like to pull up all the draft boards from my previous 4 and have 5 separate windows open with the 5 separate draft boards and current draft room.If anything gets refreshed or you try to check on any player all the draft boards resort the same one.Is there anyway to keep that from happening? I know that seems silly but since we are asking.

You are correct. Only 1 board is visible at a time. I will definitely ask about this and see if the new online draft room can allow multiple boards open at once. Good question.

This would be a huge improvement, but mostly during FAAB. I want to be able to open all my teams in separate windows without them defaulting to the last one that was opened. This would also be great for viewing live scoring. I can't think of anything I would appreciate more than that.

[Baseball Furies]

Don't mean to be cynical, but this thread AGAIN?! C'mon, seriously?







Okay, I guess I did mean to be cynical.