Looking For Feedback On Auction & Draft Boards

[Greg Ambrosius]

I hope everyone has had time to use the new online draft boards. We installed them into every online draft room last week and they are fun to watch during an online draft. We've had them on the big screen here in Las Vegas for some of the leagues we've hosted in the suite and they are fun to watch with the big stickers and the brighter sticker colors.

We are looking for any and all feedback on the draft boards. I think our live drafters in Las Vegas noticed a big difference this year on the boards because we purchased four new digital projectors. Four of the 5 Las Vegas Main Event leagues had the digital projectors and they really popped. Apologies to LV 3 which still had our older Casio projectors.

We will definitely buy more digital or HD projectors this summer and have them in all cities for the NFFC live drafts. We have enough digital projectors for each city's Thursday and Friday events, but we'll have one older projector for the Main Events in Las Vegas and Chicago (and two older projectors in New York). You can still see the boards with the older projectors, but they don't quite pop like the new ones. But we promise that next year every league will have these as we now see the difference and will money up for several more new projectors. The difference is very noticeable.

Again, provide us with any and all feedback on the live and online draft boards. Thanks all.

We also added a tweak to the live auction draft boards this year. We were able to subtract the winning bid from your remaining total and keep a running total throughout the auction, while also having a line for your max bid. This process really shaved some valuable minutes off each auction and kept them moving very well. We have a few suggestions to make the online auction board even better, but we're looking for more feedback. Post them here or email me at [email protected] and we'll give them to IT. But a BIG kudos to the IT department for the auction boards. They turned out very, very well.

Okay, enjoy the rest of your drafts this weekend. We promise to continue with better equipment in the future, better technological enhancements and improvements to save you time during the season. But keep the feedback coming because your ideas usually lead us to come up with those solutions. Thanks all and good luck.

[edelman24]

Greg...major props for the new boards especially for the auction, it takes out having to track rosters completely. My only feedback would be to make sure you guys have a way to fix the issue that happened in the Diamond if a player gets put on the wrong team and isn't noticed in the next 10 picks, there is no way to adjust at that point in time.

[King of Queens]

Fantastic work here. Major kudos to all involved for getting this right.

I really like the Draft Boards that show the auction prices. In years past, if you didn't track the salaries during the auction, there was no way to retrieve that data. Now we can look at our mistakes anytime we want!

Can this be what the NFBC needs to roll out the $50,000 Auction Championship????

[Tom Kessenich]

Can this be what the NFBC needs to roll out the $50,000 Auction Championship????

Are you gonna be the first signup?

[King of Queens]

Can this be what the NFBC needs to roll out the $50,000 Auction Championship????

Are you gonna be the first signup?

If you build it, I will come.

The founding fathers got this one correct: Rotisserie Baseball was designed to be done via auction. It's the only truly equitable format out there.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Greg...major props for the new boards especially for the auction, it takes out having to track rosters completely. My only feedback would be to make sure you guys have a way to fix the issue that happened in the Diamond if a player gets put on the wrong team and isn't noticed in the next 10 picks, there is no way to adjust at that point in time.

Agreed. It's definitely on the To Do List already.

[Lunatic]

I can"t wait to see it live in Chicago on Saturday; been using it on my PC for OL drafts and it's the best I've seen. I am not easy to please but you hit a HR with this!!!

[HarryTheK]

The new draft board was a huge addition to the live auction drafts, and mixed drafts as well. No more delays for money checks. It will also be nice to now be able to review the bid prices for future drafts.

I do have two suggestions. First, since the entire auction board did not fit on the screen, when the operator scrolled down later in the draft, there was a split in the draft board that had another column listing the team numbers. However, it did not also list the team name as it did in the top column. This was a minor challenge trying to determine who was who.

Second, is it possible to list the draft selections by positions rather than round? This is more of a question for the auctions where rounds really don't matter. It might help to prevent illegal roster constructions since you have to fill out a valid roster with your first 23 auction selections whereas in the mixed drafts, you have the full 29 rounds to do so. The current setup will catch if you bid more money than you have but it cannot catch someone drafting for a position they can't fit on their roster.

All in all, awesome improvement. Thanks for your efforts.

[Edwards Kings]

The new draft board was a huge addition to the live auction drafts, and mixed drafts as well. No more delays for money checks. It will also be nice to now be able to review the bid prices for future drafts.

I do have two suggestions. First, since the entire auction board did not fit on the screen, when the operator scrolled down later in the draft, there was a split in the draft board that had another column listing the team numbers. However, it did not also list the team name as it did in the top column. This was a minor challenge trying to determine who was who.

Second, is it possible to list the draft selections by positions rather than round? This is more of a question for the auctions where rounds really don't matter. It might help to prevent illegal roster constructions since you have to fill out a valid roster with your first 23 auction selections whereas in the mixed drafts, you have the full 29 rounds to do so. The current setup will catch if you bid more money than you have but it cannot catch someone drafting for a position they can't fit on their roster.

All in all, awesome improvement. Thanks for your efforts.

I agree with all here as I thought the boards were awsome, and I agree with this post but on the ability to list the draft selections by positions rather than round, due to multiple position eligabilty, it would probably slow the auction down as the operator would have to be moving players between positions. I agree it would make it easier to see who has made a viable roster.

[Potter]

Love the draft board. Not being able to see the entire board during the live drafts is my only complaint.

[Roy's Outlaws]

The NEW draft boards are a huge improvement, easy to see from every seat, plus very help in the auction by tracking money. Good Job guys.

[mlbbug]

Greg, I really loved the new projection boards for both the Main Event draft but especially for the live auction. I was in the last NY Auction Saturday night right after the Main Event draft which I also had a team in. That is a LOT of fantasy baseball in one day . But putting all that aside here is my suggestion regarding two issues that came up late in our auction. First of all, we had a team that was bidding on a player for more than their remaining max bid. Thankfully it was noticed before the player was sold and the bidding was rolled back to the point where the offending team had gone oner their max bid.The other suggestion relates to a different issues that occurred. Once again, late in the auction a team had won a player that they did not have a roster slot available for that player. That player had been sold and we had to roll back the bid and void out the player from the offending team's roster and start that bid all over again.
Not sure how much technology can be built into this new system but if we did not catch these issues they would have gone without notice. We need a way to ensure that no player can exceed their max bid or bid on a player that they have no roster slot available to place them in. Just my two cents.
Rich McCormick-Astoria,NY

[knuckleheads]

As the information is already available on the draft results thread, is there any reason we don't make all draft boards available to all drafters once all the drafts are completed? It's a much better format for reviewing other drafts.

[Greg Ambrosius]

Love the draft board. Not being able to see the entire board during the live drafts is my only complaint.

This is not a fault of the technology. We zoomed up on the board to show the first 15 rounds in a bigger format and then tried to zoom out to get 23 rounds on the board and could then zoom out again to show all 30 rounds. If we didn't do that at the live draft that was our fault, but yes we can show all 30 rounds at once with these boards at live auctions and drafts. It's just a matter of the facilitator going to the computer and reducing the board to 75% and displaying that on the projector screen.

There is a lot of flexibility with these boards and we'll perfect it going forward.

I know some folks said "I still love the sticker boards" but I'm sorry, we're never going back!! This is the way to go and with HD projectors you'll see these stickers pop out in every draft and in every auction. This is the way to go and we'll perfect these even more in the next year. You'll see.

[Greg Ambrosius]

The new draft board was a huge addition to the live auction drafts, and mixed drafts as well. No more delays for money checks. It will also be nice to now be able to review the bid prices for future drafts.

I do have two suggestions. First, since the entire auction board did not fit on the screen, when the operator scrolled down later in the draft, there was a split in the draft board that had another column listing the team numbers. However, it did not also list the team name as it did in the top column. This was a minor challenge trying to determine who was who.

Second, is it possible to list the draft selections by positions rather than round? This is more of a question for the auctions where rounds really don't matter. It might help to prevent illegal roster constructions since you have to fill out a valid roster with your first 23 auction selections whereas in the mixed drafts, you have the full 29 rounds to do so. The current setup will catch if you bid more money than you have but it cannot catch someone drafting for a position they can't fit on their roster.

All in all, awesome improvement. Thanks for your efforts.

Good post. Agreed, we could add a second line for list of owners' names there. I'll add that to the To Do List.

I agree that for the auctions this makes perfect sense. RT Sports actually posts their auction boards this way and we used that for LABR. That is a much more efficient way to do the auction board because then you know who needs a second Catcher, a second MI, etc. And we can display all 23 roster spots on the screen by just zooming out. We'll look at this for 2016, but excellent suggestion and one several owners made to me on Second Weekend. I like it a lot and will see if we can do that. It's already being done in the industry, so I don't see why we can't do that. Thanks much.

[Greg Ambrosius]

As the information is already available on the draft results thread, is there any reason we don't make all draft boards available to all drafters once all the drafts are completed? It's a much better format for reviewing other drafts.

We will make the draft results available now that drafts are done. I will see if we can do the same for draft boards. Let me see what we can do.

[Sack]

Excellent view of the draft using the new equipment. The colors helped locate a player by position and the
quality was superb. The Chicago auction was a real treat, the prices appearing on the board with the player
was a great bonus. I also liked that you could follow every team by name and money amount. Seems like small
changes, but in an auction draft they really do make a world of difference - great job, very pleased.

[Chthroop]

Hi,
This was a huge step forward. Ability to see on phone or iPad a huge plus. the only true gap right now is complexity of fixing missed bids and mistakes. This was a real issue in both ny drafts that i was in.

Recap of above points:
1. Scrolling. Def need to keep team names on top
2. Larger screen. Use of a larger back screen would make it possible to fit more
3. View by roster: this is a nice idea but should be an option that the operator can invoke (on iPads as well), not the main view why? Because right now you would a) not be able to see a teams picks If "below the line"
4. Small issue: I have bad vision and so the team name tiny font was hard to read! How about putting manager last name only up and make bigger?

Anyway great stuff and really a big step forward

[Texas Connection]

Absolutely loved the addition of having the prices on the auction. In the past, I always had to save the hand written prices on each of my leagues. I happily threw them in the garbage can before I left home from Vegas. It was great during the auction to have my ipad up and being able to see everyone's max bid no matter what seat I had in the auction. Throughout the season, I always like to go back to the draft boards in all of my leagues and relive what could have been. I never would go back to the auctions because it didn't have the prices, but I will now. Great addition. Add the online auction format somehow with some sort of partnership and $50,000 overall will be the floor on the overall auction championship next year.

[ALL-IN JD]

Absolutely loved the addition of having the prices on the auction. In the past, I always had to save the hand written prices on each of my leagues. I happily threw them in the garbage can before I left home from Vegas. It was great during the auction to have my ipad up and being able to see everyone's max bid no matter what seat I had in the auction. Throughout the season, I always like to go back to the draft boards in all of my leagues and relive what could have been. I never would go back to the auctions because it didn't have the prices, but I will now. Great addition. Add the online auction format somehow with some sort of partnership and $50,000 overall will be the floor on the overall auction championship next year.

From your lips to God's ears Jon!!

[Daren E]

I realize this thread was meant for the live draft boards but I do have a suggestion on the new online draft board. Some of the different position colors are very similar so it was tough to tell from a broad view which positions were being taken more than others in the last few rds. Would be nice if in addition to the different colors the position was also listed in the corner of the "sticker."