What Technical Improvements Would You Like To See?

[Greg Ambrosius]

We are always open for suggestions that help us make the NFBC better and that includes rules suggestions and site suggestions. We believe that we have a very solid game and a very solid site, but everything needs tweaking from time to time. Let's use this thread to handle the technical suggestions and constructively improve the game software that we already have.

As I posted yesterday, we already have three major items we are working on and the goal is to have all of them ready early in the 2013 season. They include:

Live Scoring Enhancements (including doubleheaders issue)
Live Overall Standings
An NFBC Mobile App

We are also going to work on the NFBC Online draft room and enhance that since online is the biggest growth engine of this business. Everything online needs to be improved and made easier for the users. That's a major focus for us.

Getting Lifetime Standings and your past history back on your pages is very important with our 10th NFBC season approaching. The data that was sent back to us from Fanball needs to be available again.

We have some side games we're going to work on and introduce in 2013 that we think you will like using your existing NFBC Main Event, NFBC XII and NFBC Online Championship teams. More bang for your buck. We are also toying with one additional game format that would likely be available only for satellite leagues. Stay tuned there.

The IT department is interested in any suggestions that can make our site better and more efficient. Once we have that list we can see what items are possible and prioritize them. Our current list includes all of the items above. If you have other suggestions please post them here. We will consider them all.

Thanks again for a great 2012 NFBC season and help us make 2013 the best season ever.

[Money]

A few come to mind.

1. In mid-season you added a drop down box to navigate between multiple teams when changing lineups. This drop down could be used on a lot of pages to allow ease of going from team to team.

2. In Free Agency, when you click on a player and then move back to the bidding page, it defaults back to the original default (pitchers), it would be nice if it could stay with what you were previously looking at.

3. The ability to bid on a player from his player page.

Thanks

[joshguy]

If the mobile app can be used for the draft room, that would be a HUGE improvement. Drafting from Safari on my iPhone is doable but awkward. Would especially help during the slow drafts.

Also, during online drafts, if you're doing a sortable search of players, once someone drafts, your search is reverted back to the default list. So if youre in a fast moving draft, sortable searches are tough.

How about allowing one to opt in to receive texts if they are on the clock in slow drafts? The emails sent out arent always set out in a timely fashion.

How about adding conditional picks for the auto draft function. Say if Im #14 and the 13th pick is on the clock. I have Brandon Phillips and Dan Uggla as 1 and 2 in my que. Cory Hart is #3. If I get Phillips, I dont want Uggla then so on my next pick, it would pick Hart for me and not Uggla.

If you're around the turns on a slow draft, its impossible to do more than just auto one because of these types of scenerios. But if I could do that, I could get two picks in and not slow down the draft.

[Likewhat17]

Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I wasn't a big fan of the "new and improved" live scoring that I saw.

The things happening on the left-hand side were impressive, showing when my players were up to bat, etc with live updates. That's great. It's the column on the right that was giving me headaches.

For one, having all the stats laid out on one line with no separation, including stats that we really don't need or care about (doubles, triples, walks, etc) was difficult to follow. I happened to enjoy how the stats were separated on the old live scoring, and gave you only the stats that you were looking for.

Again, a minor nit-pick, and I could be in the minority on that, but thought I would throw out an opinion.

[lrr]

This is probably not a priority. But I would like to be able to view cumulative results in my league at any particular point in time. For example, in week 26, you can pull up results for week 7. I would also like to be able to view in week 26 what the results were after week 7 taking into account weeks one through 6 also. That way I can measure my progress and also see which teams made the biggest moves. Thanks.

[joshguy]

Perhaps I'm in the minority, but I wasn't a big fan of the "new and improved" live scoring that I saw.

The things happening on the left-hand side were impressive, showing when my players were up to bat, etc with live updates. That's great. It's the column on the right that was giving me headaches.

For one, having all the stats laid out on one line with no separation, including stats that we really don't need or care about (doubles, triples, walks, etc) was difficult to follow. I happened to enjoy how the stats were separated on the old live scoring, and gave you only the stats that you were looking for.

Again, a minor nit-pick, and I could be in the minority on that, but thought I would throw out an opinion.

agreed, all the stats we dont use really cluttered up the live scoring page. Other than the new live scoring was great.

[Red Sox Nation-]

Hi Greg,

Great thread. Agree with the live scoring piece. I love the speed of it but we need to clean up the stats and format shown. We only need the stats that are important to our game and we need the numbers displayed in the same columns.

Greg- What features will the mobile app have? Lineup, Live scoring, etc? (I would think at a minimum those two would be features)

Several years ago we could bid on a player from the player page. It would be nice to bring this back. Thanks

Jason

[JohnP]

Nice list going here. I agree on the stat line one as well. I remember we went through this a bit when we had the fanball stats and they were in a funky order. In this case....just needs to be cleaned up, organized, some stuff eliminated, a win can be noted with a w, don't need the word "win", etc.

The other think I would have like to do was to be able to click on a team that is not in my league and see their live scoring. I guess that is mostly towards the end of the year as overall standings play out. Who knows - maybe there was a way to see that this year and I just didn't figure it out.

FAAB - for sure is the best FAAB system anywhere. Try Sportsline for a year and you will realize what a great feature this game has with the FAAB system.

[jim.s]

I'd really like last 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, 28 days stats avilable on our lineup pages to quickly see who's hot, who's losing AB etc. We have it for FA.

[Money]

On the overall standing page I'd like to see them add the points change that occur each day to each of the category's. It exists on the overall page (far right) but not on each of the category pages. This would simply make all of the pages consistent and you could easily see the impact of your previous days stats by category.

[Glenneration X]

Outside of the obvious and previously mentioned improvements needed for the Live Standings and Live Overall Standings and the return of our lifetime records and standings, there are a couple other enhancements I'd like to see that would aid those of us with multiple teams.

Would it be possible to modify the FAAB page into one that utilizes the "drag & drop" method of editing your primary and conditional bid order rather than the current "move up" and "edit" currently utilized. Drag & drop is just so much faster.

Also, would it be possible to utilize the toggle option for all team pages and not just the Set Lineup and Live Scoring pages. I think this is one of STATS best back end features, but would be even better if able to toggle between my various Standings, FAAB, FAAB results, etc.

Anything that saves time helps those of us with multiple entries.

[Greg Ambrosius]

There are a lot of solid suggestions on this thread. Give us everything you have this week and we'll prioritize everything. Thanks.

[Scared $ Dont Make $]

Free Agent bidding
Move Up should be available for the first backup, so he then takes over the primary spot. A pain to have to edit the primary then edit the backup when you simply just wanted to flip-flop them

[JEagle]

I would like more infor to be available on the team page. I would like to see upcoming pitching matchups and batter vs pitcher matchups. Its irritating that i have to flip between a few different sites to see who my players are up against for the upcoming week.

[Rainiers]

One new idea and one old idea would make this great site better for me.

NEW IDEA: In the FAAB BId results it would be cool to know not only how much the next highest bid was but who bid it. I think this would also encourage conversation, maybe some fun trash talking, etc., between leaguemates.

OLD IDEA: I love the new Live Scoring page that debuted in September, but I kind of miss the baseball icon that used to sit next to today's probable starters.

[JohnP]

Free Agent bidding
Move Up should be available for the first backup, so he then takes over the primary spot. A pain to have to edit the primary then edit the backup when you simply just wanted to flip-flop them

Yes! Good one.

[TRAIN]

On the Overall NFBC Standings page I would like to see a new category added to the top of the page that would be similar to the "View Standings for Period" line.

The "View Standings for Period" now only tells us where our team finished overall for that WEEK (only 1 week).

This new line would be laid out the same with each week of the season being clickable.

However, the information that would be displayed would be the Overall Standings for the YTD and not just for that week.

So, if I wanted to see where my team was at week 13 (I think that was the All Star Break), I would just click on Week 13 and I would be able to see where my team stood in the overall standings YTD as of that week.

This would allow us to see where our team was, or any team was YTD, overall after Week 1, 10, 17, 25, etc.

I think adding a new line that gives this info would be much appreciated by all of the NFBC players.

I don't think this information is now available on the NFBC website (if it is please let me know).

[DOUGHBOYS]

I like Train's improvement and I know others have mentioned it too.
Mine is a small one.
A 'Submit Lineup' box that is both on top and on the bottom of our rosters.
It saves a lot of scrolling, especially for the 50 round slow leagues.

[Scared $ Dont Make $]

Yes, they will need to add buttons to pages where data falls "below the fold". So the user experience does not require them to scroll back up to the top of the page to click a button.

The fold in web design is the position on a web page where the majority of browsers viewing the page will begin to scroll. Elements that are positioned “below the fold” are not seen when the page first loads. And some people believe that it's important to design web pages that don't scroll, or that keep only less important information below the fold.

[Bob Enzyte]

On the live scoring page, could you add week to date stats with today, previous YTD and YTD stats?

[EA Sports]

Good list so far. A very small addition that I would like to see would be a column for games started (GS) for pitchers. It would make life a little easier on Sunday.

[Red Sox Nation-]

Good list so far. A very small addition that I would like to see would be a column for games started (GS) for pitchers. It would make life a little easier on Sunday.

Yes- This is a great idea and necessary. If we sort by K's for periods of time its cluttered with relievers when we are looking for SP.

[joshguy]

Good list so far. A very small addition that I would like to see would be a column for games started (GS) for pitchers. It would make life a little easier on Sunday.

Yes, please have a better updated projected starter spot. This year, only some pitchers starts would be in red. If it could be all pitchers, it would be such a HUGE time saver. Now I have to toggle back and forth between the NFBC site and others. Oh, and if I could get a little greedy, which opposing pitcher the pitcher is facing would make it even better I would be giddy with just the starts though!

[Red Sox Nation-]

I'm bumping up this all-important thread. Let's give IT all off-season to implement this stuff for opening day.

[Greg Ambrosius]

I'm bumping up this all-important thread. Let's give IT all off-season to implement this stuff for opening day.

Thanks for the reminder Jason. I've copied and pasted all of the suggestions here and then tried to prioritize them for our IT department. I've sent this to them now. We'll talk these through and see what could and should be done to make the game and the site better for 2013. I'll let you know what we decide soon enough.

The IT guys are asking for this input because they want this site to be as good as possible and it's important to have an entire list of suggestions and then prioritize them. What is important to you might not be important to the masses. Or something that seems complicated to you might be an easy fix for our IT guys. So let's get all of this on paper, in front of the guys who can make these happen and see what we can get done.

Great list and I think this just about does it. It's being sent now to our group and we'll stay on top of this. Thanks again all.