Post
by Greg Ambrosius » Thu Nov 30, 2017 9:48 am
I promise this is my last post of the day with MTM, but it's important. It's important for everyone.
Every single point that is made by MTM or anyone else on these boards or via email or via text or via phone that helps us improve the contest is GREATLY appreciated and accepted by all of us. That's a fact. You folks are using the site every second of every day and nobody can tell us what can be done better than the folks that use it. Tom and I don't spend 1% of our time compared to you on the game site or in the draft room. That's also a fact. So EVERY suggestion that can help us make the site better is appreciated. We now have a tech team in place that will act on our suggestions and they want to make this software the best in the industry, just as you do. If we haven't proven that our new company is totally committed to this space by now, well, then you haven't been paying attention.
What I'm disappointed about the criticisms on the new draft room are where they came from and what resulted from that. MTM gave the new online draft room a big thumbs down and many who haven't even seen the new draft room agreed with him. He was fighting for EVERYONE to Make The NFBC Great Again....excuse me, Make The NFBC Better.
You can correct me if I'm wrong Mike, but you make all of your picks on your phone. You aren't sitting in front of a 27" desktop monitor or even a 13" desktop monitor drafting this DC team. You are doing it on a 5" phone. That is why you are BEGGING for the Que to be bigger on your phone. You want to load players into your Que on your phone. Your criticism came from your drafting experience on the phone.
Now not everyone is going to draft 50 rounds on their phone. And as Dan Kenyon has eloquently stated, the new draft room is functional, there appears to be no tech hiccups in selecting players or putting them in your Que, and drafts are moving smoothly. It's easy to Chat in the new draft room, the draft board is similar to the past one, and you can even change your player's positions on your roster during the draft. As Dan said, this new online draft room is better than the STATS HTML or Flash draft room and I totally agree. And we'll continue to make it better for desktop or laptop drafting, and of course eventually for improving the phone experience.
Remember, for most of our years at STATS we used the Flash draft room, which was developed around 2001 or 2002, and which is software that is no longer supported on computers. Flash is a dinosaur. And the HTML draft room was never accepted by our desktop drafters. We know because we could see who used HTML or Flash in every single draft. Last year more than 80 percent (and Tom agrees it's much higher than that) used the old Flash draft software. Why? Because it was reliable and simple. You could see more players in the default list than the HTML version. You could use the HTML version on your phone or on Apple products like the iPad, but few used it for a regular draft. It's kind of like the old FAAB and the new FAAB at STATS. Well, just so you know, there will be just one FAAB here!!
Okay, so we've advanced past Flash draft software. We now have a draft room that works very well and is better than what we've had before. It's customizable to all platforms, but when you shrink a 27" draft room to a 21" monitor it looks a little different. And when you shrink that down to a 13" desktop monitor it looks even more different. And when you shrink it down to the iPad size, you lose a little more and then down to the 5" smartphone even more. As IT explained, for us to customize the size and fit of the entire draft room to those sizes it will take separate programming jobs for each device. And that was never the intent right out of the gate. Eventually the entire company will need that -- or maybe it's a drafting app for phones -- but it's not there now. You can certainly easily make a draft pick from a phone -- which is what we wanted -- but putting 40 players in a Que from a phone isn't ideal. Do that from your home computer before you leave work and watch those players leave the Que before your next pick.
So there's nothing wrong with the request to expand the Que on the phone, but that isn't happening separately. And the Que can load as many players as you want on the desktop. But my point is that not everyone drafts like the person who said there are too many faults with the new draft room to list. Get into a draft and find out for yourself. Hell, a $50 DC will show you everything that Dan has talked about. And the suggestions by others on items we overlooked or screwed up on we are addressing and fixing. We have 8 drafts going now and we'll likely have 800+ by season's end. Everything we are doing now will make the busy February-March months so seamless, so why would I be upset?
We're happy that some folks are making DC picks from their phones and keeping drafts cruising. We know how 1 Round Auto will help speed them up, and multiple Round Ques will help even more. We couldn't even draft from some devices before. We're making progress together, but jump on a desktop to draft once, ride that baby hard and then let's have this conversation. Any and all suggestions to improve it will be considered. But we're not just talking about making the NFBC better, we already have and will continue to do that. See it for yourself...on a bigger screen.
And we will make FAAB better and Search for players on your teams better and so on and so on. Will we get it all perfect out of the gate? I highly doubt it. But we are progressing and I'm proud to stand behind the IT guys who are making that happen. Come join us and see for yourself.
Greg Ambrosius
Founder, National Fantasy Baseball Championship
General Manager, Consumer Fantasy Games at SportsHub Technologies
Twitter - @GregAmbrosius