Any ideas on how to speed up an online live draft? (1 Viewer)

I’m curious if anyone uses any unique ideas to speed up the drafting of online live drafts using myfantasyleague.com?

It seems every year my league has one or two owners which monopolize the draft time, causing the draft to drag and cause other owners to start whining and complaining. I would rather not micro-manage everyone's draft by setting up the per pick draft timer. I realize some owners pick quickly for the majority of their picks and at some crucial rounds, take little longer. A set timer also changes the feel of a draft, causing more stress and more bad picks as people fret about the time more than thinking about who to pick.

One idea I had was to give each owner a set allotment of time for their whole draft. Say everyone gets to use 10 minutes for a 15 round draft. After their 10 minutes are up, they are forced to use the pre-pick method on MFL or the commissioner will skip their pick. Albeit, MFL doesn't allow such an option.

Alternately, I am figuring to base the week 1 waiver wire order off of the total pick times for each team. The teams which pick the quickest go earlier in the waiver order and the slower teams end up at the end of the waiver order for week 1.

Does anyone else have experience with 7-8 remote owners using MFL during a live draft to expedite the drafting times? When everyone was in the same room, peer pressure/cattleprod was sufficient... but now with most owners remotely connecting the draft, a different mechanism is needed...

Thanks in advance for any ideas/strategies you use which work.

one problem with the waiver idea: i traded up in one of my drafts, and "inherited" the length of that pick which increased my average pick time dramatically.

WisWolvrns said:

I’m curious if anyone uses any unique ideas to speed up the drafting of online live drafts using myfantasyleague.com?It seems every year my league has one or two owners which monopolize the draft time, causing the draft to drag and cause other owners to start whining and complaining. I would rather not micro-manage everyone's draft by setting up the per pick draft timer. I realize some owners pick quickly for the majority of their picks and at some crucial rounds, take little longer. A set timer also changes the feel of a draft, causing more stress and more bad picks as people fret about the time more than thinking about who to pick.One idea I had was to give each owner a set allotment of time for their whole draft. Say everyone gets to use 10 minutes for a 15 round draft. After their 10 minutes are up, they are forced to use the pre-pick method on MFL or the commissioner will skip their pick. Albeit, MFL doesn't allow such an option.Alternately, I am figuring to base the week 1 waiver wire order off of the total pick times for each team. The teams which pick the quickest go earlier in the waiver order and the slower teams end up at the end of the waiver order for week 1.Does anyone else have experience with 7-8 remote owners using MFL during a live draft to expedite the drafting times? When everyone was in the same room, peer pressure/cattleprod was sufficient... but now with most owners remotely connecting the draft, a different mechanism is needed...Thanks in advance for any ideas/strategies you use which work.

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I know you said you don't want to micro manage your owners with a draft timer, but to me using a total time allotment would be micro managing and it would be manual most likely.The best way to fairly address this is to use a timer. Everyone is treated exactly the same and everyone knows what to expect.In 1 of our survivor slow drafts, we implemented a 4 hour timer. Not too bad except for this 1 caveat:If you timeout and miss a pick, you cannot make that pick until the end of the draft.Let me assure that everyone made their pick and it was in a timely manner. No issues at all. And in fact everyone enjoyed the draft more than usual.Just some ideas that might help.

amnesiac said:

one problem with the waiver idea: i traded up in one of my drafts, and "inherited" the length of that pick which increased my average pick time dramatically.

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Good observation. I'll have to test this in a mock to see what can be done around it.

Family Matters said:

In 1 of our survivor slow drafts, we implemented a 4 hour timer. Not too bad except for this 1 caveat:If you timeout and miss a pick, you cannot make that pick until the end of the draft.Let me assure that everyone made their pick and it was in a timely manner. No issues at all. And in fact everyone enjoyed the draft more than usual.Just some ideas that might help.

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Thanks.Did you ever have a problem with 7-8 owners making picks right after one another, which moves up the next guy to a 4 hour clock with him maybe not realizing he was on the clock so soon? Probably not an issue for frequent internet users, but it was always a question I had with such drafts.I did an analysis over our last 5 seasons on MFL and found 95% of the picks happen in 3 minutes or less. So I'm figuring on putting in a 3 minute pick timer based off the above. I'm still debating on what to happen when it expires... my guess a first warning, them moving down to no warning to autopicking, etc... Overall, it's a typical thing... 90% of the laws are for 10% of the people... lol

WisWolvrns said:

Family Matters said:

In 1 of our survivor slow drafts, we implemented a 4 hour timer. Not too bad except for this 1 caveat:If you timeout and miss a pick, you cannot make that pick until the end of the draft.Let me assure that everyone made their pick and it was in a timely manner. No issues at all. And in fact everyone enjoyed the draft more than usual.Just some ideas that might help.

Click to expand...

Thanks.Did you ever have a problem with 7-8 owners making picks right after one another, which moves up the next guy to a 4 hour clock with him maybe not realizing he was on the clock so soon? Probably not an issue for frequent internet users, but it was always a question I had with such drafts.I did an analysis over our last 5 seasons on MFL and found 95% of the picks happen in 3 minutes or less. So I'm figuring on putting in a 3 minute pick timer based off the above. I'm still debating on what to happen when it expires... my guess a first warning, them moving down to no warning to autopicking, etc... Overall, it's a typical thing... 90% of the laws are for 10% of the people... lol

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The way to resolve unexpected issues is to have your owners use the predraft feature. If you are in say round 3 and you know your pick is say 4-10 away, there is no reason someone couldn't predraft in order to avoid timing out.In the draft I mentioned before, most owners would predraft if they knoew there might a conflict. This kept things moving very nicely.

Commish should get phone number before the draft and holler if someone's time is about to expire. It's a real simple thing I've come to really appreciate. Predrafting can make some rounds fly and when it's not done geesh they can take a long time.

The league I commish uses a 24 hour timer, and we start right after week 3 of preseason (Saturday night). It gives us a lot of time to draft without being susceptible to preseason injuries.

At first we'd have some people that slowed things down, but the last couple of years everyone has gotten pretty good at knowing when and how to queue up players. We only had a few of picks this year that took 12hrs+ (and most of those are during sleeping hours, so not a big deal really.) We always have been able to finish before the Thursday night game, usually on Monday or Tuesday.

One idea I am planning to use if we ever go to a "live" draft is to use 3 minute timers, but give each team a couple of timeouts that they can use to pause their pick. Maybe for an extra 3 minutes or something. Then they can use that for trading/extra research/whatever.

Not trying to hijack too much, but we had some problems this year slow drafting because of the new feature, My Draft List.

In the past, if you might miss your pick, there was incentive to use Predraft lists which make your pick as soon as you are on the clock. But now there is also My Draft List, which only picks the guy at the end of your timer.

So we had a guy who is gone for long stretches of time, and rather than predraft he would use My Draft List. Good for him in that if he does return he can make his pick himself... but bad for the league that we had to wait the full 4 hours, or very close to it, on a large number of his picks.

As a result I think there is a lot of impetus in that league to cut our slow timer from 4 hours to 2 hours for next year.

As long as teams get drafted before the season starts, tell the people that whine to get a life. It's a hobby. Not everyone can sit at the computer in breathless anticipation of their next pick.