GroveDiesel
Footballguy
Ugh, that's what I was afraid of. It's been like that every year so far. Our draft is scheduled for Labor Day. I'm praying that they get the kinks out by then.
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AOL Fantasy Football (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Tarkin
- Start date
burd
Footballguy
ah jeez ... this is the last thing i need to hear. i've got people all across the country in my league and i need the live draft function to work. Is there anything specific that was a problem so that i can do some quick troubleshooting? BTW, is there a website where i can live draft for free in case AOL doesn't work?
Phantom Knight
Footballguy
Don't know off the top of my head . . . but many places offer "Mock Drafts". No reason your league couldn't do a mock draft somewhere. And then save the draft for importing into AOL.
Phantom Knight
Footballguy
I have not used AOL . . . yet. So my apologies if some of these are "in there" already.Importing teams
But one thing that is frustrating is having to key in rosters manually when moving from another league or when doing an offline draft. So providing a mechanism to do this - perhaps from an excel spreadsheet and/or a csv and/or tab delimited file would be very nice.
Drafting
Ability for commish to stop timer
Ability for commish to "revert" draft to a specified previous pick. Say currently at pick 4.3. Allow commish to revert to pick 3.7.
Ability for commish to change an owner's pick (without reverting subsequent picks)Commish access to teams
A checkbox on each owner's page to allow the commish to have full access to their team. That way, the owner can control when the commish can wander in while still allowing the possibility of it happening for those rare occasions where it might be necessary.
Scoring
Some places give a lot of flexibility but then . . . lock you down just when you think you are going to get what you need. Perhaps they give points for a defense's "Points allowed". Shutout = ??; 1-6 = ??; 7 10 = ??; etc. But . . . They lock us down to the specified breakdowns . . . what if my league breaks 0; 1-7; 8-13 etc? Why not make the actual break points themselves variables instead of constants. Ditto bonus points for yardage. I play in one league that awards yardage points like this: 0-64 = 0; 65-99=5; 100-125=7 etc. Some sites offer bonus points for yardage that would cover this . . . if they allowed us to specify the break points . . and gave us more than 2 or 3 slots for it. As a programmer, I can say this is pretty trivial and yet it is a wonderful thing.
Ranking
I assume this is already in place. But once we have entered our scoring system . . . the site will rank players according to that system. And allow us to look at previous years' data.
bigfishboy
Footballguy
Make sure that everyone can log into the draft room from the computer that they will be drafting from. We had one guy that logged in from work just fine, but was going to draft from home. When he went to log in from home AOL detected an old account on his computer (that he didn't know the access info to). He could not log out of the old account, could not rest AOL and could not log in using the account info from work. It kept auto-detecting the old account. Serious flames occurred.
One guy had logged onto the website and acquired his team, but the draft room showed it only as "open team". There was nothing he nor I could do in the two hours we had to trouble shoot.
If this is a continuation of last year, make sure you delete last years rosters (they are automatically carried forward) before creating the draft room. Otherwise, all the players are blacked out. Even after doing this, the players were still blacked out and we had to delete them in the draft room. Serious pain in the rear.
If you have issues and have to reset the draft room, it will delete the options that any absentee autodrafters chose. It will not chose from any list they set up. We had one team end up with QB's for his first 4 picks, his 5th was Priest Holmes. Another autodrafter ended up with 8 RB's and 1 WR, we start 3 WR.
One guy had logged onto the website and acquired his team, but the draft room showed it only as "open team". There was nothing he nor I could do in the two hours we had to trouble shoot.
If this is a continuation of last year, make sure you delete last years rosters (they are automatically carried forward) before creating the draft room. Otherwise, all the players are blacked out. Even after doing this, the players were still blacked out and we had to delete them in the draft room. Serious pain in the rear.
If you have issues and have to reset the draft room, it will delete the options that any absentee autodrafters chose. It will not chose from any list they set up. We had one team end up with QB's for his first 4 picks, his 5th was Priest Holmes. Another autodrafter ended up with 8 RB's and 1 WR, we start 3 WR.
bigfishboy
Footballguy
My suggestion is to use a message service chat window (presuming you don't have any predrafters). AIM, Yahoo messenger or MSN. Just open up a chat room and have people type in their picks.Though, I like the idea of using Antsports or other mock site if you can set up a private draft.
Phantom Knight
Footballguy
We used a chat site one year. For me as commish it was hellacious. Never again!* Had to manually keep track of the timer (only 2 minutes)* Field phone calls from other owners* Try to make sure that owners drafted their keepers in the correct round* Try to make sure that owners did not draft other teams keepers* Draft for a team that couldn't make it* And try to draft my own team with any semblance of intelligence* The site we used did not have the ability to save a session log, so I had to manually key each player as it happened.* Had to try to sort what was "official" out of all the chat/grumbling going on at the same time* Try to not nuke the owner who had the audacity to inform me that I had take more than 2 minutes to make a pickIn retrospect most sites offer session logging and that would have helped a good bit. But as commish, it was still pretty overwhelming for me.
pinequick
Footballguy
You could just leave the timer off and start your draft right now. People check in periodically to see what's up, and to see if they're on the clock. It's a lot less hectic than a "live draft", and serves the same purpose (since you're not going to be having everybody in the same place anyway).
burd
Footballguy
thanks for the heads-up. i actually see an owner who signed up for the league but shows as "open team" in the draft room. i thought of a nice backup that others can use if they're having problems w/ their draft room ... Draft Dominator. I downloaded the free version from months back, but there's no reason why i can't use it to manage my draft. It even has a timer .... sweet! So, if AOL kraps out on me, i'm still in business using DD and an instant messaging service.
