I used myfantasyleague.com auction yesterday Aug 28th and had a really bad experience with it.
There are quite a few issues still that need to be worked out.
First, the auction messages screen which shows bids etc was a mess. Sometimes it would have too much information in it like bids that didn't make it in time or bids that were not high enough without actually showing the necessary information. Then other times it would randomly clear itself so information like who the last player awarded was ended up temporarily lost. This was only a problem because some owners had such a horrible delay that they missed some of the auctions alltogether.
Second, the delay for some owners made it a horrible experience. There were at least a dozen players that were awarded too cheaply because several owners were delayed from bidding or even seeing the bidding taking place.
Third, the nomination process is kind of a mess. The 45 seconds seems to take forever and several owners routinely missed their turn to nominate because they didn't notice it was their turn. It wasn't obvious enough either because they were looking at the wrong part of their screen, the auction messages cleared itself, or the because of the delays in the site response. Our auction ended up taking way too long and the end process was a nightmare with the last three teams randomly typing in their nomination request while I tried to keep up by nominating players. It would have been nicer if the site recognized rosters were full.
Fourth, there should have been an auto nomination or auto bidding process. Some guys had to leave early either out of frustration or because the auction was taking too long. Their teams were never filled in either from auto nomination or CPU bidding (doesn't currently exist). One guy had to miss the auction completely and we couldn't contact him. A CPU bidding option might have saved his team.
Fifth, as commissioner I had the ability to nominate for players and bid for them at any time. There was at least a couple times this got me into trouble because either the refresh button reset the drop down box to another team, or because I was a moron and forgot that I had nominated for someone. I ended up bidding for another team at least a few times. Not a big deal except there is another bug with commish bidding. If I bid for team2 on player X for $15 dollars, then I can turn around and bid as the same team on player X for $16 dollars. I ended up needlessly increasing players values without realizing it and ate a few overpriced players out of guilt for bidding as another team due to the site or stupidity.
Finally, the polish isn't necessarily too big of a point but it seems that it would go a long way to improving things. The site definitely needs to fix the nominations part - it makes the auction way too long. And the 15 second timer seemed too fast. I never saw the clock at a full 15 seconds due to the delay. By the time I saw who was nominated, the clock would routinely be at 10 or lower and the voice saying Going Once. It would be better to have one settable timer at ~30 seconds for bidding and an additional timer for bids under 10 seconds that would get reset to ~10 seconds or whatever you want. I also had a hard time following the auction with draft dominator because I would routinely miss who one the auction and for how much. ESPN was fast, but I was able to keep up because the previous results stayed on the screen for long enough time. Again this could have been due to the auction messages problems, or simply making the final results in bold to make it easily noticable. Having to close the screen and reenter a bunch of times is not an option.
Half the league is upset because of the delays and the other half are happy with their cheap players. As commish I am stuck in the middle and am dreading the entirety of the season.
