MFL's live auction (2 Viewers)

[GregR_2]

Edit to add: Changed thread title now that I've actually used it. Comments in post 3 from testing and post 5 from the actual live auction.

Am ecstatic that MFL added a live auction feature this year. We used to go over to fantasyauctioneer.com to hold our vet player auction until they closed down.

Has anyone used it yet? Any impressions of it? Any issues you ran into or things we should be aware of to have it go smoothly?

We actually have a tagged player auction, then a rookie draft, then a vet auction. So we'll be making use of pretty much all the draft and auction options they have now.

 

[Illegal Pants Downfield]

Haven't used it, but interested in hearing from people who have.

 

[GregR]

I just tested the live auction. Here is what I think I learned from it.

[*]If you don't nominate someone in your time, it skips you and goes to the next person. I don't see an option for changing that to say, let the computer nominate someone.

[*]The commish has a pause button, but it seems it can only pause between players being auctioned. I tried to use it during bidding and while it said I paused the auction, the timer continued to count down until it expired and the player was awarded.

[*]While the auction was underway, I went and changed the timer so there is less time between a new bid and the player being awarded. My window seemed to keep showing the old timer until I closed and reopened the window. I have no idea what would happen if there had been other people in the auction with me at the time.

[*]Players are not removed from the player list automatically as they are put up for bid. I had to toggle the list to show only QB, then toggle it back to show all, to get the awarded players to disappear. Though that worked for most players, it left MJD at the top of the list and wouldn't remove him no matter what I did.

[*]In order to hear the voice prompts of what player got nominated, and the "going once", etc, you may need a Quicktime plugin installed. At least I did for Firefox. It didn't give me the "missing plugin" message until the first time it tried to say something.

[*]I thought the Callie voice was by far the easiest to understand.

[*]If you go into the Live Auction Room as commissioner, you have a menu you can choose to nominate or bid for any team. You also get the pause/resume buttons.

[*]The window highlights recent, big events like a player being nominated or awarded, by making the background yellow. Which makes it unreadable when your color scheme is set to a dark background and white text, at least until you highlight it with your mouse.

[*]As commish, I didn't hear any voice prompts about it being your turn to nominate. Not sure if people logged in as owners get them. So you may have to pay attention. I didn't see a place for a nomination order, it just goes down the list I think.

 

[mike11162]

I'm not using the live auction room, but I'm still having some problems/glitches this time around. Have a slow auction going on right now, and we've had some problems with mistaken bids. I used it last year same format and there were no issues. I have everything set right, I'm sure of it. I think it has to do with glitches when owners are submitting bids over the phone. I also have one guy who was able to exceed the auction cap by one dollar, and I can't find any valid reason other than glitches caused by other devices accessing the software.

 

[GregR]

We had our veteran live auction last night. It mostly worked well though we did have a couple of snags or annoyances.

1) One owner said he couldn't type more than one letter into the text windows, including the one you type the bid in. He could use the Bid+$1 button so it wasn't like he couldn't bid. No one else had this problem so I think it's probably something odd with his browser. Later on it seemed to work ok for him. The biggest problem for him was not being able to nominate players as he couldn't type in a starting bid.

2) We had the following happen to two owners including myself. Anticipating that I was next up to nominate a player, I selected the player I planned to nominate from the list. When the bidding finished on the previous player, I typed in $1 starting bid and hit the button, only to watch someone else get nominated. It turns out that when the bidding ends, it refreshes those lists of available players, which undoes the player that I had highlighted. So instead it jumped to the player at the top of the list, and as I didn't notice this, when I hit submit, it put that player up for bid. So warn your league to be careful to not choose the player they want to nominate until the system has finished on the player before.

3) Teams have about 40 or 45 seconds to nominate a player. I couldn't find a way to change the order, or to change the timer, or to remove a team from the nomination list. It just goes through the franchises one after another. Unfortunately, it gives a turn to every owner whether they are present or not, and whether they have roster space left or not. I tried going into franchise abilities and removing the ability to start an auction from those teams who had full roster, but it didn't help. So around the point that half the league had full rosters, it got really slow. To get around it, I did the auction as commish (you can choose any team to nominate or submit bids as so I just left that set on my own team), and at the end I had people tell me in the chat window who they were nominating and I started the bidding for each person. It went much, much faster that way.

4) At one point it let an owner start nominate a player even though I had the auction paused. I had to go into the commissioner set up to delete that one since we were on a break and everyone wasn't back to the computer yet.

5) Anyone who had problems, closing the auction window and reopening it tended to fix it. LIke someone couldn't find the player in the nomination list that we had to delete the auction for. Once he closed and re-entered the auction window he showed up.

6) Minor complaint... the chat window doesn't have a scroll bar on it. So you can only see about the last 10 comments.

 

[Jersey35]

Thanks for this. Planning on using this new feature tomorrow night. I already expected to handle the nominations myself and let the owners simply chat me with the names to avoid challenges - looks like you've confirmed that's the way to go.

 

[Alberta Clipper]

Hi Greg. As a veteran of auctions would you prefer and trust ESPN or MFL at this point in time to host a fast live auction?

 

[AbidingDude]

Thanks. I plan on using this feature this Sunday, and am curious how it compares to ESPN as well. Disappointed to hear that nominations work differently. What about the allotted auction time? ESPN allowed 30 seconds for bidding, and if there was a new high bid in the last 10 seconds it would reset the clock to 10 seconds. Does myfantasyleague.com do something similar? Does it completely reset the clock? I am thinking of starting with 15 seconds time. Any particular browser that seemed to work best?

 

[GregR]

I haven't used ESPN so I can't compare directly. My experiences were all on fantasyauctioneer.com. Anyone familiar with that system, the basics are identical in MFL. Just some of the bells and whistles not there yet like setting your own nomination order.

The MFL system has 1 time increment after nomination that if a new bid isn't received in, then the player is awarded. If a new bid comes in, the clock resets to the full increment. You can set the increment in Comissioners-> Setup-> General Auction Setup. (To see it you'll need to go into General League Setup and choose to have an online live auction.) In there you have choices for the timer duration in increments of 15 seconds. So you could do 15 seconds or 30 seconds, all the way up to 11 minutes. We did 15 seconds (same as we had on Fantasy Auctioneer) and it worked fine.

I would trust the MFL fine. Other than the person with the browser problem it worked well, just one or two small quirks. I know the person with the browser issue has a very old computer and isn't into computers much, so wouldn't surprise me if he's on some old browser version or something that caused it.

Oh, and two other things worth mentioning. Sometimes the voice prompt that does the "going, going... gone" will say that the player is sold, but someone got a bid in right before it closed, and it will continue. Not a big deal, just you want to look and make sure the screen says the player was awarded, and not trust the voice and look away. Even if you did, you'd hear a new "going, going..." etc. That actually happened on Fantasy Auctioneer too, so wasn't too surprising to me.

The other thing I noticed, and this was a good thing in my mind, is that the system seems to have some intelligence built in around the Bid+1 button that FA didn't have. On FA, if you hit the Bid+1 button it tacked $1 on no matter what. So if the bid was $10 and you hit Bid+1, but someone put in a $50 bid a quarter second before you, you'd end up with a $51 bid. If you do that on MFL, it would tell you that you need to bid more than the current bid. So it must not apply the +1 to bids that come in more recently than a second or something like that. And there is a status window top right that will tell you that it didn't accept your bid and why.

 

[GregR]

I see there is also an option in the General Auction Setting for "Automatically Rotate Nomination Process Between All Franchises?" I'm not sure what happens if you turn that off, if anyone can nominate someone and you just need to make sure the league does it in order or what. If I would have seen it I would have tried that at the end of the auction, though doing all the nominations myself worked fine.

The chat window doesn't have a scroll bar, so using the normal league chat might not be a bad idea either. Though I don't think it was an issue for us really.

 

[GregR]

... Any particular browser that seemed to work best?

I didn't hear any complaints from anyone except the one guy. I was using the most current version of firefox and it worked fine. You need a Quicktime plugin in order to have it say the name of the player outloud and get the "going, going, gone" messages.

 

[Toomuchnv]

... Any particular browser that seemed to work best?

I didn't hear any complaints from anyone except the one guy. I was using the most current version of firefox and it worked fine. You need a Quicktime plugin in order to have it say the name of the player outloud and get the "going, going, gone" messages.

I figured out how to change the nomination order...on the Commissioner Setup page..under the Commissioner/Franchise setup coumn...click on Custom Franchise order....if you set this to your nomination order it will adjust the live auction to that order.

 

[GregR]

... Any particular browser that seemed to work best?

I didn't hear any complaints from anyone except the one guy. I was using the most current version of firefox and it worked fine. You need a Quicktime plugin in order to have it say the name of the player outloud and get the "going, going, gone" messages.

I figured out how to change the nomination order...on the Commissioner Setup page..under the Commissioner/Franchise setup coumn...click on Custom Franchise order....if you set this to your nomination order it will adjust the live auction to that order.

Awesome, thanks for posting that.

 

[wilked]

My observations:

Our countdown timer repeatedly screwed up, would end with 10 secs left. I think this might have been influenced by us changing the reset value between 30 and 20 secs while the draft was underway.

The draft order kind of got screwed up, at points it was just anarchy (anyone can nominate at any time). Not sure why

 

[Genester]

I've used both MFL and ESPN now. My leagues are on MFL, so it would be ideal for me to go for the MFL auction tool. However, ESPN is far far superior at this point, on many counts:

1- ESPN is much more polished. You don't get the kind of small annoyances Greg described with ESPN. I think this is just a Function of time - it takes many auctions to have a great product, so I am sure MFL will improve.

2 - The interface and how appealing it is is far superior for ESPN. This is a known downside for MFL - while being a fantastic league hosting site, it's not pretty out of the box.

3 - The pace ESPN drives is excellent. Fantasy Auctioneer and MFL seem much more relaxed. ESPN's settings force a dynamic, fast auction. I was worried at first, but this is a huge positive to me.

Net, ESPN is much, much better today, to the point where I am willing to invest in transferring the rosters from EsPN to MFL. I am very happy there's more competition now. Worst case, ESPN now has the incentive to improve and keep it's auction free. Best case, MFL tweaks and improves it's product where it is close to ESPN, and then we have a few equal options

 

[GregR]

My observations:

Our countdown timer repeatedly screwed up, would end with 10 secs left. I think this might have been influenced by us changing the reset value between 30 and 20 secs while the draft was underway.

The draft order kind of got screwed up, at points it was just anarchy (anyone can nominate at any time). Not sure why

That's one of the things I mentioned, you need to close and reopen your window if you change settings:

[*]While the auction was underway, I went and changed the timer so there is less time between a new bid and the player being awarded. My window seemed to keep showing the old timer until I closed and reopened the window. I have no idea what would happen if there had been other people in the auction with me at the time.

 

[AbidingDude]

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.

 

[cliffhuxtible]

I just want to add a few helpful pointers to this thread, as I assume there are leagues that will be holding their auctions this week. We did ours today using the MFL interface, and encountered many of the same problems that others in this thread experienced. If I could do it again, here is what I would tell my league:

1) You must have a player selected and a dollar value entered into the nomination box in order to get the nomination to work correctly: this was a consistent issue for us. If I recall correctly, the default $1 nomination bid is automatically typed in the box at the outset of the auction. However, because of errors and problems, everybody in the league refreshed the window several times, and the pre-typed $1 disappeared for some. Make sure they type that in before hitting nominate. Conversely, we had two owners manage to nominate a bid for nobody that counted against their salary cap. In other words, they won a player named "0000" for $1. I don't know if this was due to their failure to highlight a player when nominating or just a bug in the system. Fortunately, this is easily fixed. As commissioner, just pause the auction and click on the "delete auctions" button. This will allow you to view the list of sold players. You will need to delete the player named "0000" and then have everyone refresh their browsers.

2) The interface does not allow for errant button presses. We had some issues where owners hit the nominate button out of turn. Make sure everybody understands that this can bring the auction to a frightening halt. In general, people need to be aware that this isn't yet an interface like Yahoo or ESPN. Acting out of turn can really screw things up. And if you have to pause the auction, make sure NOBODY hits nominate during the break.

3) The "skip" button is important. As commissioner, you will almost certainly need it at some point. Because it just cycles through the different owners, each person skipped will be told they're on the clock as it cycles around. Make sure everybody is following the chat feature and tell them you're skipping around back to OWNER X beforehand. Otherwise you run the risk of getting even more screwed up, as somebody is mistakenly told they're on the clock as you cycle through the entire group to get back to the skipped owner. If they get a bid in before you skip to the next person, you'll have to wait for that auction to end before pausing, deleting, and skipping again. Be aware that there is a frustrating lag associated with the skip. I had to cycle through a few times in order to land on the right owner.

4) The EMERGENCY auction help button at the top is your friend. While it appears you're just filling out the usual MFL help ticket (response within 24 hours), we had a tech support guy in our auction chatroom within minutes. He solved a serious problem for us. Additionally, you should let your league know that customer support posts under the COMMISSIONER handle in the chat room. People were confused, thinking that I was typing the questions he was typing. This led to even more problems, as everybody in the league started responding. Let them know in advance that if tech support shows up, STOP POSTING. It was a nightmare trying to explain the situation to everybody in the chat room.

I like MFL a lot and have used them for years. They have correctly labelled their auction room as a BETA, as that is what it is. Based on their history, I am confident that next year's interface will be on par with ESPN, Yahoo, and the old fantasyauctioneer.com site.

 

[nysportsfan]

Still can't understand why MFL won't pony up the dough to make their UI crisp. It's by far the best hosting site and most reliable I've used, but also the ugliest.

 

[cliffhuxtible]

I agree. My guess is that they do well with what they have. So many leagues have their own customized sites there as well (most of which I find ugly) that I'm guessing it's just not a big concern.

 

[dal_boys_phan]

Tried it yesterday as a mock, but will need to go a different route for the draft next Saturday.

Beta is a good description - will definitely give them feedback on what would be best to add/change to make it better.

Only learned through the emergency help deck that F5 is your friend - it allows you to refresh the draft room without closing down that browser window and reopening - so that would have been better as a dedicated button. Many of the similar comments from above came into play during the mock, but as most of our owners have had experience with CBS's live auction draft and that is rock solid, we will be drafting there this year and then loading rosters.

 

[harryhood]

2 years on ESPN and haven't looked back in an Auction setting. We use MFL for the in-season running of the league but ESPN puts out a great auction product. As a commish, it only takes me about 30 minutes to transfer the rosters from ESPN to MFL(using the import rosters tool on MFL), and apparently saves much headaches. The one thing with an auction is all 12 teams have to be moving forward in sync, and if that doesn't happen, there is some seriously frustrated owners.

Glad ESPN has this auction software, and hopefully MFL will catch up in terms of usability and UI.

 

[Binky The Doormat]

It all starts with Vick. I got caught enforcing pricing in our auction and it has placed me in a much higher risk/reward situation than usual.

Also have DeAngelo Williams, and a WR combo of Kenny Britt, Brandon Lloyd, and Dez Bryant that gotta come through.

 

[Binky The Doormat]

Still can't understand why MFL won't pony up the dough to make their UI crisp. It's by far the best hosting site and most reliable I've used, but also the ugliest.

Yeah - and try loading rosters by hand - f'n brutual for these days.