While the amateur draft is an important milestone in every OOTP baseball season, the draft is arguably THE most important event in the game of fantasy baseball. While rosters change and evolve over the course of a fantasy season, the draft is where every team owners hope to land those cornerstone players who will drive their team through the season and lay the groundwork for a successful run to the fantasy championships.
As such, the draft has been one of the areas that has the most potential for success and has generated more than its fair share of headaches for me while coding the fantasy mod. While I didn’t actually plan to throw much time at it in the 1.0.5 release (due to plans I’ve been drawing for a new Live Draft feature down the road), I was forced to put some development time into improving the experience and fixing some serious flaws based on feedback during the beta.
Here’s a rundown of what’s happened to the Draft process for 1.0.5.
Draft Administration
Streamlined Settings Page
Most draft settings were carried over directly from StatsLab when I incorporated them, so any settings that no longer apply have been removed. The settings screen has been revamped and new explanations of some features have been provided.
- Improvements behind the scenes
To streamline the draft admin process, some code changes have separated the generation of draft orders and pick scheduling. - Revamped Scheduling Engine
Put simply, the scheduling tool did not work in prior versions and I recommended it be turned off lest the draft order become corrupted. The scheduling functionality has been completely revamped for 1.0.5. Options more applicable to StatsLab (and online league amateur drafts) have been removed in favor of a more streamlined set of options. The schedule can also be updated and rerun at any time. Commissioners now also have the option to enforce the schedule and auto pick for teams that are past due or simply use the schedule as a guide. - Bug Fixes
Numerous bugs related to draft administration and UI have been addressed and fixed.
Draft Selection Page
- Improved Draft List Management
In prior releases, adding, removing and even changing the order of your draft list resulted in real time calls to the server to save your changes. While this helped assure that changes to the draft list were instantly saved and removed the need for a separate “Save” feature, it also relied heavily on the speed of the server (and user’s own network) to truly be effective. This feature did not pass the test in beta testing and has been revamped.For 1.0.5, the management of the list has been moved to the browser, with all changes tracked locally on the users end, allowing for instant changes without the lag of a call to the server. Each time a player is chosen, they are added to a local browser cache so the page needs only reach out for that information once. When done, a new save list options sends changes to the server.
- Commissioner’s can truly “Act As” any team owner
There are times when the game admin or league commissioner might need to view the selection page from an individual team owner’s perspective for one reason or another (confirm a draft list, review inconsistencies in draft results, make a pick, etc.). The “Act As” feature has been re-coded from end to end to truly allow a league commissioner to completely view the Draft Selection page as any individual owner in that league and even take actions on behalf of that user. - Manually Reload Draft Results
Owners can now manually reload their draft results list on the draft selection page at any time
Draft Results Page
This gives commissioner’s a lot more control over their auto picking selection(s) and should put an end to the dreaded “auto pick all” bug (a legacy bug that affected the original StatsLab code that was the basis for this feature as well).
- Automated Timer and Page Refresh
A new built in timer allows the user to automatically set the page to refresh in a given time frame (number of seconds. The user controls both the refresh time and ability to turn the timer on and off.
New Commissioners Tools
- The Edit/Manual Pick Dialog allows league commissioners to browse a list of draft eligible players and make a selection. This replaces both the broken “edit” feature (which frankly caused numerous problems to the draft) and the old static manual pick dialog that required the commissioner to enter a player ID (and how were they supposed to get that?).
- The Auto Pick Dialog box presents commissioners with several auto picking/drafting options. Commissioners can choose to auto pick:
- The current pick due
- A defined # of picks (which the commissioner can specify)
- Through the end of the current round
- The entire draft
The fantasy draft is a very important event in any fantasy game and in 1.0.5 it’s received some well deserved attention and some major improvements.
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