Fantasy Baseball Drafts are running much slower than we would like and there have been a handful of complaints. We are addressing this issue on several fronts. We have updated some settings today, and those changes have roughly doubled the speed of the acknowledgement from the server when drafting. We are also working on a small update to the draft GUI, that will reduce the number of server calls required to complete a draft. This will be a huge time saver for baseball. Lastly, one of the issues specific to baseball is that the number of games per contest and the size of the baseball rosters leads to much larger data transfer than the other fantasy sports. To address this we will begin trimming back the available players in the baseball draft pool by removing players who do not average enough fantasy points/game to meet the minimum 10pt rank cap value. These types of players are in general poor draft choices anyway, so we hope they will hardly be missed. As players move their average fantasy points/game up to the minimum we will add them back into the fantasy baseball draft pool. This will have the added benefit of us properly ranking new players before adding them to the draft pool.
As usual, thanks for all your feedback. We are constantly trying to improve our fantasy sports offering so let us know what you think about us good or bad.
Showing posts with label Draft Pool. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Draft Pool. Show all posts
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Monday, July 16, 2007
Issues With The Fantasy Draft Pool
We have got lots of feedback on issues with players missing from the baseball draft pool, or classified in the wrong position. It is probably worth taking the time to explain how things work on our site, to clarify a few things. Also this issue is very unique to Baseball, and should not be an issue at all with Football, Basketball, Hockey, Nascar...
The website is fully automated using a live statistic and data feed from the Sports Network. If we had to manually determine everything daily the website would not really be manageable. The feed identifies the roster for each real team and the position for each player. Many baseball players are classified with multiple positions. They may be classified as 1B/OF, DH/OF, 2B/SS or any other combination. For players who are classified with multiple positions, we can't put them in the draft pool because we do not know what position they will play in a given day. Also the DH position is not included in our structure (because of the difference between AL/NL) Unfortunately, there are a handful of popular players that are classified this way.
The draft pool is actually very accurate even with the multiple position issue, but most of the inaccuracies stem from this. There are also a small handful of players who are classified for the wrong single position. Ichiro is one of them. These players are draftable in a position that they do not normally play this year. This is an error in the feed that we have no ability to correct.
We took a quick look at manually correcting the positions of several players, but it is not that simple. When a new player gets called up, we want their position from the feed. Also, we don't want the feed to overwrite our manual corrections. All this complicates things. We also have a ton of development in progress, and we do not want to pull our software team off of what we feel is currently more important.
So I guess what I am saying here, is we are aware of the issues, but it is not a simple or easy fix. We may get to it this year, but it will be based on software resources becoming available in the near future. By next year's baseball season we will do something to clean the positions up and correct errors in the feed. These types of errors do not really exist for the other sports as all players tend to have defined single positions. The draft pool is the same for all competitors in a contest, so there is no advantage given by an error in the draft pool. Unfortunately, for now at least, some user's favorite players may not be available in the fantasy baseball draft pool.
The website is fully automated using a live statistic and data feed from the Sports Network. If we had to manually determine everything daily the website would not really be manageable. The feed identifies the roster for each real team and the position for each player. Many baseball players are classified with multiple positions. They may be classified as 1B/OF, DH/OF, 2B/SS or any other combination. For players who are classified with multiple positions, we can't put them in the draft pool because we do not know what position they will play in a given day. Also the DH position is not included in our structure (because of the difference between AL/NL) Unfortunately, there are a handful of popular players that are classified this way.
The draft pool is actually very accurate even with the multiple position issue, but most of the inaccuracies stem from this. There are also a small handful of players who are classified for the wrong single position. Ichiro is one of them. These players are draftable in a position that they do not normally play this year. This is an error in the feed that we have no ability to correct.
We took a quick look at manually correcting the positions of several players, but it is not that simple. When a new player gets called up, we want their position from the feed. Also, we don't want the feed to overwrite our manual corrections. All this complicates things. We also have a ton of development in progress, and we do not want to pull our software team off of what we feel is currently more important.
So I guess what I am saying here, is we are aware of the issues, but it is not a simple or easy fix. We may get to it this year, but it will be based on software resources becoming available in the near future. By next year's baseball season we will do something to clean the positions up and correct errors in the feed. These types of errors do not really exist for the other sports as all players tend to have defined single positions. The draft pool is the same for all competitors in a contest, so there is no advantage given by an error in the draft pool. Unfortunately, for now at least, some user's favorite players may not be available in the fantasy baseball draft pool.
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