myhousekey Posted June 23, 2009 Share Posted June 23, 2009 (edited) I had planned on using Fantasy Auctioneer this year to run our online auction but it looks like they are taking a hiatus until the 2010 season. What are other people using to run an online auction this year? We are hosting the league with MFL but it appears they only offer a "slow" online auction taking days or weeks to complete. Ideally we'd like something that can be completed in 3-6 hours. I saw ESPN offers online auctions. I guess you just have to all jump in one of the public auctions to do it if you don't run their league with them. Also saw a site called btfsports.com has some auction software but I'm completely unfamilar with them. Any other suggestions? Edited June 24, 2009 by myhousekey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Belushi Posted June 24, 2009 Share Posted June 24, 2009 I'm in 2 leagues that use on-line auctions. With all of the problems last year with Fantasyauctioneer we had to resort to using MSN to chat the entire auction. It wasn't great, but it was free and got the job done. This year we're looking at using ESPN in one league just for the auction, and then transferring the results to MFL. I can't understand why MFL doesn't offer a service for on-line auctions. Even if they charged $20 on top of your league fees it would be worth it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myhousekey Posted June 27, 2009 Author Share Posted June 27, 2009 (edited) I checked out the free mock auctions over at ESPN. The software seemed pretty good. My only complaints would be: - Can not change $200 salary cap or 16 player roster. The $200 cap is not a problem for my league but we have a 15 player roster. The only way to accomodate that is to approach it like a $199 salary cap and save $1 for the last player. - No pause button. If you have any issues during the draft (someone disconnected etc...), there doesn't seem to be any way to put the draft on hold until that guy is reconnected. - Not allot of draft rooms available. The ratio of Snake draft to Auction draft rooms offerred is about 4:1. All of the rooms are empty today but you may have some issues getting a room as the season draws closer. Each team gets 25 seconds to nominate a player for bid on their turn. If they don't nominate anyone a player is automatically nominated for them at an opening bid of $1. You get 25 seconds to bid on a player. Any bid made under 10 seconds resets the timer to 10 seconds. There is an autobid feature that can be turned on. Also, the draft does not include any IDP. You drafted 1 QB, 2 RB, 2 WR, 1 Flex RB/WR, 1 TE, 1 K and 1 D/ST and then 7 other players. The draft results were emailed to me automatically after the draft. Edit: I also quickly went thru the process of setting up a free ESPN league with the intention of only using it to run the draft. This eliminated the roster issues as you can customize it to whatever number you want and add IDP. I don't appear to be able to adjust the salary cap though. This also would eliminate the problem of too many mock draft rooms being full. The earliest I could schedule my leagues draft was 7/2 so I'll report back after the draft and see if the interface was any better/worse. Edited June 27, 2009 by myhousekey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
satelliteoflovegm Posted June 27, 2009 Share Posted June 27, 2009 We did a test of MFL it was slow and dumb, agreed. We are doing a conference call, with a google spreadsheet that calculates remaining salary and term. Of course I'm fortunate to have an owner that has a conference call system at work. We will supplement it all with the mfl chat room if anyone has a private message for me (the commish) With the google doc (i'll share it with you) all owners can view instant updates of remaining money and who has what players. Whomever developes a good auction site will be rich. Having said all that my 12th backed out on me 18 hours before our conference call auction the 27th at 2pm eastern. After being committed for months. Ridiculous. Hopefully I can find an owner to AT LEAST auction a good faith team and then buy it or walk away. I'll post how it works, if you want. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeeR Posted June 30, 2009 Share Posted June 30, 2009 I think ESPN or a chat room is pretty much it. You would think someone else would have stepped in (ie another site/program) to fill the void. ESPN is OK from what I can tell (although mocks are a joke, people draft a couple guys and quit FYI). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myhousekey Posted July 3, 2009 Author Share Posted July 3, 2009 (edited) Edit: I also quickly went thru the process of setting up a free ESPN league with the intention of only using it to run the draft. This eliminated the roster issues as you can customize it to whatever number you want and add IDP. I don't appear to be able to adjust the salary cap though. This also would eliminate the problem of too many mock draft rooms being full. The earliest I could schedule my leagues draft was 7/2 so I'll report back after the draft and see if the interface was any better/worse. I think this is going to work for us just fine. Doing an auction draft thru an ESPN free league instead of just an ESPN mock allows you to do allot of the things I thought were missing when I did the mock: - Pause/Resume the draft - Adjust the amount of time per nomination (25 sec default, min 10, max 600) - Adjust the amount of time per player bidding (25 sec default, min 10, max 600) - Undo Picks (Only available after the draft is completed?) - Change Pick Prices (Only available after the draft is completed?) I still did not see any options to adjust the $200 cap or the $1 bid increments. Some other things that would have been nice is the players name being announced or a sound made when a player is nominated in case you were looking at another page. If ESPN's scoring system was more customizable I'd probably just move all my leagues there. Especially at the $0 price tag. Edit: For those of you more experienced with auction drafts, what is an appropriate amount of time to allow a team to nominate a player? What about the bidding timer? Edited July 3, 2009 by myhousekey Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myhousekey Posted July 18, 2009 Author Share Posted July 18, 2009 Edit: For those of you more experienced with auction drafts, what is an appropriate amount of time to allow a team to nominate a player? What about the bidding timer? Bump Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DMD Posted July 18, 2009 Share Posted July 18, 2009 Nominating a player - a minute maybe. Doesn't really matter. What does is how long you intend before first warining, second warning and award. I prefer maybe ten seconds to first warning and then five more seconds to second warning and five seconds to "gone". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BeeR Posted July 19, 2009 Share Posted July 19, 2009 Disagree on all counts: - If someone can't figure out who to nominate in 30 secs or less they deserve to have the "default" candidate put up, esp given that if they have a clue they will have already started thinking about who to nominate several turns ahead at least. And it does matter some as otherwise it can drag out the draft (if you have enough stupid people). - Re the warning thing, I think ESPN defaults to 5 and 2 seconds for the going once/going twice thing and prefer that - again it just drags out too much otherwise. This is for ESPN of course; in person auction is different. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
myhousekey Posted August 26, 2009 Author Share Posted August 26, 2009 FYI, looks like Fantasy Auctioneer is dead. Just got this email. FantasyAuctioneer Going Out of Business Hi everyone, This is unfortunately the end of the road for FantasyAuctioneer. Thank you so much for being a part of our little footnote in Fantasy Sports History. Although we announced a partnership with RotoExperts last February, the deal has since fallen through. We both agreed that with ESPN and CBS Sports already in the online auction business, our window had already closed. We had a number of improvements planned, but realized that any successful innovation would likely be emulated soon after by much bigger pockets. RotoExperts Founder Ben Ice and I go a long way back, though, so who knows what we might be working on together in the future. Sincerely, George del Prado Founder www.FantasyAuctioneer.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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