Garcia's Blog 1/30/14- Live Draft Updates
Posted: Thu Jan 30, 2014 5:24 pmHey guys,
As everyone here knows, we debuted our live draft feature last Friday. Many people have already signed up and completed a draft, in general they have been very successful. Two drafts did run into problems, the first one Friday night and one on Sunday.
The Friday night draft was our first live draft and a small error was found that would have limited the number of people with access to the draft chat. We pushed the draft back 30 minutes and were able to completely fix that issue. That will no longer be a problem.
The Sunday draft was a a problem where the same player was drafted by the same team in two consecutive picks (last of one round/first of the next round). This occurred as the user picked the player for his first pick at the same exact millisecond that his time ran out and the system was picking that same player off the top of his queue. This is a rare event that unfortunately never came up in the many drafts that were conducted in testing. The duplicated pick proceeded to interrupt the post-draft loading of rosters to the league, as it stalled when it tried to add the duplicate player. Unfortunately this was a frenzy league and as the rosters didn't load the frenzy was not able to go off. However we were able to coordinate with the league to schedule a new waiver time, complete each team's roster, and enable the team to replace the duplicate pick with a free agent player.
As I said, unfortunately this was a rare problem that did not come up while testing. However we have since implemented a fix that we believe will prevent it from happening again. We have also fixed the process that loads the players onto the teams rosters to be able to handle any similar or other unforeseen glitch in the future. Although we do not expect it to, if a similar problem does occur while you are running a live draft the Commissioner of the league will immediately be able to pause the draft and then reset the draft back to the problem pick. This will erase any picks since then and allow the draft to resume from the specified selection.
Besides those two drafts, we have been able to run numerous drafts that have gone perfectly smoothly. While we regret and apologize to the two leagues that did have problems, to our knowledge there are no other bugs or issues that people have had in a live draft. While we cannot make absolute guarantees, we have every expectation that our Live Drafts will continue to be smooth and enjoyable experiences for all.
Additionally, we have also made a few small changes that the community had requested. First we have added displays to show the turn duration on league indexes. It will show both next to Draft Type under a league's information as well as in the mouseover popups in the league directory. Secondly, a new time duration of 45 seconds has been added. Draft time durations are set by the commissioner while setting the time of the Live Draft. Below the calendar the commissioner will see an option to set the turn duration to 2:30, 2:00 (default), 1:30, 1:00 or the new 0:45 second option.
Please continue sending in your suggestions (for live draft or otherwise) to us at onlinegamesupport@strat-o-matic.com. I will talk to everyone next week!
-John
As everyone here knows, we debuted our live draft feature last Friday. Many people have already signed up and completed a draft, in general they have been very successful. Two drafts did run into problems, the first one Friday night and one on Sunday.
The Friday night draft was our first live draft and a small error was found that would have limited the number of people with access to the draft chat. We pushed the draft back 30 minutes and were able to completely fix that issue. That will no longer be a problem.
The Sunday draft was a a problem where the same player was drafted by the same team in two consecutive picks (last of one round/first of the next round). This occurred as the user picked the player for his first pick at the same exact millisecond that his time ran out and the system was picking that same player off the top of his queue. This is a rare event that unfortunately never came up in the many drafts that were conducted in testing. The duplicated pick proceeded to interrupt the post-draft loading of rosters to the league, as it stalled when it tried to add the duplicate player. Unfortunately this was a frenzy league and as the rosters didn't load the frenzy was not able to go off. However we were able to coordinate with the league to schedule a new waiver time, complete each team's roster, and enable the team to replace the duplicate pick with a free agent player.
As I said, unfortunately this was a rare problem that did not come up while testing. However we have since implemented a fix that we believe will prevent it from happening again. We have also fixed the process that loads the players onto the teams rosters to be able to handle any similar or other unforeseen glitch in the future. Although we do not expect it to, if a similar problem does occur while you are running a live draft the Commissioner of the league will immediately be able to pause the draft and then reset the draft back to the problem pick. This will erase any picks since then and allow the draft to resume from the specified selection.
Besides those two drafts, we have been able to run numerous drafts that have gone perfectly smoothly. While we regret and apologize to the two leagues that did have problems, to our knowledge there are no other bugs or issues that people have had in a live draft. While we cannot make absolute guarantees, we have every expectation that our Live Drafts will continue to be smooth and enjoyable experiences for all.
Additionally, we have also made a few small changes that the community had requested. First we have added displays to show the turn duration on league indexes. It will show both next to Draft Type under a league's information as well as in the mouseover popups in the league directory. Secondly, a new time duration of 45 seconds has been added. Draft time durations are set by the commissioner while setting the time of the Live Draft. Below the calendar the commissioner will see an option to set the turn duration to 2:30, 2:00 (default), 1:30, 1:00 or the new 0:45 second option.
Please continue sending in your suggestions (for live draft or otherwise) to us at onlinegamesupport@strat-o-matic.com. I will talk to everyone next week!
-John