First Live Draft

We bitch plenty about Strat, so I thought I would give credit where credit is due.

I just did my first ever live draft (for the Barnstormer's Finals) and other than the fact that you have to keep the number of picks for each queue at 5 or they don't fire (which is stupid), the draft went very smooth. Works great.

Thanks Strat for taking the time to add something positive to the game.

This wasn't by accident. Barnstormers have been asking for this for YEARS to replace Diamond Dope. While their early attempts were weak at best, we worked with them to develop the criteria for what was necessary to add to their draft to make it Diamond Dope and Barnstormers worthy. Barnstormers board member Mr Baseball World (and many others) worked countless hours with SOM directly to define our needs and severely test and fine tune their improvements.

I also told them the future of Barnstormers was directly dependent on getting the draft app improved. Right down to the countdown to getting the stadiums added to the draft which you see is a recent add. Their deadline for that was when we needed it for the Finals.

I'd like to thank Mr Baseball World for his patience in testing the app and of course SOM (John Garcia) for finally delivering the goods but I want everyone to know that this did not drop out of the clouds. WE THE COMMUNITY were heavily involved.

And we will be sure that any issues with it are looked at and promptly fixed.

moose it would be great if we could trade draft picks during live drafts... it would make it incredibly realistic

moose it would be great if we could trade draft picks during live drafts... it would make it incredibly realistic

Trades during the draft would be cool, but IMO the highest priority enhancements for the draft should be:

#1 - Add a value of 25 to the draft queue picklist (so can set proxies to keep firing through end of draft) to fix the problem Rich pointed out.

#2 - Add a setting to limit the number of rounds in the draft, so that you can end the draft at, say 11 or 16 rounds (rather than being forced to make 25 picks)

moose it would be great if we could trade draft picks during live drafts... it would make it incredibly realistic

Trades during the draft would be cool, but IMO the highest priority enhancements for the draft should be:

#1 - Add a value of 25 to the draft queue picklist (so can set proxies to keep firing through end of draft) to fix the problem Rich pointed out.

#2 - Add a setting to limit the number of rounds in the draft, so that you can end the draft at, say 11 or 16 rounds (rather than being forced to make 25 picks)

Conversely Mike, I wouldn't mind the option to continue drafting beyond 25 or 26 rounds if you wanted to. But yes customizable number of rounds would make sense.

Not sure how drafting less (or more) than 25 would work since every team needs to have 10 pitchers and 15 hitters. You go right from the draft to the preseason. This needs a lot more thought. Every team needs to have the minimums.

Also, SOM is not able to replicate the "problem" you are speaking of in the first post. Are you sure you didn't have a check box set (or not set) which may have caused your proxies not to fire ?

Moose if you're talking about the number of players to pick from each queue, it's pretty simple. They for some reason only allow a maximum of 5 players to be picked from any given queue. That number counts down with each pick. So if you queue up 100 player combined in the 3 queues, they will still only draft the top 5 players in each queue unless you keep going back in and resetting it to 5 after every few picks.

I see what you are saying. You can queue no more than 15 players at a time. We did visit the issue with them that we would like to see more than 5 "autopick # from this queue". We didn't absolutely say it was mandatory but we did talk about it. We can circle back to that.

But I think the multiple queue serves a different function. To select by position. Let say we want an SS then a 2B then OF's in that order. Yout take the best 3 SS you would accept and put them in your preferred order. Now you only want 1 SS so you set that you can only draft 1 from that queue. If your first choice gets drafted then it DOESNT draft the other two and moves on to queue 2 for your 2B in the same manner. Let say you are looking for an outfielder and you need 3. Then you say draft 3 and it stops when you get 3.

I get it that 10 players "autopick from this queue" might be more useful than 5 especially in that last scenario when you are looking for 3 outfielders.

But I think that trying to queue up 100 players is a little bit excessive and that you are trying to put the whole thing on auto pilot when it might be better to check in more often and attend to the maintenance of the queue.

Again, we can ask for more players in the "auto pick # from this queue" but I think that we were trying to replicate Diamond Dopes (remove if group picked) function and allow more selective drafting by position. - I don't think queuing up 100 players is desirable.

I wasn't actually suggesting cueueing up 100 players I was making that point that if you did queue up 100 players you'd still only end up drafting 15

Yes but what I was saying is that we were envisioning more selective use of the queues for drafting by position and in that respect SOM choose 5. I think that bumping that to 10 would make it more useful ? Then you could proxy up to 30. How many is YOUR preference ?