So remember how slow the draft board was last year? You'd hit an arrow to move a player up a notch and then have to wait like a minute to do another move? That's what I was fixing. Now you can drag and drop the sortable list and zoom things on and off your draft board.

I built a prototype that I finished up around thanksgiving and thought it would be easy to implement. Well, doing it in the fully operational site proved more complicated. When I finally got something to test it was taking 2 minutes to render the page in the browser. Just not right. I finally cracked that nut by modifying the source code for one of the widgets I was using.

Then, once I had it all working in the browser, the AJAX requests were taking like 25 seconds to process in the server. So if you refreshed the page before they were finished, some of the moves would get lost. Not to mention it would crush our server with a lot of people moving things around at the same time. No good. Frustration level mounting.

So last night I finally figured out how to do it the right way. Today I had to rewrite the whole scheme so I was only passing a few players back to the server instead of the whole list of 1500. Got stuck on one stupid bug, but once that was squished it all came together beautifully.

I'll implement the lock check box tomorrow (I have a working prototype) and then check to make sure I didn't foobar any of the other functionality with the new AJAX code. If that works I have a few more issues to clean up and we should be ready to go with the drafts.

How many free agent draft rounds do folks think we should have?

6-8 rounds for FA.

Too late to join?

I guess it would depend on the number of guys that made it through to FA. Take the number, divide by 26 and there's your number.

With the free agents, it seems like a team could conceivably drop every player and draft free agents, so our ceiling would be 53x26 = 1,328 free agents. Wouldn't the free agent pool just be every player who was on an NFL roster during the season? (I recognize that our timing is a bit off, so I'm proposing that for the moment.)

That was my thought - FA is just the guys that were on NFL rosters and aren't presently on Sandbox rosters.

I'd guess that's around 6-8 rounds of players.

We'll probably have a team you can take over. I'll PM you when we get close to starting.

Basically, yes (excepting for players already on Sandbox rosters). I'll email you about some of the details.

I guess I could just make it 53 rounds and people can stop drafting once they are satisfied with their line up. I don't view the free agent draft will have that much talent after the first round or so, but since it has two years worth of emerging talent, perhaps I am wrong.

Wait, what?

We have to draft totally NEW TEAMS?

No. You'll keep anyone you want to keep.

The free agent draft is just for players currently not on one of the other rosters in the league and not one of the players selected in the 2012 NFL rookie draft. Some teams have relatively few keepers and might turn over half their roster and need more than a few rounds to fill their needs. I edited my reply to Rain Man to clarify.

This is nice.

Do you have an idea of when we'll have to pare down our rosters to 53?
That seems to be the next best pool of talent to draw from for backups and ST types.

cdcox will have final say over this from a standpoint of practicality and programming, but which do you think is better from a gaming standpoint?


1. You do your rookie draft, and then pare down to 53 to start with, and then in the free agent draft you drop a player every time you pick a player up. This means that if you drop a guy, he goes into the pool for other players to pick up starting from that point forward.

2. You do your rookie draft, and then pare down to 53 to start with, and then drop as many more as you want, knowing that you'll then be able to draft free agents until you hit 53 again. (You can re-draft guys that you drop if you subsequently decide that they're better.)

I kind of like System #1 better, but there's a minor chance of grousing if I pick 22nd out of 24 and drop a QB that everyone wants, and the guy with the 23rd pick gets the first shot at him.

I think I would be a fan of #2.
I'd like to know who is available in the FA draft before I start making picks.
It seems like in the first scenario a player I would like to pick up could be exposed one pick after me every single round. That would suck from a game perspective.

#2

Cool. Thanks for the input.

There will likely be another twist to free agency that we're still working on. It'll be designed to keep players active during the Sandbox offseason (which is the ongoing NFL system). It'll let people pick up free agents during the year as various backups and role players explode onto the scene (you know, like how Donald Stephenson and Ropati Pitoitua and Brandon Siler exploded onto the scene late in the year).