Category Archives: Fantasy Football

Fantasy Football, ottoneu

ottoneu Fantasy Football Arbitration

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We’ve been preparing for the 2016 baseball season, so it has been a little quiet around here. There will be more about baseball soon, but let’s talk about football right now. The first ever ottoneu Fantasy Football arbitration period is now open, and it seems like a good time to review what arbitration is and how it makes ottoneu Fantasy Football unique.

The winner of our league, The Gaks, had an excellent draft and crushed all of us with some of his better valued players, such as a $7 Devonta Freeman, a $55 DeAndre Hopkins and a $74 OBJ. Each of those players scored over 260 points last season, which is worth roughly $85. This surplus value (the worth of their performance minus their salary) allows more money to be spent on superstars and gives flexibility for in-season auctions. As it did in our league, the team with the most surplus value usually ends up winning the league.

Arbitration is a way of crowd-sourcing additional salary to players that are underpaid, bringing their salaries closer to their true value. Each team has $60 to allocate across the 11 other teams, and can put anywhere from $4 to $8 on a single team and $1 to $4 on any single player.

  • Arbitration starts on February 15 and lasts until March 1
  • Arbitration allows teams to add dollars to players on other teams in their league
  • Every team has a $60 allocation budget to utilize as they see fit
  • Every team must give every other team in their league at least $1 and no more than $8 in additional salary
  • No player can be allocated more than $4 of additional salary by another team ($44 league max)

It’s a fun system that adds a little competitive balance to ottoneu Fantasy Football. Leave a comment or shoot us an email if you have any questions, and get started allocating!

Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Football, ottoneu

Finding The Right ottoneu League

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One of the harder parts of getting started with ottoneu Fantasy Sports is finding the right league. Not everyone has 11 friends available for a time-intensive dynasty league, and joining a league of strangers can be a little awkward. Some leagues and owners are able to overcome this initial hurdle, but ottoneu leagues are more fun and more active when all the owners are comfortable with each other. To that end, we’re trying out a couple of things with ottoneu Fantasy Football that should make it to ottoneu Fantasy Baseball before the 2016 season.

First, you can see the league’s founder on the Join League page, with an easy link to email this user. Only logged-in users can email league founders, so make sure you are registered and logged in. The goal is to encourage users to email founders of leagues they’d like to join and see if the fit makes sense.

Secondly, an availability board has been set up to allow owners to post their availability for ottoneu Fantasy Football leagues. The goal here is to turn this message board into a great place for leagues to recruit new owners.

There is still plenty of time to join ottoneu Fantasy Football leagues, so please check out both features and let us know what you think!

Fantasy Football, Meta, ottoneu

Andrew Luck Contest Winners

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A couple of days ago, I asked what you would bid on Andrew Luck if he was the first player nominated in your ottoneu Fantasy Football auction draft. There were a bunch of great answers, but three answers stood out:

  1. Chike
    This is a pretty interesting breakdown of how teams may budget in ottoneu Fantasy Football, and even pops back with another great question. Maybe contest number two…
    https://about90feet.com/2015/08/10/ottoneu-fantasy-football-is-live-get-a-free-team/#comment-1973
  2. Tom O
    Part two of a two-part comment that lays out some good rationale for spending a lot on Luck
    https://about90feet.com/2015/08/10/ottoneu-fantasy-football-is-live-get-a-free-team/#comment-1961
  3. Chris Brown
    There’s always someone who rejects the entire premise of the question, but that doesn’t mean they are necessarily wrong. ottoneu games are all about value, and if it is impossible to extract value out of Andrew Luck, you should look elsewhere.
    https://about90feet.com/2015/08/10/ottoneu-fantasy-football-is-live-get-a-free-team/#comment-1968

Chike, Tom O, Chris Brown – email me at help at ottoneu dot com once you’ve paid for a team this season and I’ll make sure you get your money back. We’ll try this again next week, so check back for another chance at a free season of ottoneu Fantasy Football!

Fantasy Football, ottoneu, Software Development

ottoneu Fantasy Football is live! Get a free team!

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The wait is over! You can now join or create an ottoneu Fantasy Football league. Tell your co-workers, your friends, and definitely your single-season fantasy football leagues! Sign up now. Go, go!.

There are some basic rules and roster/scoring options to review for the best experience. As always, feel free to reach out with any questions.

ottoneu Fantasy Football has been in the works since 2013, and it would not have been possible without your support and encouragement. Try it out and share you thoughts with me and other players.

A contest, as promised, to score a free team: leave a comment stating how much you’d spend out of your $400 budget on Andrew Luck if he was the very first player nominated in your draft. We’ll pick a winner and give you $20 towards an ottoneu Fantasy Football team for this season, either a new one or one you already have. Have at it!

Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Football, ottoneu

ottoneu on Twitter

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ottoneu now has three Twitter handles to follow. You should follow all three, but here’s the breakdown:

  • @ottoneu – will remain the primary source of all ottoneu-related news and information. Expect more contests (more than the 0 we’ve run in recent memory) from @ottoneu in the weeks and months ahead. You could get a free ottoneu Football or Baseball team!
  • @ottoneuFootball – if you are interested in football-specific news, follow here! Development updates, bug fixes, and everything ottoneu Fantasy Football-related will be announced here. We will also tweet out football leagues that need owners to help you find good owners and good leagues easier
  • @ottoneuBaseball – baseball-specific developments, information on when players are added to the player pool, and a great resource to find new owners and leagues – all available from @ottoneuBaseball
Fantasy Football, ottoneu, Software Development

Join the ottoneu Fantasy Football Beta Test

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Fantasy Football season is coming up and ottoneu Fantasy Football is getting ready to launch, but not without your help! Last winter, there was a brief alpha test, and now it is again time to pull some of you together for a beta test.

The test will focus on the following areas:

  1. The Auction Draft – is it fast enough? Do your bids register?
  2. Lineups – this page has been rebuilt from the ground up! Is it intuitive to use? (This is where I’ll heavily need beta testers’ feedback)
  3. General navigation of the Football site

Interested? Of course you are! To participate, you only need to do two things:

  1. Like ottoneu on Facebook
  2. Leave a comment on ottoneu’s wall about who you’d nominate first overall in your ottoneu Fantasy Football draft

Do these two things by Wednesday, and I’ll pick a few of you to check out ottoneu Fantasy Football before anyone else!

Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Football, Meta, ottoneu, Software Development, Startups

Weekly Summary: Improving Baseball

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I read through all the comments in the post about the database and realized something important: some ottoneu Fantasy Baseball players seem to think Baseball is going to be negatively affected by Football. Nothing could be further from the truth. While ottoneu is a one-person (me!) company, there is currently enough time in the day to keep building and improving both Fantasy Football and Fantasy Baseball until there is enough revenue to justify growing the company. Now, onward to the Fantasy Baseball improvements!

First, the Trade Wizard now has a confirmation screen, so you can double-check your trade offer before it ends up in someone else’s hands. This much-requested feature should reduce the number of loan mistakes in your trade offers and allow for more complicated trade offers to be put together.

Second, the Live page was re-written to make it faster to see how other teams in your league are doing. It is still a little slow to initially load, and I’m continuing to make that page faster since I know the majority of you check it daily.

Third, the Roster Organizer was made accessible year-round, as some owners indicated that they’d like to use this planning tool even while the season is on-going.

Fourth, I rolled out some new information on player cards. Average salaries, projected positional eligibility, and ownership percentages are now available on player cards, so you can make smarter personnel decisions.

Finally, I’ve started work on a tool that will allow commissioners to retroactively change lineups. It is being built to directly address the kind of data loss that occurred last Friday. This tool will have a significant number of checks in place to prevent it from being used inappropriately. I’m hoping to roll it out to a few leagues towards the end of this season and it should be available to all baseball leagues this off-season.

On the Football side, more steps were taken to ensure that another database event never occurs. I now feel confident that the mistake I made Friday night cannot be replicated, and that if another database event occurs due to my error or any other reason that there are more fallbacks than were in place last week.

As always, find me on Slack, e-mail, or leave a comment here.

Fantasy Baseball, Fantasy Football, ottoneu, Software Development

Week 2: Baseball Scores and Football Drafts

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Last week was all about creating and joining football leagues. This week was wider in scope and full of interesting changes.

On the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball side, I pestered FanGraphs into giving me live scores of MLB games. By pester, I mean I asked nicely once. Integrating this data was not hard, and now live game scores are on the Live and Lineups pages. Doubleheaders are presented better on both of these pages as well. Now you can keep tabs on both your fantasy players and your favorite team from one page!

A lot of progress was made on ottoneu Fantasy Football this past week. Leagues can be created and joined and (most importantly to me!) paid for, which are the majority of the milestones ahead of release. Today I started working on another major milestone: the auction draft. The interface is going to look a lot like the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball system one for now. However, player search is much faster and drafts should generally go much quicker, since there will only be 20 roster spots to fill instead of 40.

I also experimented with Flex and Superflex on the new lineup pages. The good news is that they both now work properly. The even better news is that proof-of-concept 1 Flex, 2 Flex, and Flex+Superflex roster arrangements all work properly, which means that ottoneu Fantasy Football will launch with some form of lineup customizability. Between this and the scoring options, ottoneu Fantasy Football’s week to week experience should be varied and interesting for all kinds of fantasy football owners.

This upcoming week is going to be all about the auction draft. I’m hoping it will go quickly by utilizing the best parts of the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball auction draft system. There could be an alpha test as early as mid-June on some of these features, so please let me know in the comments if you are interested!

Fantasy Football, ottoneu, Software Development

Football Week 1 (in which leagues can be created but not joined)

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My first full week working entirely on ottoneu Fantasy Football just wrapped up, and it seems like a good idea to share the progress made over the past few days.

Screenshot 2015-05-25 10.38.47

I mostly committed code to football, but there was some effort on baseball as well. The biggest baseball change made was that owners can no longer see who started an auction until after the auction is completed. This will force owners to bid based on the quality of player rather than against the team that started bidding. This was a small change, but an important one to some of the more competitive leagues. I also made a small fix to how math is calculated in the trade wizard and changed who “Trade Withdrawn” emails are sent to based on bugs reported in Slack. Did I mention you should join the ottoneu Community Slack?

The football week was spent working on league creation – a pretty natural place to start. As of a few minutes ago, owners can create leagues at all payment tiers, $20 to $500. However, no one else can join these leagues! That will be the milestone for the upcoming week. Once people can create and join leagues, the next major milestone will be porting the auction draft from baseball to football, with a few small improvements of course.

This first week has been more productive than I expected, and if I can keep this up I feel pretty confident about an early July launch for ottoneu Fantasy Football.

Fantasy Football, ottoneu

ottoneu Fantasy Football: Coming July 2015

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ottoneu Fantasy Football will be launching in July 2015. Teams will start at $20/season, there will be prize leagues, and I have chosen to leave my day job to devote all my attention to launching ahead of the 2015 football season.

ottoneu Fantasy Football will be unlike other fantasy football games and somewhat similar to ottoneu Fantasy Baseball. I wrote a quick post about this last November, but I also need to learn more from you! What are you interested in getting from a fantasy football game that you do not get today? Is ottoneu about advanced stats, prospects, team-building, or a combination? As the football game begins to come together, your input and feedback will be vital to its success.

The next few months are going to be a sprint to make sure the core football systems are in place and ready to go for the 2015-16 NFL season. I’m available via the normal channels, and I would highly recommend joining the ottoneu Slack community to participate in the ongoing conversations about both baseball and football.