This offseason brought some significant performance improvements to the ottoneu Fantasy Baseball auction draft. I’ve been tracking performance pretty closely and I’ve been thrilled with how much better the site has performed this year over last year. However, a small but significant rule change has caused issues for about half the drafts that have occurred so far, especially in leagues with a number of first-time owners.

The rule change was as follows:

II. f. Each owner must nominate a player in turn. If a team does not nominate a player, they will be considered done with the draft.

There is an important reason this rule was quietly added to football in 2015 and baseball this season. Last season, owners would purposefully not nominate players towards the end of auctions. By waiting until other teams were out of money or roster spots, a certain subset of owners attempted to lower prices on their sleeper picks. While the overall advantage gained is minimal, if you ended up in a draft with two like-minded owners, the standoff could last for hours or even days! This was not ideal, so a rule was implemented in the platform to lock teams out of the auction draft if they missed a nomination.

In my league, this was not a problem – we loudly shamed owners who missed their nomination turn, and paused often to prevent anyone from fully missing their turn. However, it became clear based on your feedback that my league was the exception – we were comfortable with the draft software, we knew each other well, and so we have a unique league dynamic that minimized the practical impact of this rule.

Some leagues embraced this rule, as they ran into owners using this strategy in past drafts. However, many leagues ran into logistical nightmares between keeping track of the fast-paced draft action and pausing every few turns to unlock a team that accidentally missed their nomination. There are few things more fun than an ottoneu Fantasy Sports draft firing on all cylinders, and few things more frustrating than having to stop that draft every few minutes to sort out what seemed like an overly harsh penalty for an honest mistake.

As a result, nomination enforcement is now optional and can be set in Commissioner Tools -> League Settings. It is off by default, so missing a nomination will not lock a team’s owner out of bidding or future nominations. In highly-competitive leagues, we recommend turning this setting on, but it is up to each league to handle this how they would like.

Rule II. f. now states:

f. If enabled in the league settings, each owner will be expected to nominate a player in turn. If a league chooses to require nominations and a team does not nominate a player, they will be considered done with the draft.

This change is live now and will affect any auction drafts in the future, as well as those currently in-progress.

We’ve been hard at work listening to the ottoneu community and making improvements for the upcoming season. Here’s what to expect going into our 6th full year:

Improved lineup and roster organizer pages

Last season, changing lineups required juggling multiple drop-down boxes and clicking the Save button. Now, simply click the player you want to move, then click the new position you’d like him to play.

Improved auction draft performance

I’ll save you from the technical mumbo-jumbo, but the auction draft should be much speedier! We overhauled the backend, and early feedback has been positive. Let us know how your draft goes, as we always are looking to improve that experience.

Available owners board and league description field

Finding new ottoneu owners hasn’t always been the easiest task and can even be discouraging for new and seasoned players alike. Being a part of the right team is a major component of the ottoneu playing experience and what makes this format so unique. With that in mind, we’ve added an available owners board and league descriptions to the Join Leagues page. I wrote about the available owners board last August when it first went live.

Real-time team-to-team messaging

Team messaging was a lot like email before: every team had an inbox and could see a list of messages from other teams.

The rise of Slack completely changed trade negotiations by allowing them to happen in real time. We revisited messaging and revamped the format to be more like chat and less like email.

The new format went live in the last 24 hours, check it out and leave a comment or a Tweet to let us know what you think.

More to come

ottoneu Fantasy Sports remain a work in progress, and we’ll continually be improving the site throughout the year. As always, you can leave a comment or email us with feedback, and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest updates. Have a great season, and thank you for your support!

It’s been a little while since the last ottoneu Fantasy Baseball development update, so let’s dig into what’s new on the site.

The commissioner tools have always been a powerful way to manually move players and change salaries and cap penalties. The flexibility allowed by these tools have led to interesting gameplay additions by various ottoneu leagues, but it is important to be able to hold commissioners accountable for any changes they make. Going forward, all transactions done through the commissioner tools will have a “(c)” next to them on your league home page and other places where transactions are listed.

One of the challenges of playing ottoneu Fantasy Baseball with daily lineups is making sure you hit your game limits and innings limits. If a team at the top of the standings is using up games at an unsustainable clip, it can be easier to catch them towards this part of the season. But how can you track which teams are using up their games played? Check out the new graph at the bottom of the standings page! You can see how you’re doing with game limits relative to your competition at each position. There are a lot of interesting ways to slice and dice games played data, and this graph is a very early attempt at tracking this data over time.

There have been a number of bug fixes over the last few weeks as well, including improvements to waiver claims, abandoned teams, auctions, and the live page. I’m always open to more feedback about ways to improve ottoneu Fantasy Baseball, so use the comments or  the contact page to email me!

TL;DR – ottoneu is now mostly responsive and works much better on mobile devices, so visit on your mobile phone and let me know what you think!

In my last post, I dug into some of the most common ottoneu feature requests and built as much as I could during a little break from my day job over the holidays. When I first requested feature ideas on Facebook, and really every time I’ve ever asked the community for their wishlist, there is one common request that I wasn’t able to address over the holidays – a mobile app.

There are a couple reasons for this:

1. Building native apps for Android and iPhone would distract me from continuing to improve the core ottoneu platform
2. Maintaining (at least) two native apps while also maintaining the platform is a heavy ask for a single person who is, for now, running ottoneu as a side project.
3. Native apps are a less flexible approach to mobile device support than making the existing site work well on mobile devices

With regards to #3 above, apps mean unique development for each mobile platform, a lack of support for future devices, and less than instantaneous addition of new website features. A mobile-friendly web layout addresses all of these issues. In reality, all these issues I’ve enumerated boil down to one thing – I’d rather try to build one thing (the core website) well, instead of three things (website, iOS app, Andoird app) poorly.

With all this in mind, I started digging into a mobile-specific layout for ottoneu this weekend, and I made a lot more progress than I expected! I am continuing to tweak little things here and there, but you can see it in action now. You will need to clear your browser’s cache to see the latest changes, and if you don’t take this step the site will look broken. Please check it out and let me know if you have any questions, concerns, or notice potential for improvements.