Anyone Have Experience with Fantasy Auctioneer?

[mistersee]

I've commished draft leagues before but, it looks like my 1st year auction league will be using this service and I was hoping someone could give me a run-through of what the auction experience will be like. I'm setting up a practice auction first, but until then, what should I expect?

Do they offer nominating options? Does each owner get to nominate a player in succession, or does a Bot do it? I'm guessing a Bot bangs the gavel X seconds after a bid, is that right? And does the Commish have pausing privileges on the auction should someone need a bathroom break?

Thanks for anyone w/ the time to walk me through this....

-Anthony

[tavo2311]

I've only used it once but here is what I remember. The commish can pause the action. He can also change the speed of the auction mid-auction. So err on the side of a slower set up and then if it's taking too long you can speed it up later. The site will set a bid order, so the players themselves will nominate players in order, snake style. I believe the commish can set/change the order ahead of time. Over all a pretty decent site. Here is my one suggestion though. IMPLORE your members do a couple free mock auctions on the site before auction day. The auction applet is in depth and detailed and the auction moves quickly. I tried a mock ahead of time and new right away i'd have to do a few more. I bugged each memeber to at least go in, try it for 5 minutes, and then leave the mock, so they were at least familiar. Of course, many did not and sure enough, they were the ones complaining they didnt know how to do anything or organize anything on auction day. Good luck

[converge241]

I like it a lot especially the commish tools mentioned above

Even little things like that there is an audible going once going twice sold feature. Many dropdowns to review your own and others teams and budgets left as well.

[RotoFan07]

Does the computer have to auto bid the players or can they be nominated by each owner?

[converge241]

each owner nominates in a set order

each owner nominates a player and a starting bid, then its a free for all with the bidding until the going once/going twice

[Matthias]

I've used fantasyauctioneer for maybe 6 different auctions and it really is the best thing since sliced bread. Here's the mechanics of it....

1) You tell it how many roster spots you have at each position and your overall budget;
2) People sign up and choose a nominating order spot (or you can do it randomly and reassign them... it really doesn't matter)
3) You set how long for each player (5 seconds, 10 seconds, whatever)
4) The website calculates the maximum bid... say you have a $250 auction budget and 30 roster spots, the most you can bid on any one player is $221 (since you would need at least $29 to bid $1 on each player in the rest of your roster).
4) Auction starts.
First player puts up someone, say Pujols, at a starting bid of $35.
The auctioneer does a, "going once, going twice" and ticks down the seconds.
Other players can either type in a new bid (say $40) or just hit a, "+$1" button.
After nobody else bids, you hear a, "Sold" (with the occasional grumbling that you'll hear a Sold but someone will sneak in a bid anyways).
Pujols gets assigned to the winning team's roster (for multi-positional players it asks you where you want to put them).
Winning bid minus $1 gets taken out of the winning team's maximum bid.
Next player nominates and repeats.

As the draft goes on, you can pull up other people's rosters, see what players they have, what positions they have open, how much money they have available, etc., etc. And the person who set up the draft can pause the draft (up to a maximum cumulative pause time of an hour or so) in case somebody loses their connection, which happens once in a while, or to give people bathroom breaks. The person who set up the draft can also roll back picks or reassign players from one team to another. And, as somebody else mentioned, speed up or slow down the time that people have to bid or the time that they have to nominate someone.

Here's the important thing, though, and I can't emphasize it enough: EVERYBODY in the draft MUST register for THAT DRAFT before it starts. That does not mean that they have to create an account on fantasyauctioneer (although that is also required). They must specifically confirm that they are part of your draft at whatever time. Because if they haven't joined the draft once the draft starts, they cannot join it, period. Now once you've joined the draft, you can connect to it after it's started. And you can join the draft weeks ahead of time. But you can't join it one minute after. I had one football auction where two guys literally missed the cutoff by 30 seconds and there was nothing we could do except give them robo-drafted teams. It sounds a little opaque, I know, but once you create a draft you'll see, X out of Y players have joined this draft and you'll see their names/emails. So you'll know who to bug to register.

There's a reason they won various internet awards, though: it really is good as sin. It only takes 5 minutes to become comfortable with what's going on and it's an amazing draft experience; worth every penny times ten.

[mistersee]

I just wanted to say how thankful I am that posters take such great amounts of time and apply such clarity to their posts in this forum. I've since participated in Mock Drafts on this site and had great experiences.

Thanks again,

Anthony

[SenPalpatine]

FA is a great program, but like people have already said, do everything you can to get every owner to do a mock ahead of time. Some people will have problems with the software. Fantasy Auctioneer recommends that you use Firefox with their program so some owners may have to download that first - but you don't want them trying to do it while you're trying to start the auction. I would also plan to have a short break every hour - these auctions can be intense and they require a lot of concentration. But they are awesome!

[jsuer1971]

Yes. I've done many, many mocks and two real auctions on there. It's a good product. Be certain to do the mocks though - - just to learn it.

[DC_Commish]

First post!

After several years of fantasy football, I am trying a baseball league. Typically, my football league conducts a draft in which nine or ten of the owners are present to choose players and stick them on the draft board. The remaining two or three owners participate via AIM.

On Draft Day, usually everyone brings a laptop with his research and cheat sheets. They all connect to the web through my wireless network. If we used Fantasy Auctioneer, would the site permit several owners to connect from one location (i.e., can multiple people with wireless connectivity log on to the same auction from the same IP)?