My Idea for Easier Shuffling

[modred]

(I didn't know exactly which forum to put it in but here goes).

I think it would be really nice to be able to conduct a shuffle that does not require the creator of a league to move each player automatically.

Thus, working on the principle that a picture is worth a thousand words, my idea of what would constitute a nice level of control over the makeup of my team after a shuffle is available for comments, flames, and deconstruction at http://www.sainio.org/mogul/draft.cgi. Be sure to read the explanation for each of the various options. I have tried to come up with something where a casual user can tweak a couple of settings and get a decent team and a control freak has plenty of options to customize.

Disclaimer: I am not in any way, shape or form affiliated with sportsmogul, I just have a bit of extra time. My apologies to sportsmogul if I have stepped on any toes.

[Kyuss]

Hey. Took a look at your page, wish you had been around when the FDL had started. Couple of quick questions(I only glanced quicky, so if these are anwsered on your page don't beat me).

1.) Could you import a .mog file to draft by?

2.) is there anyway you could set it to 1 round at a time instead of 5?

3.) is there a cutoff for numbers of teams, or could you make all 30, with some being computer controlled?

As a guy who loves to mix up the rosters I'm very interested in your ideas on the page. Do you know much about Java scripts? I've been looking for a way to set up a draft where all the players are listed, and checked off or removed as they are drafted. When I did the FDL, everything was done by hand, and that was a pain in the butt. Worth the effort, but wished it could've taken less time.
Anyways, I would be very interested in chatting with you about this, if you have AIM or MSM, email me here, jsbadger@earthlink.net , maybe we can set up a time.
Later

[modred]

1) I assume that a .mog is something from the CD version of the game? I've only ever played the online version so I don't know. If the file is text it should be fairly easy, if it is binary that is another story. If it is binary then I would have to know the format used to store the player data in it and that could very well lead me down a slippery slope. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (http://www.loc.gov/copyright/legislation/dmca.pdf) is not friendly to reverse-engineering things like file formats (fyi, an anti-DMCA (http://anti-dmca.org/) link).

2) Yes, five was just a number I picked that showed off the drafting process without causing it to take millions of clicks to run an entire draft.

3) Some of this is version 2 :-) The big deal is not dealing with more teams or more human strategies in running the actual draft, it is creating the infrastructure to deal with more than one human in any league, creating leagues, letting humans join leagues, and setting up a commisioner's interface for the draft. A lot of this seems like re-inventing the wheel and is not as interesting to me as the actual logic and running of the draft.

As far as having a draft list with players being removed as they are selected the computer is just too fast to make it useful. The computer runs however many runs of the draft based on the input strategy, there is no direct picking of players. Think of it as submitting a draft list and rules and getting back a list of players selected. If you ran a draft one round at a time, the other people in the league could just look at the list of remaining players and rosters to see who is left and who was drafted.

Adding a draft grid would probably be the best way to look at that information.

[dturkenk]

The biggest problem with running shuffle leagues is the moving the players from team to team. If you own the CD - shuffling is an option when you create a league. It's manually shifting players that's time-consuming.

I think John's also looking for real-time drafting - and was wondering if that was possible with your system. I think, from a very cursory look at it, that it might work - depending on how you've set things up. I think that's where the most potential is for this idea - since you don't need a full league in order to have a draft league.

Still, I'm impressed by the work - and I'd like to see what some of your ideas for it are.

[modred]

As far as helping with the moving players around goes only something that is part of BBMO would work...

Right, the computer "AI" portion of the draft allows you to have less than a full league of humans and to not have to delay a draft because members can't make it.

As far as real-time drafting goes, it would be easy to do it on a round by round basis. Just set the number of rounds to pick at 1, tell everyone to set their prefereces, run the round, and repeat until done. If John is looking for a pick-by-pick real-time draft, that would be harder and not really the focus of the application as it stands right now.