Painful---Here comes the feedback...

[RedRyder]

Originally posted by RedRyder:
quote:Originally posted by BillyWaz:
It would be nice for EVERYONE to be able to "play around" on the draft site, and not just get access the morning of their draft.

I want to see how small the font actually is! I should text you my log-in so you can see. [/QUOTE]Oh, them you could see everyone picks...sorry...nevermind.

[BONGIZMO]

Roughly 4 hours and 50 minutes as a final time tally. Head hurts, will chat tomorrow as I'm sure many in the league will....nite all.

[Old School]

Unmitigated disaster really, especially for draftmaster format since many players not even listed. I'm no stranger to online drafting, and with ALL my upcoming big $ leagues online, I simply can't fathom it. I'd have to back out at this point if not fixed. It shouldn't be painful to draft.

I had 4 or 5 players given to me who I did not even draft. Eyeballs bugging out of my head trying to see names

Gamers league had some real vets who know there stuff, all of them really. I 'd hate to see what happens to novice online drafters

maybe some dramatic improvements can me made asap.

[kentucky]

whew, i have never been one to complain and i'm not going to now..but i feel if they make the site more user friendly, it'll go a long way to make this site work. the information we're used to seeing in a draft room isn't readily available..you have to move around to find it. there are a lot of little nuances that can be corrected to make it functional. the next question is how long will it take to make it user friendly.

for some reason, i didn't have the problems some people did. a lot of times the wrong player was selected. of course, we had to stop and "reload". that may have happened 20-30 times. that in itself probably cost us 30-60 minutes.

i'm confident it'll get better, but time is running short.

[Old School]

Originally posted by KyThunder:
whew, i have never been one to complain and i'm not going to now..but i feel if they make the site more user friendly, it'll go a long way to make this site work. the information we're used to seeing in a draft room isn't readily available..you have to move around to find it. there are a lot of little nuances that can be corrected to make it functional. the next question is how long will it take to make it user friendly.

for some reason, i didn't have the problems some people did. a lot of times the wrong player was selected. of course, we had to stop and "reload". that may have happened 20-30 times. that in itself probably cost us 30-60 minutes.

i'm confident it'll get better, but time is running short. ...agreed and I would make one suggestion. Use the input from the Gamers Drafters and work with the software guys direct. After 26 rounds I think we all worked it in side and out

[kjduke]

Originally posted by Geoffrey Stein:
From a functionality standpoint, the software has held up very well tonight.

As the person in the room with our "Gamers," I am well aware of their complaints, but I can tell you that the draft room is doing what the draft room is supposed to be doing. no it didn't Geoff

[kjduke]

Originally posted by BillyWaz:
On 6+ hour pace with some of the best in the business....doesn't sound good.

I'm betting that KJ Duke has a few more things to add to his list. The list is so long I don't even want to talk about it. I just don't want to do any more drafts on fanball software. Bottom line, it was slow, frustrating and hard to follow the draft. Every other contest has better software.

Many of us NFBC/NFFC loyalists gave them long lists of suggestions in Vegas last March for creating a good online draft experience, but we all wasted our breath. I don't care what they do to improve it at this point, I'm not doing another online draft with the NFFC this season. Love ya Greg, but my patience with your online product is finito and there's no kind of promise of improvement that's gonna change that. I hope you have it fixed for baseball.

[moyer1313]

Well, I didn’t experience any of the problems that many of the others did with Nate Kaeding showing up all the time, not knowing they were up because they had froze, getting Pre-Picked when they were not on Auto, having to click on a button 3 or 4 times to get it to function, etc., so, as Geoff stated, the software can work as presented.

I’m using a 4-year old laptop running Windows Vista and IE 8.0, so it isn’t because I have some great home PC.

However, it didn’t work well for several users and that is a problem.

Enhancing those problems was the design layout.

Below is a post that I made this afternoon before tonight’s draft.

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Member # 77

Member Rated:
posted August 04, 2010 04:09 PM
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Unfortunately, there are many factors that go into designing the Draft Room.

In a perfect world, a Slow Draft Room would look different than a Live Draft Room.

For example, in the Live Draft Room, I have no use for a player's stats to be displayed. It is a waste of screen space.

However, In a Slow Draft Room, it might be nice to have a player's stats displayed. It may save me a little time going to another site to look something up.

Also, the design has to be used by both novice drafters and non-novice drafters.

For the novice drafter, having the stats displayed is probably very helpful.

For the non-novice drafter, it may or may not be helpful.

Is it possible, not this year of course, but in the future, to have separately designed Draft Rooms?

Maybe one for Live Drafts, one for Slow Drafts, one for veteran NFFC Drafters, one for novice drafters, etc.?

This would also allow them to cutomize the Ads, or no Ads, for each Draft Room.

Given that some concession has to be made to make the Draft Room useable by all, below are my specific use comments that may or may not be useful to the general population:


1. List players LastName, Firstname.

This will make finding players much easier, especially in Draft Champions where the list goes very deep and I am sure there will be many players not listed at all.

2. The List of Players and the Draft Summary have to be displayed at the same time.

The only 3 things that I really care about on the screen are:

a.) A running list of those drafted listed by 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, etc., not by 169, 170, 171.

b.) A list of players not drafted that is listed by LastName, FirstName and sortable by Name and Position.

c.) A Pre-Draft Queue that is easily populated and easily re-arranged.

Anything else may be necessary, but is extra as far as my being able to draft efficiently.

3. A Roster List is not needed for viewing all the time.

4. The visible Queue List needs to be longer.

5. Last year's stats are not needed for viewing all the time.

6. For Slow Drafts, it needs be possible to Pre-Draft more than one Round at a time with a different Pre-Draft list for each Round.

This is a must for me.

7. Having to make 2 clicks to Draft a player is understandable, to prevent misdrafting. Adding a player to the queue, doesn't need to be a 2 click process.

8. Those that have drafted with me before know that I rarely type in the Chat Room because I am an old Paper-n-Pen guy and keep track of most everthing manually. I rarely look at the Chat Room, unless there is a problem. Making the Chat Room smaller would be my recommendation, but I know that is the exact opposite from what everyone else wants.

9. Hopefully, there is a noise that lets you know that it is your turn to draft.

10. Hopefully, there is not a noise that lets you know that there has been something typed in the Chat Room.

11. I'm not going to make any comment on the Ads, other than I don't believe Fanball is going to gain any business in a group of non-novice drafters.

12. Currently, the Draft Order runs across the top. Running it down the side would probably allow for better use of space, specifically to allow longer Player Lists and Queue Lists to be displayed.

This is just an Off the Top of My Head List. I'm sure there will be other things to add after the draft tonight.

Thank you,
Mark
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[ August 04, 2010, 04:11 PM: Message edited by: Follow Me ]

--------------------
'07 10-3 127.3 ppg $0 Won
'08 11-2 123.3 ppg $0 Won
'09 2-12 129.5 ppg $0 Won

The only team in NFFC Main Event history to win 11 games and not cash.

1683.8 pts. in 2009 is the record for a team with just 2 wins. Old record - 1479.95
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Posts: 411 | Registered: Jul 2004 | IP: Logged |


Having lived through tonight’s draft, I want to state that everything written above is still true.

I will comment on a few of them:

1. List players LastName, Firstname.

This definitely needs to happen, especially with all the names not being in the database. Several comments were made in the Chat Room about players that were assumed to have already been drafted, when they were never in the database.

2. The List of Players and the Draft Summary have to be displayed at the same time.

This was probably the #1 complaint from everyone, other than the Ad, about the design.

a.) A running list of those drafted listed by 12.3, 12.4, 12.5, etc., not by 169, 170, 171.

This needs to be changed. It currently lists the picks by number and by Round, but not by 12.3 or 16.8. That is how we all are used to seeing it and how we are all used to keeping track of things.

9. Hopefully, there is a noise that lets you know that it is your turn to draft.

Yes, there is a noise to let you know that it is your turn to draft.

10. Hopefully, there is not a noise that lets you know that there has been something typed in the Chat Room.

Thankfully, there is no noise when typing in the Chat Room. With all the Stops/Starts and complaining tonight, my speakers would have worn out.

Players like Neil Rackers, Matt Bryant, and Brian Westbrook not being in the database is bad, but easily fixed. The other stuff, may not be, but needs to be.

The time needed to make substitutions for mis-picks and to document Placeholder picks was longer than we are used to. That could be just a matter of the Commish getting used to the Administrative software or maybe the Administrative software was put on the back burner while working on the frontend software. Normally, that wouldn’t matter much, but tonight it matter a lot.

Geoff put up with a lot of whining and complaining tonight and I’m sorry he had to. He saw the complaints and can hopefully parse them into something that can be used to make things much better.

Mark
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[ August 05, 2010, 01:19 AM: Message edited by: Follow Me ]

[Riverdog]

Here are my complaints/ what I'd like to see corrected.

1. There are 3 seperate places to look to keep up with the draft. (The top has a scrolling order going left to right) This is the ONLY place you can see when your pick is coming - (the ever important - how many picks til mine) Then on the bottom left you can view either the players list to draft from OR see who has been taken (the draft picks) However, on this list you can only see the last pick and scroll to the beginning but you can not see who picks next (gotta look up top for that) You can not see the draft (players taken) while you are looking at the draft list. THere is a button to toggle back and forth to take turns looking at who's drafted and who is available.

not user friendly.

2. The lists are missing many players ( why cant they just load like all the players or at least REALLY deep ) I wasnt sure if a kicker was taken or just not listed. It was not worth trying to time my asking if he was taken right before my pick.

3. If there was a mistaken player taken accidentally - auto (happened A LOT) It took too long to replace the pick.
This slowed down the draft continuously

4. Everytime the draft was paused (which was many times) you have to hit a re-load button or it doesnt show the draft moving again. THe draft was paused so often that twice the draft looked paused and when it re-loaded my pick had passed (auto)

5.No Draft Grid ! Its nice to be able to see a draft grid to see how the draft is shaping up or at least the draft listed by rounds. THere were no Rounds listed anywhere. JUst pick #'s in to the 300's. If you wanted to judge what round it is you had to do the math or look on your roster where it shows what round you took a player. Lots of looking in different places to put it all together.

Overall, just not user friendly but I am hoping everything can be fixed and the drafts can run faster and smooth.

It has potential. I thought the que players was good once you got used to it. The sound when its your turn is a little scary - I miss the "It,s YOUR turn"

Is this possible to fix. ? I hope so.
Todd

(left my post while Mark was leaving his)

[ August 05, 2010, 01:22 AM: Message edited by: Riverdog ]

[Riverdog]

6. If you are goig to show player stats (which can be helpfull) please include the # of receptions catagory. Thats a big one for our purposes.