Inaugural Fantasy Draft Details and Testing Season!

[alexfall862]

Hi again! Been busy hammering out the start of the league in July, but it's getting close enough that actions involving owners are coming up soon, so wanted to drop a dev diary to walk through all those systems!

Draft Day!

The consensus seems to be 6/15-6/16 is the best weekend to begin the draft. Mechanically, the draft will work in this way: 

The draft will be 10 rounds, consisting of the 300 best players based on the current generalized overall calculation (whether a player is ‘better’).

Draft Times
Day 1: 6/15, 12pm CT - 8pm CT
Day 2: 6/16, 12pm CT - 8pm CT (as needed)
*You do not need to be available for every pick, you’ll be @’d in discord when your team is in the next bundle of 5 picks.

There will be no time limit on picks as this is meant to not tie people to their computers all day, but expect that it may vary wildly. Ideally I’d love to have picks in within 2-3 minutes of being pinged that you’re on the clock.

There will be no trading of these picks, so the lack of need to try and work trades should hopefully speed up the internal pick clock among folks a little. 

Things that will help users that won’t be free the entire day:

• A form will be generated and sent along with the roster release so you can pre-submit a list of specific or general preferences as far as who you’d like to pick. You can do that for each round and/or update as you like if you wouldn’t like to submit a selection directly. 
• I’ll send a discord ping to whomever you wish to be the primary contact for drafting from the generated pool when they’re 5 picks away.
• A new channel will be created for the draft and I’ll send a league-wide ping in that channel for each round that ticks over. This should be a good chance for users to prep for later that round or the subsequent round in order to be ready to go without needing to watch pick by pick.
• The picks will be done in a serpentine fashion, and the announcement of the pick order will be posted in the discord channel tonight as a chance to test livestreaming for things like the regular MLB draft.

Inaugural Roster Release

The full roster will release on 6/05 with the draft pool separated out into a different list. The pool will consist of the 300 best players in the sim based on the the adjusted overall calculations. The draft, mentioned above, will consist of 10 rounds. Because the roster is generated with 13 pitchers and 13 position players and the draft is just pulling the top 300 players, it's entirely possible that your roster will not be evenly set as far as player distribution in terms of getting your desired balance, so just be mindful that when you're picking the rest of your roster you may want to pick more of one type of player than the other depending on the set part of your roster (or not, I'm not your dad).

Testing Timeline

The goal is to use June for testing (and early July for ‘spring training’) to get all users a chance to test out lineups, defensive alignments, and rotation choices.

For testing volunteers, expect the turn-around time on feedback to be 24 hours. In general, this is the pattern I’m looking for (things involving active participation bolded): 

Weekly Participation Timeline

• Monday: Gameplan Due 
• Tuesday: Game Results Posted, Feedback Forms Sent
• Wednesday: Feedback Forms Due
• Thursday: Working on Fixes/Clarifying Feedback/Group Discussion
• Friday: Second Set of Game Results, Feedback Forms Sent
• Saturday: Feedback Forms Due
• Sunday: Fixes/Prep for Next Week

Testing Schedule

• Week 1 (6/3): The first tests will be mechanical in nature and involve the volunteers who wanted to help out with testing providing lineups, rotations, and strategy input. This is to test edge cases I may not have built the system and to make sure things are intuitive as far as what and where they are submitted.
• Week 2 (6/10): Fixes and adjustments from the first week, as well as working on testing different submission methods for strategy/lineups/etc. to see which works best for folks in different situations (mobile, desktop, etc.) *6/15-6/16 will be the player pool draft
• Week 3 (6/17): Refining the strategy submission and testing season-long features such fatigue/injuries and revenue/balance sheets work properly.
• Week 4 (6/24):  By the end of June, we’ll aim to run entire test seasons to make sure the processes for simming games works without unforeseen issues.
• Week 5 (7/1): Buffer Time - in case things discovered in testing need more TLC
• Week 6 (7/8-7/21): Spring Training (all users)
• Week 7 (7/22): Week 1 of the regular season!

Salary Calculations

In order for teams to be fully informed of who/what they’re drafting, it’s going to be necessary to have existing contracts in the sim. 

These will be calculated in several steps: 

1. All players will have their MLB service time set at their age-23. 
2. Players under 3 years of service time in the MLB will receive a minimum MLB salary (NIL and minor league salaries will be hand-waved for sanities’ sake at least for now and probably for several seasons). 
3. Players at or above 6 years in service time will receive a veteran salary with a random year amount between 1 and 3 years as well as a somewhat randomized salary that is a set unit multiplied by the value of their standard deviation from the league’s mean overall (50) and then fuzzed/randomized a little.

Generated Veteran Contracts

That unit value for MLB veteran contracts will likely be something like 7-12m/yr per unit. So a player that’s 3 standard deviations above the mean could get a contract as low as 21m or as high as 36m AAV. Likewise a player that's .5 deviations above would get 3.5m - 6m and a player with a negative deviation is going 

The contracts are a little short so that the natural market can reset the valuations and teams don’t feel like they’re boxed into situations they don’t want. 

Since the pool of generated players that will be drafted in the inaugural fantasy draft are also the top 300 players (>33% off the roster) it seems unlikely that any players would be generated onto a roster that would rack up a massive generated contract - most of those are going to be in the draft.

Players between 26-28 will receive the same calculation, but because arbitration sucks, the unit multiplier will be far lower, around 2-5 million.

Dev Diary Timelines

For folks who aren’t part of testing, I have a couple dev diaries in the can for defense, stealing/baserunning, pitching staff logic, and fatigue/injury that I’ll aim to pepper into June so you’re not all in the dark as we go.