Add option for auction draft instead of snake draft

[albertlyu]

Since I do more auction drafts than snake drafts, I modified the draft-aid controller to set auction values when a player is added to the draft's history. This will be useful for me to quickly find the auction values of a nominated player's peers (quickly sort and filter by position, tier).

If you're curious about how I implemented it, you can see my commit to my fork here 86fde6db54c2a50b61c9030d5984a6a87e2fdf06. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to hide the {{auctionValue(player)}} markup when you draft a player and type in a value. I also don't have any validation on what value you type into the prompt, but oh well. I had attempted to toggle between snake and auction, but couldn't decide on a great user experience for it, so I tabled that from this commit. Maybe you could think of a better way of doing this.

[jayjzheng]

I don't have any experience for auction drafts, so i probably won't be able to give you a lot of help.

The immediate reaction I had though, is that wouldn't typing in the amount for every pick slow the process down drastically? Maybe it's just me, but my goal for this app has always been to eliminate displaying/using unnecessary data as much as possible, in order to create a fast and simple UI.

As for validations on the input, maybe instead of "text", you can use "number"?

[albertlyu]

I can definitely see that a window prompt may not be the best way of entering a drafted player's auction value. The way I'm using it now though, makes it very easy for me to quickly find similar players' values so I know how much I want to bid on the current player being nominated. I thought about having the most recent drafted player in a separate 'nomination' view, from which similar but already-drafted players are automatically ordered to the top of the draft history list.

From a UI perspective, I was unsure what was a good way to switch between auction and snake. But I suppose a user would be interacting with the app one draft at a time, and toggling between draft types may not have much use case.

On a separate note, check out an auction draft sometime :) I think your app can really fill auction drafts just as well (if not better) than snake drafts. In auction drafts, players are nominated out of order, and every manager can bid on any nominated player until time runs out. Your app made it very easy for me to quickly see who was still available while I was debating submitting a bid on a nominated player, so I was able to make quick decisions based on the pool of available players left. I could then target tiers and positions and keep track of them as the draft went on quickly.

[jayjzheng]

Interesting, will definitely check auction out sometime.

How do you decide on how much you would bid for each player?

[albertlyu]

Hey there, sorry I didn't see your question till now. I always start out auction drafts with an auction value cheatsheet, but it never turns out the way it's expected. It's really different from snake drafts and looking at ADP because the market seems to be so dynamic and based very heavily on the temperaments and tolerance for risk that the league members have. People tend to splurge $ on the top 4-5 RBs this season, but will scale back on QBs.

What I think your tool provides will be to quickly add and list auction values of previous drafted players, so that the user can make a mental adjustment as to the market value for certain players. So for instance if Tier 3-4 WRs were drafting at $38-42 based on the draft history, and you find that a currently nominated Tier 4 WR (let's say Antonio Brown) was sitting at $35, I can quickly make that decision to bid an additional $1 and hope to grab Brown at $36 below the previously set market value for a Tier 3/4 WR.

Hopefully that anecdote / use case makes sense.

[albertlyu]

Some auction draft cheatsheets will list Charles/McCoy/AP/Forte/Lacy in the $55-60 range, but recently I've been in drafts where each of those guys were going for $65-70. If I'm basing my bids strictly on a cheatsheet and I'm hoping to grab one of those 5 RBs, I won't be able to react to the market and adjust my projected auction values in time -- I'd have to construct my roster and mentally change my bids on the fly. Another reason why your tool would help me remember to mentally reset my projected auction values for any tier / position I'm targeting.

[jayjzheng]

Gonna try some auction drafts. Probably will add this in for next year's drafts.