[FF]: 2014 Season Long Fantasy FIRST

[EricH]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

Hey... I just realized we have a problem... After downloading Eric's excel doc, the when you load the lists and such the exact same draft order is made every single time... I thought I would investigate due to over 25% of our drafts, us having a first pick. (Though not everyone uses Eric's doc) The doc works perfectly otherwise though...

Originally Posted by EricH

I'll check on that. It should give a different order every time. Unless... I'll check that too. (I think I know what's goin' down.)

Awright, I ran some testing. And I have a solution (the problem wasn't quite what I thought). But first, the testing method:

I ran the generator 10 times without closing Excel or clearing data. 7 different players got first pick, possibly 8. The first two were Breakfast Company.

Then I ran the generator 10 times, clearing the draft between runs. (Actually 11 times, but I think I forgot to clear once.) 8 different players got 1st pick.

Then I closed and opened Excel to generate drafts. I was going to do 10, but after 5, the pattern was clear. Breakfast Company, BTW.

Then I tried clearing the draft before closing. Didn't help.

But, there is a simple fix. I've used it before when manually generating drafts on occasion (Ed, if you remember a couple years back when Hallry kept getting 1st picks... I did use this once or twice... and I've used it against myself, too).

If you use my spreadsheet to generate drafts, you need to generate the draft 2-3 times--or roll a die and generate that many times. I think Excel's starting random number is 14, which happens to be Breakfast Company's position in the list. Guess what, they get a lot of 1st picks.

I will be thinking of a fix over the weekend, maybe sooner. It'll probably involve tripping the random number generator some random number of times before starting to use its numbers. I'll announce when it's fixed and published. I'll probably do a little bit of development--I found something by accident that could make my life MUCH simpler, and should be a quick add (famous last words, right, programmers? ) before the release, maybe make life a little easier.