FYI, those discord links have expired.

1. Falcon (EricH)
2. Questionable Decisionmakers (Brian_Maher, TDav540, saikiranra, pchild, abbymarie, PJ )
3. Salty Spitoon (Miklast)
4. The Breakfast Company (BrennanB, Golfer4646, tmpoles, tindleroot, niklas701)
5. The Lunch Company (nomythicalbeast, hailey.faiella, snapdragon, max_boord, Csherm)
6. Instant Regret (cobbie, Attention, Matthew_Levis)
7. Making All Rookies Into Options (jtrv, katherinehulle, stryker, Optimal, AcesJames)
8. Robotics Three 6 Zero (Kaitlynmm569, EricKline, Evan_S, Ryan_5943, Thequackmaster)
9. QwEST (Kevin_Leonard, SPang, ThatSoftwareGuy)

1. Falcon (EricH)
2. Questionable Decisionmakers (Brian_Maher, TDav540, saikiranra, pchild, abbymarie, PJ )
3. Salty Spitoon (Miklast)
4. The Breakfast Company (BrennanB, Golfer4646, tmpoles, tindleroot, niklas701)
5. The Lunch Company (nomythicalbeast, hailey.faiella, snapdragon, max_boord, Csherm)
6. Instant Regret (cobbie, Attention, Matthew_Levis)
7. Making All Rookies Into Options (jtrv, katherinehulle, stryker, Optimal, AcesJames)
8. Robotics Three 6 Zero (Kaitlynmm569, EricKline, Evan_S, Ryan_5943, Thequackmaster)
9. QwEST (Kevin_Leonard, SPang, ThatSoftwareGuy)

Looking for team

1. jmcquie

Hey SLFF community. Looking for some direction on the alternate/potential new draft running software, and i’m just about ready to jump to the next step starting next week with OFF drafts. As the main purpose of working on this is to help support SLFF, i’d like to get a better idea of what people think the next priorities are. I’ll also be posting the poll in the OFF server, and if someone wants to post it in the SLFF server and relay the results, that would be great. In general Discord auto drafting will be much easier for me, and has a very high likely hood of being fully functional, CD drafting has a moderately lower one.

In regards to the draft runner:

Please SELECT YOUR TOP 2 PREFERENCES on where the draft runner goes

I’ll try to start working on whatever has the most support after 24hrs of this poll being up.

If you want to add extra context to your thoughts, that would be awesome as well. I look forward to the feedback!

As my votes indicate I’m kind of indifferent to whichever way we go. I think the main focus though would be which one is faster to debug because that would positively impact both the Discord and the CD runner - I just don’t know which one that is.

Here’s my auto runner code:

if {team = good}
pick
else
explode

1. Falcon (EricH)
2. Questionable Decisionmakers (Brian_Maher, TDav540, saikiranra, pchild, abbymarie, PJ )
3. Salty Spitoon (Miklast)
4. The Breakfast Company (BrennanB, Golfer4646, tmpoles, tindleroot, niklas701)
5. The Lunch Company (nomythicalbeast, hailey.faiella, snapdragon, max_boord, Csherm)
6. Instant Regret (cobbie, Attention, Matthew_Levis)
7. Making All Rookies Into Options (jtrv, katherinehulle, stryker, Optimal, AcesJames)
8. Robotics Three 6 Zero (Kaitlynmm569, EricKline, Evan_S, Ryan_5943, Thequackmaster)
9. QwEST (Kevin_Leonard, SPang, ThatSoftwareGuy)

Looking for team

1. jmcquie
2. Leap

Alright, the results are in, and I will start working on an auto runner supporting Chief first. There definitely is a lot of people interested in Discord, and hopefully I will have the time to make it compatible with both.

Thanks to everyone who voted in the poll!

1. Falcon (EricH)
2. Questionable Decisionmakers (Brian_Maher, TDav540, saikiranra, pchild, abbymarie, PJ )
3. Salty Spitoon (Miklast)
4. The Breakfast Company (BrennanB, Golfer4646, tmpoles, tindleroot, niklas701)
5. The Lunch Company (nomythicalbeast, hailey.faiella, snapdragon, max_boord, Csherm)
6. Instant Regret (cobbie, Attention, Matthew_Levis)
7. Making All Rookies Into Options (jtrv, katherinehulle, stryker, Optimal, AcesJames)
8. Robotics Three 6 Zero (Kaitlynmm569, EricKline, Evan_S, Ryan_5943, Thequackmaster)
9. QwEST (Kevin_Leonard, SPang, ThatSoftwareGuy)
10. The Snacc Company (CBrosch0, CurtisB42, alyssag3)

Looking for team

1. jmcquie
2. Leap

1. Falcon (EricH)
2. Questionable Decisionmakers (Brian_Maher, TDav540, saikiranra, pchild, abbymarie, PJ )
3. Salty Spitoon (Miklast)
4. The Breakfast Company (BrennanB, Golfer4646, tmpoles, tindleroot, niklas701)
5. The Lunch Company (nomythicalbeast, hailey.faiella, snapdragon, max_boord, Csherm)
6. Instant Regret (cobbie, Attention, Matthew_Levis)
7. Making All Rookies Into Options (jtrv, katherinehulle, stryker, Optimal, AcesJames)
8. Robotics Three 6 Zero (Kaitlynmm569, EricKline, Evan_S, Ryan_5943, Thequackmaster)
9. QwEST (Kevin_Leonard, SPang, ThatSoftwareGuy)
10. The Snacc Company (CBrosch0, CurtisB42, alyssag3)

Looking for team

1. jmcquie
2. Leap
3. WilliamHurley

Super unofficial opinion poll for SLFF 2020. Gathering preferences for 2020.

For all SLFF seasons up till now, and most of OFF, drafts have been run in tiers. A new option has been fleshed out and is fully functional in the new draft runner for 2020, but as far as I know mr bossman hasn’t made it official, so would like to get that discussion out in the open.

The version run for TRI has since been cleaned up, and looks slightly different, but all works smoothly. This is what it would look have looked like for Capital Cup (the most recently run OFF draft):

While this is an obviously long draft, SLFF drafts are significantly shorter than this one as shown, the purpose is to show what the draft looks like on CD.

The team number is followed by the number of available instances of each team. (4 instances of 225, 5 of 225B etc. A team will show up on the random list on the side until all instances are cleared. (aka if Darre and Snapdragon both random, they both get 1495B.)

Why change?

Pros:

• Tiers cause team/player divisions, which make it so that you might be in a tier of unbalanced players that are either strong or weak, giving an advantage to one of the tiers.
• It’s a lot easier to calculate rotations as you don’t need to figure out if events are tiered or not beforehand.
• Waivers are much easier, as you no longer need to check for what tier you are in.
• Waivers become more fair, if you are in a tier where nobody is doing the waiver, you can leave that juicy 254 pickup till your last claim.
• Depending on your perspective on this, and if you think it’s good or not, you can select the same team twice, doubling down on a team. Adds some extra strategy to your picking.

Neutral

• In the old system, tiers could give you multiple first overall picks, this still essentially does that, devaluing some of your slots.
• Waivers stay the same length, as you have the same number of available teams

Cons

• Drafts will be on average longer, but no longer than many of the other drafts. (Currently 91 minutes per draft, Tiered drafts would be saving 49-42 minutes under the current 3/2/2 timing)
• It hasn’t been tested as much as tiered drafts, and thus has a small chance to be slightly more buggy/causing redrafts.
• Randoms have more of an impact, as you could get the same team (good or bad) in the draft.

What would you prefer for SLFF 2020?

If you have any other thoughts/pros/cons lets chat about it!

2020 Autodrafter update

Made some significant progress with the bot, and am relatively confident that I will have a fully testable version sometime within this month. Next week’s drafts will debut auto list submission and retrieval via the bot.

Generally the concept is:

PM the bot with the eventcode/full event name/shortevent code (eg CapCup), put your list in the body.

Some form of list check goes through the list to make sure the formatting is valid, then it replies with a “you are good to go” or a “please fix” message. Updates to the list can be detected if you edit the main message (really annoying if you do it for a manual draft runner, since they don’t get a notif).

Have to work on the details of the list verification, and auto reply.

If you have any suggestions/concerns let me know!

I’m neutral, and this is essentially because OFF hasn’t weighed in. The plan was to test a bit in OFF before bringing it to SLFF and making it “the thing”.

While it was trialed in off, due to the large number of players participating, it was decided that it didn’t make sense to continue in OFF. (Near 3 hour long drafts )

Fair enough.

I polled on the “tierless” option, partly because noblesse oblige and partly because on the manual Excel runner it’s a lot easier to fix issues. And partly because the confusion impact goes down even thought the time hit goes up…

I think an important question that should be answered first is “what is the longest acceptable duration for a draft?”. From here and the player count, we can work backwards to determine if duplicating produces a satisfactory solution.

Basically, if N > t/7, where N is the number of SLFF players and t is the length in minutes of the longest acceptable drafts (and assuming 3 2 2 slots), I support tiers, if N <= t/7, I support duplicating.

So, what is the longest acceptable duration for an SLFF draft in your opinion?

I don’t think this is a very useful question. With the current number of teams, we will definitely have non-tiered drafts regardless of the decision between tiered or tierless drafts. If you are talking about “longest acceptable” then it’s rendered very irrelevant as long as there are drafts that aren’t run in a tiered format.

Currently with 2019 events/numbers, and the 10 teams signed up, 2/62 events would need to be tiered.

If you add the hypothetical teams this number is only 19/62 drafts. The vast majority of drafts are likely to be natively non-tiered.

In 2019 SLFF it was 30/62. (ish)

This question IS however useful for slot timing discussions, which new possibilities certainly arise with automatic drafting on the horizon.

I definitely agree with Brian. I think there should be an agreement on the most reasonable length for a draft. IMO, drafts should be tierless, unless it hits a certain time length. For example, TRI. The draft was close to 3 hours long. In that case, let’s assume the “time limit” is an hour and a half. The draft would then be split into two tiers. The goal is the keep as little tiers as possible, while also keeping the time reasonable. I think time limit is especially important because the season happens during school days. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m still in high school, so staying up late on school nights is a no go. Granted, that could be fixed by submitting a list, but I still think drafts should be kept to a reasonable length.

K thanks have a nice day

You can mitigate time concerns by changing the timeslots. If the drafts are longer, theres a valid argument to drop the intervals deeper into the draft, since everyone is expected to be there by the time the 3rd round starts.

While I hear what you’re saying, 3rd round at 1 minute intervals is BRUTAL on the draft runners. I wouldn’t touch it without a tested autorunner.

Source: 5-3-1 was the standard up until maybe two or three years back, rather than 3-2-2.

That being said, Discourse doesn’t have the 47-second limit that vBulletin did, which accounted for a lot of the pain. But as a runner back then, your best hope was that you had a bunch of lists/randoms so you could get half the tier done and catch something like a breather.

Discussing overall time limit: Generally speaking, an earlier draft start time would allow longer drafts. However… an earlier draft start time messes with the West Coast players’ availability. Let’s say a 2-hour limit, as that would end the draft by 10 PM with an 8 PM start (7 and 5 on the West Coast). Depending on how close we were given the number of players, I could possibly see sliding it a couple minutes longer, but if the third round starts anywhere after the 2-hour mark it’s a split. I would also say that Fridays and Saturdays would be the most likely to relax any time limit…