Slow Auctions
Slow Auctions are now available on the site! I’ll walk through the various aspects of the slow auctions and my own thoughts on they will play out.
How it Works
Each team in your league gets their own auction to run. Each of these auctions individually run just like the auctions of old with the exception that you’re the only one nominating players for your auction. The bid countdown resets with each bid, exactly like the quick auctions, so there’s no blind bidding and there’s no value to waiting till the last second to bid. The commish tools of pausing and resuming the auction functions across all auctions, not individually. You pause/resume them all at once.
Auction Settings
The auction nomination and bid timers can now go up to a max of 86400 seconds (1 day). The bid timer settings are what matter for the purposes of making it a slow auction, anything at an hour (3600) or more for that setting will be considered a slow auction. You can update these timers if you pause your auction, but you can’t swap from a fast auction to a slow auction or vice versa without resetting the whole auction. Honestly this is something we’ll probably add in the future (at least going from a fast auction to a slow one). It was something that didn’t even cross my mind until earlier this week and just didn’t have time to implement it before auction season.
I personally wouldn’t go over 12 hours for a bid timer. Anything more than that and your auctions have the potential to last a very, very long time. If you go shorter than 8 hours you can of course pause the auction overnight and resume it in the morning. You could also pause the auction each night, set a longer bid timer, and then resume the auction right away if you wanted it running overnight. Pausing the auction does reset any currently running countdowns, so it seems like it’d be less work to just pause the auction overnight since it’s likely that nothing definitive would happen overnight, but that’s ultimately up to you and your league.
These style auctions do have the potential to take a long time (worst case scenario it would literally take months) depending on your league settings (roster sizes, open roster spots, bid timer, etc.), but the biggest determining factor will be if you’re messing around with tiny bid increments and/or letting the bid timer wind down before bidding. Don’t mess around with the low bids early on. Be sure to use the manual bid to jump it early and they will go much quicker. There’s also no value in these auctions to waiting till the last moment to bid, so I’d recommend simply bidding when you can.
Auction UI
Honestly don’t think there’s a ton to talk about here, hopefully it’s pretty intuitive. For these slow auctions you’ll see an additional area towards the top where you can switch between the multiple auction instances that are occurring in your league. They are color coded to indicate roughly what state each of them are in. Blue is waiting for something, either the auction to start, a nomination to occur, or signifies that the auction is complete. Yellow is there’s currently a player up for negotiations and you’re not currently the high bid. Green is there’s currently a player up for negotiations and you are currently the high bid. Otherwise everything else should be the same as the auctions you’re used to.
Other Functionality/Thoughts
A few other small things and edge cases I should mention. You’re max bid and available contract durations are affected by any current high bids your team has out there. If your league only allows one four year contract, and you bid a four year contract on a player, you can’t then offer another four year contract to a different player. You’d gain back the ability to place another 4 year contract on a player if you’re outbid. The same goes for your roster limit. If you only have one open spot left, and you’re currently the high bid on a player, you can’t offer a contract to any other player until you’re outbid on the first.
Our auctions have never held tight to league positional requirements/limits for bidding on players and it’s no different now. You’ll just want to be more mindful of your roster composition since there’s more auctions going on at once.
Slow auctions do have email notifications around a few events since the point is to not have to be in the auction room the whole time. You’ll get an email when it’s your time to nominate a player, when you’re outbid on a player, and when you win a player.
