FAAB Processing Changes
For those of you that don’t know, I’m Kyle and I handle the tech side of things here at RSO. We have just made a change in how our Free Agency Auction Bidding (FAAB) Process is going to run. For those new users, this is the bidding process for acquiring Free Agents after your auction. We don’t call it waivers, because we have a separate waivers process which is for picking up players that have recently been dropped by your teammates. Since this change affects you, the GMs/owners/users, I thought I’d write up a little something to illustrate the change and how it will affect you.
I’ll try to portray how this process was handled before as well as how it is handled now after this change with a very simple FAAB example with just two teams and some sample players. Let’s say Team A has the #1 waiver priority and Team B has waiver priority #2 this week. Team A puts in a FAAB request to add Doug Baldwin for $1M and drop Donte Moncrief as their one and only FAAB request that week. Team B meanwhile submits two requests. Their top priority FAAB request is add Allen Hurns for $2M and drop Martavius Bryant and their backup (#2) request is to add Doug Baldwin for $1.5M and drop Martavius Bryant.
How it used to work is that the nightly process would select the top priority request from the team highest on the waiver order and then process the bids for that player. In the example above, it would have grabbed Doug Baldwin, then found the highest bid for him, and processed that request, continuing in that fashion through all the requests for the league. This means that Team B would have gotten their lower priority request Doug Baldwin (#2 request) and not received Allen Hurns (#1 request) despite being the top bid for both players. Now did this happen very often? Not at all. We still didn’t think that was acceptable so…
We are changing it so it’s more common sense. We’ll grab the player with the highest bid across all teams, then validate the bid (make sure the drop player wasn’t already dropped, cap space check, etc.). We’ll of course still break tie bids, which will still be determined by the league waiver order, and then process the request and move on to the next one. In the above example, Allen Hurns would be processed first, and then Doug Baldwin. Team B would get Allen Hurns and Team A would win Doug Baldwin since Bryant was already dropped by Team A. This means that if you’re the top bid, you’ll never lose out on a player because of a request that is lower on your priority list.
The biggest change for you, the owners, is that priority will now be primarily based on the bid amount for the player. As such, we modified the user interface (UI) a bit. Now the only time you’ll be allowed to modify the priority of requests is if they have the same bid amount. This way you can still prioritize which players you’d like to add (or drop) for the same request if needed. You can see this illustrated in the screenshot of the new UI below. The bottom line is the higher the bid, the higher their priority in your FAAB requests. Does this mean that you can’t try to sneak one by your teammates with a low bid on some risk/reward player? Of course not, but you’ll want to be very mindful of who your drop player is for that request so it stays a valid request until that player gets processed. Waiver order will now only be used for two things, breaking a tie here in the FAAB and the other Waiver claims process.
Please feel free to reach out with questions through the Contact Us page, email us directly at inquiries@realitysportsonline.com, or twitter @RealitySportsOn. I’ll even toss out my own twitter @RSOKyleEnglish if you have any FAAB or even broader tech/platform related questions. It might not look too active, but I’ll respond.
