There has been some very good discussions on how to use Google docs for keeping track of the various league rosters and to integrate that capability into our standard transfer processes. I will cut and paste the pertinent posts from the other threads into this one to have a complete record of the discussion. I will also cut and paste our transfer processes from the sticky on Draft Tips for new managers to give people a chance to propose how they would edit the existing processes. Once we get a consensus or a couple of alternatives, we can put the proposed revisions to a vote.
Excerpts from the Drafted League Rules for New Managers: From Ingromius: 3. Season Transfers: We use the following process, for both post-draft, pre-season transfers and regular season transfers. a. Plan your transfer: (1) Ensure the player is a free agent and not already on someone's team; (2) Ensure your planned transfer complies with FPL game restrictions on salary cap and on the limit of players from one team b. Post your transfer in the FPL Message Board for your league ----------------------------------------------------- From Ingromius' reposting a FAQ on transfer process: 3. These are the steps to take to drop a player from one’s team and acquire a player from the “free agent” pool (those players not already on another team in your drafted league). a. First, ensure that the player(s) you want are not already on another team in your league. You can do this by a) looking at each other team’s roster; b) keep an EXCEL sheet of your league’s rosters and update it with each posted trade; c) Check the blog site of someone who posts a composite of the league’s current rosters (Note the time when it was last updated and then check for League forum posts and BigSoccer Season Thread posts since the blog’s last update to ensure no one of the other managers in your League has the targeted acquisition player on his/her team.) b. Second, ensure your proposed trade is executable – it must be legal within Fantasy.Premierleague.com rules. In other words, you must have sufficient funds to acquire the new player and the acquisition can not violate the limits on number of players from one team rule. c. Third, post your proposed trade in your drafted league’s Fantasy.Premierleague.com’s League Forum. As a minimum, the post should include the following information: i. Your Team Name ii. Player(s) OUT, Position, EPL Team, Current Valuation iii. Player(s) IN, Position, EPL Team, Current Valuation d. Fourth, Check back in the Fantasy.Premierleague.com’s League Forum to ensure you were the first to post an acquisition of this player. If you proposed a multi-player trade and someone else “beat” you to a trade of one of your acquisitions, your entire trade is voided. You’ll have to post another proposed trade that does not include the player whom someone else swooped for before your post. e. Fifth, once you’ve confirmed that your proposed acquisitions were the first posted for the player(s) you wanted, immediately go to your Fantasy.Premierleague.com Team Page and make the transfers, releasing the dropped players and adding your new acquisition. f. Sixth, as a courtesy, post a copy of the completed trade in the BigSoccer.com Season Thread for your Rocks League. Penalty / Procedures for Making an Illegal Trade: 1. During the Post-Draft, Pre-Season period (1-2 weeks), most draft league managers make about 4-5 adjustments to their drafted squads. a. If a manager tries to acquire an illegal player, the entire trade under which he made the illegal acquisition is voided. For single player acquisitions, the manager just has to reverse the illegal trade, dropping the player that is already on another’s team and either adding back his dropped player (if the dropped player is still available and has not been acquired by another of his league’s managers in the meantime between the posting of the illegal trade and the time the illegal trade was discovered and corrected) or by posting a legal acquisition of another player. For multiple player acquisitions, his claim for the legal player is voided and another manager within his/her league could post a trade for that player. b. We all have unlimited free transfers before the season starts, so there are no points or financial penalties for post-draft, pre-season illegal trades. Just correct it as soon as you can. 2. Illegal Trades made During the Season: a. If a manager tries to acquire an illegal player, the entire trade under which he made the illegal acquisition is voided. For single player acquisitions, the manager just has to reverse the illegal trade, dropping the player that is already on another’s team and either adding back his dropped player (if the dropped player is still available and has not been acquired by another of his league’s managers in the meantime between the posting of the illegal trade and the time the illegal trade was discovered and corrected) or by posting a legal acquisition of another player. For multiple player acquisitions, his claim for the legal player is voided and another manager within his/her league could post a trade for that player. b. Each team has one free transfer per week during the season, except for the one time use of the unlimited transfer wildcard. Additional transfers incur a 4 point penalty that gets deducted from the overall season score at the next update to the league’s table. c. As soon as the illegal trade is discovered, the offending manager has to correct the situation. As a minimum, assuming it was a single player trade, he needs to release the illegally acquired player and either reacquire the player dropped or acquire another legal player. This means at least 2 more trades that week or a penalty of 8 points that the game will deduct from your season’s total score. (No one wants to lose points needlessly, as they are determinant in promotion and relegation between our drafted leagues.) d. Points are not the only penalty for making an illegal trade. The Fantasy.Premierleague.com game taxes valuation gains in players. Let’s say you acquired a player with a 7.0 valuation and before you decided to release that player, his valuation increased to 7.3. The game will take .1 of that gain and if you tried to re-acquire the dropped player, unless you have reserve funds available, you may not be able to reacquire the same player, regardless of whether another manager swooped for your dropped player before you realized and corrected your illegal trade. e. Bottom line: Making illegal trades is very costly. That’s why we emphasize that the first step to making any trade is to ensure you are acquiring legally available players. --------------------------------- From Ingromius' reposting other posts of trade wisdom: Why would a manager make more than one trade in a week an incur the 4 point penalty for every additional trade? Newbies might wonder why any sane manager would make more than one trade a week and cost themselves points in the season long table and hurt their promotion/relegation chances. Here are some reasons for active transfer activity regardless of whether they cost an extra 4 points. 1. Say a manager has already used his free transfer that week, and a new, hot prospect gets added to the database. Your competitors will not wait until next week to swoop for that player, so you bite the bullet and go for him even at the expense of 4 points. 2. The long-term injuries, discipline absences, multiple game weeks and no game weeks for some players really come into play. In order to field a full team for the inter and intra cup competitions, you may have to make multiple trades in a week. 3. For financial reasons: Early in the season, you may make multiple trades to swoop for some hot, in form, previously little known player, and ride that player's increase in valuation by 1-3M, then sell him and increase your team values by the discounted .2 - .5. It is important to build your team value to be able to acquire discarded better players later in the season, especially during the January transfer window. 4. Even though these are valid reasons, other things being equal, try to plan your trades to only use the one free trade per week. For example, say West Ham United and Wigan are going to be the only two teams with a double game week in about 4 weeks. You might start acquiring available starting players from those teams 3-4 weeks prior at 1/week. Of course, if you drop a hot prospect from your team, expect him to be snatched up by other managers trying to improve their teams or be unavailable for you to reacquire the same player because you cannot afford him, due to his rise in value since your acquisition and the way the game taxes you between 50-80% tax on his valuation rise. The game has a weird sliding scale of how much you get to keep of the valuation rise.
Quotes from the Pre-Organizing thread on this same subject: First up is Paul Blecher's post that started the whole discussion:
After re-reading all the comments, let's see if we can focus the discussion. 1. Nothing changes on our principle that a player must be in the FPL database, aka free agent pool, before anyone can transfer for him, or draft him. 2. Nothing changes in that managers still have to do some homework to ensure the proposed trade is a legal trade. (Refer to our previous comments regarding multi-player trades). To be legal: a) Player must be in the database; b) Player must be a free agent and not already on someone's team within your drafted Rock's League; c) Acquisition of the player must not violate the FPL rules on number of players from one EPL team on your fantasy roster; d) You must have the funds to make the acquisition. (This is important because of the tax FPL takes on players whose value has appreciated so that you may not have the funds to acquire the new player.) Part of the reason for this suggested use of Google Docs is to help managers do their due diligence to ensure that the player is not on another team in their drafted Rock's league. As a comparison, here is how I ensure a player is available: 1. I keep a team roster for all 8 teams in my drafted league and update each team's squad when they make a transfer. 2. I also keep a complete spreadsheet of all the players, with a column indicating whose team they are on, if any. I update that spreadsheet weekly along with the points and updated transfer values to analyze who I may want to acquire. 3. I check the League Forum and the latest weekly transfer threads since my last spreadsheet update and update it accordingly. 4. Like someone said, noticing who was released is key information and may evoke a quick claim by me or other active managers. So it is important to keep that aspect of knowing who are the recent releases. 5. I have a separate window open with my team in the Transfer mode and I make a trial run to acquire the candidate player (I DO NOT HIT THE TRANSFER BUTTON). This step ensures I have enough finances to make the move and that the move doesn't violate any FPL rules on number of players from one team. 6. If I have a legal trade, I then make the post in the Rock's League Forum; check to ensure no one else beat me to my target acquisition, then I go and hit the transfer button on the window I had open. If I got lazy and didn't update my spreadsheet for several weeks, I may click on each team and ensure they don't have the player I'm targeting, and then I check the League Forum for the transfers since the close of last week that are not reflected (that I can see) in their roster on FPL to ensure the player is available.
On the other end of the spectrum, I do not keep a spreadsheet other than the one I create to track the draft. I am lazy at updating them during the long haul, accept that about myself and thus check every roster before making a transfer. I have gotten quite used to carefully double checking the position player(s) on each roster and then the latest forum. In two years I have not had a problem. Realistic time to check rosters is about 5 minutes once I settle on a target transfer. At that point I have already run through a mock transfer to be sure I have the funds. If all is in order I go to the FPL league forum and post the trade, then make the transfer to my team. This has been a fairly painless process. Having said that... I can see the value of all team rosters updated and posted on one page. I certainly understand how such a page must be accurate if it is to be counted on for transfer purposes. It would need to be mandatory to update the page immediately or express a need for additional time in your league forum as has been suggested. Perhaps we could explore other potential penalties for not posting other than making the trade invalid. I would not want a manager to lose a player he legally selects from the FPL site. Perhaps a 4 point penalty could be handed down and tracked separately (lobomojo has done with his site) allowing the actual trade to stand. There may other suggestions here. I tend to lean towards keeping things as they are but could easily be persuaded if the change is for the good of the league, not just me. I can add a step to the transfer postings easily enough as long as I am walked through the process. My two cents.
as I'm said I'm mostly for, but if it is adopted, I think it should be as a supplement to, not a replacement for posting on the official site first which allows for times to be posted and the respecting of down, and update times (though perhaps allowing for penaltys/voiding transfers, if official post is not followed up in google.doc timely
I'm not at all in favour of the idea that posting on the official site isn't enough to get a player, however.... Due to the effort put forth by Blech/Djangone in voicing support for this idea, I'll not vote against it. PS...never used google docs before and am much like Hal in respect to all the tech savy younger posters on here.
I'm totally against an 'extra step' being put on managers when everything has worked just fine for all the years we've been playing this. Posting in the official forum is more than enough. It is in everyone's own interest to track the transfers and keep their own copies and I don't see why this should change, by 'forcing' managers to update an online copy as well.
I didn't create the existing VSR document so I don't have the authorization to do it, but it would be easy enough to expand the authorizations for people to experiment with it. As I said before, if you've worked on a computer spreadsheet before, it is basically the same, except that it is on the Internet not your computer and you publish instead of save when you're done. As for the first point, maybe Glorydaze's suggestion of an alternate "penalty" instead of losing the player would satisfy your concern, and may be more appropriate. Perhaps an increasing points penalty for each additional time a transfer isn't updated (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.). Or perhaps an owner who finds and inputs a transfer that wasn't made gets the points that the transferring owner is being penalized (kind of a payment for doing what the first owner didn't do). Regardless of the format, if this is adopted, I'd definitely be in favor of a 3-4 week grace period during the first season where any forgetful owners are "reminded" to do the update, and would even support reminders on a voluntary basis afterwards. Again, the point isn't actually to punish anything, just to get it done.
I'm the owner of the VSR document, so if people would like access to it to take a look at what it's like, send me a PM with your google ID and I'll add you.
I'm not worried about issues like penalties and the extent of mandatory_ness, yet. Initially, I just want to understand the capabilities of using this new technology and possibly for other uses. For example, using this same Google docs, can one download and upload the entire player database? With latest points and valuations? And then have a filter to weed out the players on our teams, so you have a spreadsheet of the free agent pool? After we understand the capabilities, we can list the pros (benefits) and cons of using this technology. Since we already have the experience of Very Small Rocks using this last season, they should be able to identify all the pros and cons of how they used it, but is there a broader application? Is it useable in the draft for example? We all freeze the database when we begin the draft, so in theory, the database could be uploaded in this Google Docs and then as each player is chosen, he is moved from the free agent pool to the drafting team. I'm thinking that this might be helpful in dealing with BigSoccer access issues. Is there a corresponding forum in Google Docs where a draft might be conducted instead of using BigSoccer.com? Not saying we need an alternate site, but wondering what are the possibilities.
You can actually use your current email address and sign up for the account here. You need one so that you can be given access to edit the document.
For someone claiming to be from the older generation, you are operating on an entirely different level. We didn't attempt to do any of this in VSR this past year - all we did was have the spreadsheet with up-to-date teams. However, you can add "sheets", so there is no reason that you couldn't have a second sheet that had players on it, or however else you arrange it. In short, I'm pretty sure you can duplicate on the googledocs anything you would do on an Excel sheet at your own computer. What I don't know is whether you can, for example, download directly there, of if you would need to download to your own computer first, and then cut and paste to put it into the googledocs spreadsheet. But, at the end of the day, I believe it has the ability to be identical. Probably best to get you on and let you play around with it.
i really liked the google docs spreadsheet as it allowed me to see every teams roster in one viewable screen. As the official site is blocked for me at work, it was very convenient in planning a transfer. I don't think it needs to be mandatory yet, but a compromise might be to have each division run a trial run this year allowing everyone to get used to it and give feedback at the end of the 09-10 season.
You can copy the data from the FPL site into a spreadsheet but it takes a little effort. Can't be done automatically. If you were working with an online data base, you could set up the function, but this is just a spreadsheet which relies on manual input. Absolutely ... that is definitely doable. You can set up a Google group (similar to a forum) and restrict it to whoever you wish as long as they have a Google ID. I've never done it so I'm not sure about integrating the online spreadsheet into the group.
Yeah I think the trial is a good plan. Generally I loved the spreadsheet in VSR... so much quicker to hit ctrl F and type in a player's name and see if he was available. BUT. That was never a sufficient procedure as there were times during the season when managers weren't updating their rosters on google. I remember a few times I had a little cartoon smoke above my head as I input several trades that had been posted to the FPL forum but not the spreadsheet. It only takes one inconsistent participant to make the whole thing unreliable. Secondly, there were times that even the most diligent of us couldn't get to the google spreadsheet right away. This was never a problem as it was a supplement to the official procedure. Were it mandatory, we'd still need to figure out how to handle it. What if 2 managers drafted in at the same time, as happened back in the post draft phase with Shorey? Would it be a race to update the google page? What if a manager couldn't access google but managed to make a rushed trade on fpl? How soon would he (or she - sorry Chloe) be required to update the spreadsheet? We'd have to sort out this second issue in particular.. With all of these concerns though, I did think that the spreadsheet was a fantastic resource, even as a first check before doing a transfer.
I really like the google docs idea--it's just what the league has been missing for years, IMO. I'm fine with the idea of a trial run, but I'd lean towards making it mandatory right away. The time saved on everyone's part by not having to keep our own databases of all other league transfers will dwarf the "extra step" time. Not to mention the saved time from dealing with the mistaken transfers that happen in every division in every season. If the resistance is mostly to the "extra step," however, then why don't we just make the google docs update the ONLY mandatory step in the transfer process. Then any post to the site forum or to a a BS thread would be the optional part. Kind of like what many guys already did when double posting their transfers first on the league site, and then on BS.
Any procedure that is contingent upon accessing a site (Google docs, Big Soccer, whatever) other than the site (FPL) where the actual transfers are made and where the forum is located has a possibility of incurring problems. Since Google docs does not hold the data base where rosters, available players, scoring, salaries, transfers, etc are kept, the possibility exists that someone could have the ability to access the FPL site at a specific time but not Google. Should a person be prevented from making a move on FPL if Google is not available? I think the Google doc page can be an excellent tool, but should not be the sole determinative source of whether a move can be made or not.
If someone wants to update the Google Docs for everyone else, that's fine. But I still believe the only mandatory place to list the transfer should remain the official Fantasy Premier League site. We're already on there making the transfer, so no need to go anywhere else.
I had told myself I was going to refrain from further posts on this thread and let it run its course, and I even stopped myself the first two times I started to respond to 1800-WC, but each of the 1800 posts on the subject really are great evidence for why this needs to be mandatory! We got by in VSR this past year with a couple of inactive teams not updating their googledocs teams when they made occasional transfers, but if even one relatively active team chooses not to participate in a voluntary system, the value of the spreadsheet breaks down. And, while I assume it was a joke that someone could update for others (I think Lobo actually took on the task of trying to keep a list going for Sand this past season), we can't in turn hold a volunteer responsible if there are errors, which leaves us with a spreadsheet that is unreliable and can't be counted on. So, whether in said in jest or not, it's not much of a solution in my opinion, even with the cute smiley face! It really does need to be mandatory if its going to serve its purpose. I also note that even with three posts now objecting to the new proposal, no explanation has been offered for the 1800 resistance to the proposal other than the claim that it's worked fine in the past. From my perspective, it's not that it has worked fine in the past, but rather that all of you who have been doing this for years (and even those of us who have only been at it for a shorter period of time) have succeeded in working around a flaw in the system. But why not make it better? The reality is we are using the FPL site for a purpose for which it isn't designed. Having participated in computerized leagues designed for drafted teams, I can comfortably say that an ideal system would allow you to see (1) every team's roster with a click of a button AND (2) the players who are not already on someone else's team (and only those players) when you clicked the transfer button. Wouldn't that be nice? While the second part would be great, I haven't come up with a way that we can accomplish it without a significant amount of work that would probably be much more susceptible to error, but the first part requires virtually no work at all if everyone just does their share. If we're going to go to a trial run for next year, I'd really like the trial run to be that it be mandatory. Get rid of it if problems arise, but let's jump in and give it a go. I originally suggested the penalty of forfeiting a player if you don't add him to your googledocs roster within a period of time, but an escalating points penalty would be less draconian and would perhaps make more sense - maybe 2 points for the first player you don't input, then 4, 6, 8, etc. if you persist. Or maybe even 0 points the first time! Also, if a points penalty was adopted, an additional thought that would ensure that the list gets updated anyway would be to award the penalized points to the owner who comes through at the end of the gameweek and makes the updates for anyone who didn't make their own transfers that week (1800-WC perhaps). Come to think of it, we could just let the free market system work and I'd probably offer to make 1800's transfers for him if he's willing to pay me 2-4 points for each player!
Couple of brief ideas: 1) We might let each league do its own thing, have its own rules. There's no real benefit to uniformity, is there? In that case, each league would vote. I'm sure that's not too much of a pandora's box. 2) The 'extra step' complaint, so much work! I know! But the problem is that half the managers already do an extra step in creating their own spreadsheets. That's not even counting my brother, whose spreadsheet is like something out of the finance department at MIT. Craig's not going to give up his own sheet, but I bet nearly everyone else would. 3) I have to admit being the one who was occasionally inconsistent in updating my VSR moves on google docs (ahem, Jagielka, sorry!). I'm forgetful like that. I'm going to incur more penalties than anyone, I guarantee you, if we go mandatory. Yet I'm still in favor of it. 4) I can't see what's really 'official' about the FPL site? The only advantage to the message boards there are the time-stamps. Otherwise, who cares about what goes on in anyplace other than the team pages / transfer pages / standings pages? Oh, and the pundit, can't forget the pundit.