Quote:
Originally Posted by Raidergoo
Live Winter Meetings are a blast, with GM's in 3 countries and 2 continents showing up to chat via an AIM chat room. There's a lot of trash talk, and announcements that so and so is being shopped, or that a team needs pitching, stuff like that. In the background, GM's submit bids for a player to the commish via private message , and the commish will enter them manually for the GM. At one time last year, I had the main chat going, with 7 separate PM conversations at the same time.
eMLB uses a trade review board, which can take a week or more to approve a trade. During the Winter Meetings, the review is done live, so teams can wheel and deal rapidly.
1 day gets simmed every 30 minutes, and in game news articles that come up get posted, plus PM's if a player likes or hates your offer.
It does not amount to much, but it sure is entertaining!
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I just finished conducting our first live Winter Meetings in the style Raidergoo suggested, and it is indeed a
blast. It's also an
immense amount of work, but if you can handle the coordination then this is an experience I wholeheartedly recommend. Your owners are going to come together and have a ball wheeling, dealing and generally chatting each other up. Talk about a great league spirit-building exercise!
Now I do want to point one thing out. I actually sent out league file updates during the Meetings so that owners could make contract offers to FAs. Then I imported them back in every half-hour, advanced a day and repeated the process. If you choose to do it this way,
don't be a doofus (like me) and make the mistake of processing trades
before importing your owners' updates! Yes, I realize this will be obvious to most everyone, but in my rush I made this error during the first half of the Meetings and had to spend a couple hours post-Meetings editing players to be on the proper rosters and have the proper contracts. Doh!
Even with that bout of foolishness on my part, this experience comes
highly recommended for intrepid commissioners who are looking for a way to spice up the off-season. This was such a hit in PEBA that the owners are now calling for a similar event to be held at the trade deadline. Thanks a million for the great suggestion, Raidergoo!