AllSimBaseball Free Agent Auction 1.0
 

First of all, I’d like to say thank you to Phil Barrett, Mets GM in my online league(pbar25 on the OOTP boards). He was a tremendous help in not only testing but throwingout idea after idea that helped shape over half of this utility. My hat is off to him and I thank him for his time.
I’d also like to say thanks to Tony M, who is a moderator on the OOTP boards for giving me advice and pointing me in the right direction when I was looking for mySQL queries that were a bit off the beaten path. Thanks Tony!!

Here is a rundown of what it it provides...


Members Area:

• Free Agent Listing – Find players you want to bid on, click on their names and place your bid.(Now sortable by positions)
• Bidwatch – see the latest bid action in real time, along with the number of hours a bid has been standing. You can click directly on a player to place your counterbid.
• My Bids page – Keep a close eye on the free agents you’ve placed bids on and how many bids you’ve placed on that player(in case your league places a limit as mine does). Click on a player to see if any counter-bids have been placed. This page shows the Amount, Years, Total and the Status of your bid. As the auction moves forward, you’ll be able to see who signed with you quickly via this page. This page also shows how much money you have to spend in total, a total which will be entered by the admin when Free Agency begins.
• Signed Contracts Page – After Admin(s) have verified expiry, players who have been signed via the auction will be listed here, including the terms of their new contracts and the team they signed with.
• Player Bid page – this is the page where you place a bid on a player. There is a lot of dynamic info on this page. As bids are placed and time moves forward, this page tells you how much the latest valid bid is worth and how much you need to counterbid, in order to have a valid bid. It also shows how many hours the previous bid has been standing and a red warning will appear if time has run out. You can still place a bid anyway but admins can invalidate easily since they will also know that the clock ran out. (Now if time has run out the submit buttons are grayed out preventing futher bidding.)
• Edit Profile – Change your password here, and your name if you need to.
• Passwords are encrypted using MD5 encryption but you should still choose a strong password!(Now changed to SHA-1. slightly better than MD5)
  
• Bank Account-like feature - Each team is given a budget/account(reflecting the in-game money to spend on FA's)by the admin and money is withdrawn from that account with each new bid, preventing teams from spending beyond their budgets. When a counter bid is made over your bid, that money is credited back to your account. Each team's bid histor page shows their ongoing budgets as they spend.
  
• No Money, No honey - When a team has less than $300,000(customizable) left to spend, all submit bid buttons for all players become grayed out, preventing that team from placing any bids.
  
• Drop-A-Line - It's not a chatbox but it's similar. Anyone logged in can drop a comment in the Drop-A-Line column of the index page just like a chatbox. Anyone logging in will see the latest comments at the top.
  
• Sortable columns for all categories in the bidwatch list.
• Timers added to show hours left until certain admin set deadlines are reached.
• Current time clock added.
  
• Add your email address in your profile to receive notifications when bids are placed on players that you are in the bidding for.
  
• Added an option for teams to "Bow Out" of bidding. The option is only available if they have a valid, non-leading bid.
  
• Added a feature that allows users to report possible errant or illegal bids to the admins.

Administrators:

• Manage Free Agents – Add, edit or delete existing free agents(Now, you can import a list of free agents from a .csv file you can create from copying the list from the reports page and pasting excel, then saving as .csv. A sample CSV is included so you can import some players right away. Afterwards, just delete all Free Agents and replace the .csv with your own and re-import. Just make sure that your .csv has only 2 columns with no headers. Player name and position, in that order, and change "C" for catchers to "CA". For some reason on import, the database was thinking all positions needed two characters because the rest have two characters 1B, SP, etc. Anyway, look at the sample .csv for the format. If you import directly using phpMyAdmin, no need for the edit.)
• Manage Users – Create users, change team names, real names and passwords as well as set budgets for team owners. Manage Users page now shows 30 teams at a time.
• Admin Bidwatch – see all the latest action. Edit or set the status of any bid with just a couple of clicks. Setting a bid to INVALID will remove the bid from the bidwatch list. A copy of the INVALID bid is stored in the index page under “View Invalid Bids” and it continues to be listed in the member’s MyBids page for his reference, in case there is any dispute over validity.(This admin duty is now minimized by the app's calculation of money left and elapsed time. Now, the app also prevents a team from counter-bidding themselves. I wonder who would do that?! :rolleyes: .)
• Teams Page – Quickly take a look at any team’s bidding during this FA period. You’ll be able to count bids on players and edit bid status quickly and include a reason if necessary.
• Index Page – View Signed contracts will show you a quick list making it easy to enter info into OOTP without having to navigate your league site’s forum pages. Admins can post a message that will appear on the page members see immediately after login. With this, you can place rules and reminders and the like.(New, separate league rules page added. Admins write them or paste them and they show up in the members area for quick reference)
• Set Bid Time Limit – There are presets to select from here. If you choose 24, then when a player has a valid bid stand for 24 hours, the utility will then show a message in red that the time limit is up when someone tries to place a new bid. Admins should still verify and change status of winning bids to “SIGNED” so the player and his new contract info get sent to the Signed Contracts page.(Now, there is a settings page. see next item...)
  
• Auction Settings page - Input your league name and it shows in headers such as in title of the rules page. Set time limits in hours(1-99). Set counter-bid percentage over requirements(1% - 99%). Number of bids a teams is allowed per free agent(1-99), however, this is just rule that shows up in the MyBids page and still must be monitored.
• Delete All Bids – Click to clear when you are ready to set up your next free agent period. CAUTION! There is no way to undo if you click this!
• Delete All Free Agents - Click to clear when you are ready to set up your next free agent period. CAUTION! There is no way to undo if you click this!
  
• 2 Admin timers added that countdown to deadlines that the admins set. name the deadline and set the clock and both the admin index and members' index show the hours left until the deadline is reached.
• Clocks added that show the current time. Currently set to America/New_York, but a small edit in the indexes can change it to whatever you want. (Maybe I'll add a control for that in the Admin settings page later. ;)
  
• Created field for admins to adjust the minimum amount of money a team must have(or have freed up) in order to be allowed to place a bid on a new free agent. This was previously hard-coded at $300k. If a team does not have this minimum amount of cash available, they will not be able to place a bid.
• Added a "position" column to the "Signed Free Agents" listing in the admin area. This should help facilitate the the effort of searching for and assigning players after free agency.
• Created a new entry in the database that triggers a bold, red font warning NOT to knockout, nor place a new bid, that shows up immediately when the intent period has passed.
• Added a section in the Admin control panel that lists bids that have been reported by users that may be errant or illegal bids. Admins can set the status to resolved after taking action.

That’s all, I hope you get use out of this thing. I already have some things I want to add for version 1.1 because this tool was pretty much developed with my own online league in mind. I realize that not all online leagues use our rules so this is an area which will be addressed in the next updates.


EDIT: Additions and changes made as of Jan. 20, 2011. are in red.
EDIT: Additions made as of Feb. 19, 2011 are in blue.
EDIT: Additions made as of October 8, 2011 are in green.
EDIT: Additions made as of December 29, 2011 are in purple.
EDIT: Additions made as of May 1, 2012 are in Sienna

Download version 1.0.7 is HERE.

Update Package 1.0.7 to 1.0.8 is HERE.

After FA is over, how are the players actually signed in the game? I assume this does not move the signed players to their new teams in the game.

You are absolutely right.

In my league we run have run an auction via the boards for 40 seasons( 6 real life years) and the commissioner(me) waded through the posts and signed players in-game via the player editor. It's one of the unique aspects that we love because free agents can't say "no".

This tool simply organizes everything, provides guidance(especially for new league members) and warnings when time limits have passed or are near, does a lot of math for members and admins so auction rules can be adhered to more easily.

An online league that might want to use this would need to set rules such as:

1. number of bids a team is allowed to place on a particular FA(my league sets it at 3)
2. a % that a counter-bid must add to a previous bid total.(my league sets it at 10% above the previous bid)
3. number of hours a valid bid must stand without being counter-bid, in order to sign that player

At the end, the commissioner only needs to look at the Signed Contracts page, in order to assign FA's in game accordingly, because that list is concise as far as contract details he needs.

I will post some screenshots tomorrow. :)

Ok, then when signing them in game, do you just edit their 'team' and contract rather than actually make a bid on them? I'm trying to get my arms around what exactly is done to 'sign' them in game.

Exactly. :)

How does the app handle different lengths of contracs? Can you set the amount required to raise the bid, ie 10%?


EDIT - Can an opening bid be set?

it goes by total value of the contract. Right now it is set at +10% for counterbids because that is my league's rule. A small edit and this can be changed and controlled by admins.
What does this mean? Set to what?

What I mean is, can the opening bid amount be set by the commissioner?


Also, let's say the top bid is 50K for a guy and I bid 70K. Does the bid amount automatically go to 70K or does it increase the 50K by 10%. That seems logical to keep people from having to continually bid and wear out their certain number of bids on a guy.

Just trying to cover all my bases before I install this.

In your scenario the new leading bid would be 70K, just as you intended.
Before a GM places a bid it will state the minimum bid required for a player (10% greater then current leading bid), but a GM can always bid whatever amount they like. So at times a GM can step in with a monster offer that is never outbid.

Regarding setting the opening bid.....at the moment you can't do that, it might be a good idea to implement it. But that would be a lot of work when entering in the free agents each off season -- as you'd have to look at each player and determine a value yourself. In our league the market has always corrected itself once the bids start rolling in.

The rule in Fidel's league is we simply have a minimum major league contract allowed ($350K I believe), so no opening bid is considered valid unless it meets that requirement. It allows small market teams, and large market teams too, the ability to find some cheap contracts if the market isn't there for that particular player.

So by bidding more than the min increase, you don't get a cushion ala ebay. It'd be nice to bid the max you want to give for a player instead of continuing to watch and see if you need to up it again. Also, it'd be nice to give less than your max if no one beat that max.

Correct, no bid cushion. It adds to the strategies involved in that with only 3 bids you need to decide on a tactic -- bid the minimum amount for a bargain, or aggressively go after the must-have player.

I understand the request, but abstractly it's a public offer to a player's agent. So in baseball terms, I just don't see them lowering the amount they'd sign for after it's offered.
I'd think back to the ARod Texas deal...I'm sure Hicks would have liked if he could have gotten it reduced to $1 more then the next highest offer. :rolleyes:

I believe on Ebay the max bid is not displayed to others?
The biggest issue with that scenario within an open bidding system is this:
If you bid $50 MAX, and I see it....I'm going to bid $49 MAX so you don't get any type of deal. So the deal you are looking for would be countered by other aggressive owners paying attention.
In a nutshell: If I know you only have to pay $1 more then the 2nd highest bid, I'd just make the 2nd highest bid $1 less then your bid since I'd risk nothing.

Is there somewhere I can see this in action? Like are the players somehow linked to their HTML page? Stuff like that.

In my scenario, the max bid wouldn't be seen.

Sure, you can login as the Giants. I'll PM you the details.

No HTML links to the player pages. It wouldn't be hard to create a place for admins to add links to the players but at this time, we simply made this tool to take the place of our forum auction, which required lots of hand-holding for new guys and plenty of errant bids by miscalculation of timestamps and/or bid totals by even some of our veteran league members. This tool also eliminates the amount of sifting through posts and scrolling through individual threads for valid and invalid bids for the guys in our league that monitor our FA period. at the end of Free Agency, the admins on our forum close threads like this. Now that work will also be unnecessary. :)

Screenshots here. :)

In an open auction(keyword being "open"), which this would be used for, hidden max bids are not necessary and would defeat the purpose of an open auction. In ebay that is simply used so you don't have to keep watching the bids as they come in. We actually want GM's to keep watch. Also, ebay sets an expiry time/data on item auctions, this system does not. Instead of Tuesday at midnight being the deadline for bids, lets say, the deadline always resets to 24 hours(or 12 depending on the rules) according to a counter-bid's timestamp. So theoretically, bidding could go on for three months if every team wanted a player, had enough money and waited out 23 hours and 59 minutes before counter-bidding(30 teams x 3 bids each x 24 hours) one by one. But the most we've ever had bidding go on for a free agent in our league is about 6 days when GM's are really working their strategies and trying to land a top end free agent and they finally run out of bids. Average is 3-4 days for most players.

I understand the concept and why you use it the way you do. Some flexibility would open this up to many other users is my point.

Yep, flexibility is necessary. Added an Auction Settings page today. Here an admin can set hours to closure(1-99 hours), number of bids allowed per free agent by a team(1-99), and the required percentage % minimum for counter-bids(1%-999%). These result in rules and dynamic warnings reflecting these settings in the members area.

Working on a small shoutbox for the index page. I think that might be a fun addition.

Something that might be fun would be a 'widget' like in statslab that would show the previous 5 bids. This code could be added to the website. I don't know if its doable, but its an idea.