Options for trades and lineup changes in the 2024 salary cap league

This post is for the attention of those managers who are going to take part in the FBUK Classic / $5m Game salary cap leagues, run via the Fantrax platform, in 2024.

Those of you who played in the FBUK Classic salary cap league in 2023 might remember it suffered a technical glitch on a few occasions, associated with Sunday transactions, which resulted in a small number of fantasy teams being incorrectly deducted large amounts of points in the standings.

We worked out it was caused if the new Picker+ tool was used to set up a player transaction (Fantrax introduced the option in 2023). For some reason, it would backdate the transaction to earlier in the season, which caused confusion with the roster and points scoring for previous weeks. I spent a lot of time during the season repairing the rosters to correct the stats and points.

Eventually, Fantrax concluded that the Picker+ tool was not compatible with leagues like FBUK that have weekly transactions (Sunday trade deadline) and daily roster moves (active lineup changes). I did ask if Fantrax were able to disable the Picker+ tool for our league but that wasn’t possible at the time, although I will check again whether this has been updated for 2024.

Looking ahead to this coming season, I thought I would get opinions on the following settings options for transactions/roster moves:

1. Keep the usual system where transactions take place once a week (Sunday trade deadline) and roster moves can be done daily (moving players between your bench and active lineup). However, managers would need to avoid using the Picker+ tool, as it would likely cause the same points-loss glitch. Instead they would need to use the ‘traditional’ methods of setting up transactions either by dropping a player from your Team > Roster page or by adding one from the Players page (which most managers do anyway). The important caveat is that if the Picker+ tool is used and causes the glitch again, I can’t guarantee I will be able to repair the team’s roster and points total, in which case that manager might just have to live with the points loss.
2. To allow compatibility with the Picker+ tool and hopefully avoid the glitch, change to daily for both transactions and lineup changes. This would continue to allow active/bench changes on each game day but would also allow managers to add or drop players every day instead of it only happening each Sunday.
3. To allow compatibility with the Picker+ tool and hopefully avoid the glitch, change to weekly for both transactions and lineup changes. This would mean that the weekly Sunday trade deadline would remain but also managers would have to set their roster (active/bench) for the whole week and would not be able to alter it on each game day during the week.

Please let me know your preference via the poll and feel free to add comments in the thread below.

Note: This does not affect the draft leagues run through Yahoo, so if you only play in the Yahoo leagues and not Fantrax, please don’t vote!  🙂

• This topic was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by FBUK.

[waynum @waynum]

Is it an option to highlight Picker+ and then changing the background/font colours both to black so there’s no Picker+ to be seen?

I believe that as long as sufficient warning has been given, as it was last season, by the way, that any GM who uses Picker+ should then be fully aware that any problems have come about by their own actions.

[tiggerrrrr @tiggerrrrr]

Appreciate I’m not a longstanding player but I would have thought that switching to daily transactions would have a significant impact on the strategy given that you could free up several thousand salary from starting pitchers who aren’t pitching on that day by just selling them after they’ve pitched and using the money to bolster your starting 9. Seems like it would give significant advantage to those who have the time for daily strategizing as the decisions you used to make once a week would now have to be made every day?

[FBUKCommissionerTopic Author @fbuk]

@waynum

waynum wrote:

Is it an option to highlight Picker+ and then changing the background/font colours both to black so there’s no Picker+ to be seen?

That’s the type of thing I was hoping Fantrax could do but I imagine it is tricky for them to hide Picker+ only for certain leagues/users like FBUK, but still display Picker+ for other leagues/users. The ideal thing would be for Fantrax to enable the Commissioner to turn off Picker+ among the copious league customisation settings.

Overall, I assume most managers didn’t use Picker+ last year, given it was a relatively small number of teams that suffered the glitch, and once we realised the cause mid-season, those managers also avoided Picker+ for the remainder.

[FBUKCommissionerTopic Author @fbuk]

tiggerrrrr wrote:

I would have thought that switching to daily transactions would have a significant impact on the strategy given that you could free up several thousand salary from starting pitchers who aren’t pitching on that day by just selling them after they’ve pitched and using the money to bolster your starting 9. Seems like it would give significant advantage to those who have the time for daily strategizing as the decisions you used to make once a week would now have to be made every day?

Yep. Personally, I prefer the existing weekly transactions because it creates some amount of limitation that managers need to consider when planning trades. Also, when managing my own team, I prefer that I’m not tempted to deal with trading and budget balancing every single day, but that’s just me!

[FBUKCommissionerTopic Author @fbuk]

Thank to those who cast a vote. It’s strongly in favour of the status quo, so I’ll stick with the usual weekly trades and communicate as best I can to remind people to avoid the Picker+.

 

Tim