Staff Draft
 

Is there any utility developed to run the Staff Draft online?

Thanks guys.

Not that I know of. I have one for my leagues, but it is so completely tied to my database structure that it would be pretty much impossible to make it work for the general public. It actually moves the staff members real-time on and off of teams in the database as the draft runs.

FWIW, coding the Staff Draft is FAR more difficult than coding for an amateur draft. The following are considerations that have to be taken into account.

1. As mentioned above, staff members move onto and OFF of teams. When someone makes a pick, it's not just removing a draftee from the pool, in most cases (i.e. every case other than retirement or poaching,) you've also got to add another draftee to the pool.

2. Poaching: the rules for that are fairly complex and must be read carefully from the Help File to make sure that coaches who are allowed to be poached are poach-able, and that coaches who AREN'T allowed to be poached can't be, because....

3. Amenability Block: After you run the draft via utility, you have to create a csv and then import it into FOF. Here's the kicker about that, though: if there is ONE single pick that is incorrect (i.e. he wouldn't be amenable in-game,) the entire draft is void and will have to be re-run. This is a big deal because...

4. Amenability Rules: They are complicated, and some of the rules aren't obvious. Again, it's not like an amateur draft where you're allowed to pick any draftee in the pool who isn't on a team. Just because you have a HC job open and there's some guy languishing at AC doesn't mean that the game will allow you to hire him. (If you fired him in the past or if he has more than x years left on his contract, he will not be Amenable to you, for example. I don't recall all the details.) So, yeah, to be 100% clear on that, there are staff members who will work for Team A but will not work for Team B. (That's why Conscriptor, in its so-far-failed effort to handle this, required you to upload the transactions_yyyy.csv file for every year in the league's history to attempt to parse out which was which.) There are also other Amenability rules that I discovered in testing this out. I don't recall all of them, but I do remember that it's more than what's in the Help File.

Thanks Ben, very useful information from your end as usual. I will have to find another way to do it then.