First weekend using the product and it was intense. I completely underestimated how much time I’d spend tinkering day after day– right up until kick off. I wanted to bring up some issues I had; wondering what could be avoided, what could be changed, and what I have to live with.
==Here's a little background on my process and how it’s influenced my feedback. This is based me wanting to generate a lot of diverse lineups for GPPs==
I started with the QB position, picked a handful I liked, set the sum of their exposures to 100 (e.g. 20% each for 5) and then crunched lineups 100+ deep.
It didn’t take long to realize the global settings weren't very good at building lineups with multiple QB options like I wanted. Assuming I typically didn’t want more than 30-50% exposure to most players, FC seemingly used all my exposure of those top players on one or two of the “best” QBs leaving scraps for the other QBs with a lower projection who I felt had upside/contrarian play.
For example, prior to kick off, Tyrod Taylor and Datlon were top value plays week 4 while guys like McCown, Brees and Haselbeck were not. Lets pretend that regardless of how bad it might have been to use any of those last 3 on paper, I wanted to generate lineups with them. If I was really keen on Julio Jones Wk4 and wanted him on 50% of my teams I would set his projection high enough to make him an auto include, but limit his exposure to 50%.
The problem I ran into was the cruncher would see how much better plays Tyrod and Dalton were and use all of Julio’s exposure on lineups with those 2 QBs, and never put him on a lineup with the bottom 3 QBs. I just ran a test with 20% exposure to each of these 5 QBs, and generated 30 lineups. Julio showed up on all of Dalton/Tyrod lineups and half of Brees capping his 50% exposure (never showed up on a Hasselbeck/McCownteam). Ideally what I’d like is Julio to show up on 50% of lineups for each QB.
This led me to start building lineup groups using only one QB at a time. I liked my lineups better, and I started using custom settings based around only that QB. For example, I wanted a group of lineups with Cam Newtown, but i only wanted high exposure to Greg Olsen WK4 if I was playing Cam. When I was happy with my Cam lineups and ready to move on to my next QB I had to lower all my Olsen exposure settings. Then I did some lineups with Bortles and wanted high exposure to Allen Hurns, but again, not as much exposure to Hurns with other QBs. If something came up later and I wanted to scrap my Cam lineups, I’d have to go back and remember to redo my Olsen settings. As you can imagine, juggling between 4-5 QBs lineup tabs, and having custom settings for players based on my QB became a little frustrating.
I’m really torn on this one area. If I build my lineups around mutiple QBs I’m stuck getting an uneven distribution of top players across the top QBs and no ability to customize stats around specific QB combinations. If I build lineups based around only 1 QB it becomes very tedious remembering to set tweak settings as they relate to a specific QB and then having no way to revise that crunch later without starting over. Off the top of my head it feels like linking settings to each quarterback would be very helpful, but maybe that only works with my style of lineup building.
TLDR recommendations:
-QB stacking settings be applied to QBs individually, not globally.
- Ability to save/load multiple custom projections/exposure settings
- A setting that divides exposure to players (non-QBs) evenly across multiple QBs options- not so heavily weighted to the optimal QB lineups (this assumes building lineups using multiple QBs is even good idea).
- A filter for crunched lineups to only see lineups that use a specific player(s)- i.e. show me only my lineups with Julio Jones.
- Ability to trash crunches. I’ve found the best way to get lineups I like is to generate a lot of lineups I don’t like and weed them out. While It’s great I can select which lineups to upload, for organizational purposes I’ve love to keep that list cleaner by deleting crunches I definitely don’t want.
- Ability to combine crunches? Maybe this is what the saved lineup is really for.
- A setting that limits using multiple receivers from the same team. Currently you can set max/min players from a single team, but not set positional limits for a team. This weekend was a perfect example where I was high on the entire ATL offense, and wouldn’t have minded Ryan + Julio + Freeman or Ryan + Hankerson + Freeman, but I didn’t want Julio + Hankerson on the same team, but the cruncher was very keen on pairing those two WRs on the same team.
- Being able to deselect a player simply by clicking on his row, not just his check box, was a constant problem for me. I often found myself excluding a player by accident simply because I didn’t click exactly inside his exposure box. If you really want to keep this feature, maybe make it more obvious the player has been excluded, like set the color to something really obvious.
PIPE DREAMS?:
Manage lineups once they’ve been exported to DK and potentially revise submitted lineups. I found myself missing out on entering some tournaments because they filled up before I was done. I’d love to be able to reserve my spot(s) in a tourney by submitting lineups, but not feel like I have to fight my way through DraftKings terrible lineup interface to make changes.
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