Awesome addition, thanks!

I was in love with this new feature until I read to the point where it states, "stack could be used up to 25 times". If I want to make 100 stacks at once with 25 Cubs, 25 Braves, and 50 Rockies, this feature will not help because it doesn't guarantee that any stack will even be used once, correct? Or am I reading this incorrectly? This feature could be phenomenal if it actually did what we wanted it to! It's the same concept as with individual players. I know many people have asked about being able to lock in a player for a certain percentage of lineups, but you guys don't like this idea for some reason and won't implement it for us. The thumbs up sometimes does not change a player's overall exposure, sometimes even clicking thumbs up to the maximum of 3 times makes no difference in the amount of times a player shows up in a fixed number of lineups that I generate. It can be frustrating when we want a certain player to be in SOME of our lineups, but not all of them (which locking in a player puts him in every single lineup). I think it would be easy to add this in the code and give us the feature that many of us want. We would love to see this option with players and stacks. It would make the FC experience so much better! I know I'm probably the 100th person to bring up the same point about player lock-ins, but I hope you will change your minds about it and I know many other people feel the same. Other than these two objections (which are important to me), I love FC! Thank you.

I think MAYBE you are misunderstanding. If you want 100 stacks, 25 Cubs, 25 Braves, and 50 Rockies and set their appropriate percentages, 25% 25% 50% then you would get exactly what you are looking for. If you set those exposures and ALSO included every other team, then no, there would be no guarantee it would fall the way you want because you have other options. This is essentially the same as the player exposure settings work.

Also, in regards to the player exposure, if you ever want a player to be used an exact % of the time, just set his projection really high, and then limit him with the maximum exposure %.

Thank you for the clarification! I thought when you used the phrase "could have up to 25 stacks", that it meant it was going to be a random amount of stacks of specific team up to a maximum of whatever percentage we set it at. That's why I didn't understand how the new feature would be helpful. Also, thanks for the advice on the player lock-ins, I will start using it immediately. This new stacking feature is awesome now that I understand it. Keep up the great work!!

This is cool. However, I've never understood why the site won't enable users to control player exposure better. Is there a reason? Would the site then be 2 good?

This is cool. However, I've never understood why the site won't enable users to control player exposure better. Is there a reason? Would the site then be 2 good?

Let me rephrase that. I think I read on here once that their reasoning in refusing to implement this is because it could affect the lineups possibly in a negative way as far as from a scoring perspective. From my perspective, it could affect the lineups on any given night in a positive way too. I just wish I was the one who was allowed to decide if I want to use this feature or not, instead of the decision being made for me by FC. Also, when I remove a player from the player pool altogether and create 100 lineups after, that could alter all 100 lineups I make also, but at least I get to choose to do that if I want to. This is a feature countless people have asked for since I joined and I do not know why the stubbornness to not do it supersedes what the customers want. So, I guess we will just have to keep asking until they give in hehe :)

In case people don't want to read the article (I'd appreciate if you did, since I wrote it). The thing is not that we are preventing our users from controlling exposure better. It's that with our CURRENT method of doing exposure, if we allowed for minimum exposure, the results will be REALLY REALLY bad. We currently do exposures by removing a player from the pool between solutions when their exposure has hit a certain point. This isn't that big of a deal since removing a player from the pool does not restrict lineups that much, especially if you have a decent sized pool. To enforce minimum exposure the same way we're currently doing it, we'd have to LOCK players between solutions, which is a much more restrictive constraint.

Let's see what that looks like in practice: You have 5 "sneaky plays" aka low projection plays that you want to play each at least once, in 5 lineups out of 25. You set a 4% minimum exposure so that they'll be used at least once. What the optimizer is going to do is, it's going to create 24 lineups as normal then realize, "oh the minimum exposure hasn't been met, let me lock in those players that need to be played" and now all 5 of those plays are in a lineup together. Now we have groups so if you want to prevent this, you set it so that each lineup can only have 1 of those 5 players. Now the optimizer will create 20 lineups and realize that exposure constraint needs to be met and you might get decent results, but there are going to be issues with those lineups being almost identical to other lineups with 1 player subbed or if you have some uniqueness constraints, they're going to be bad because they need to satisfy uniqueness from all previous lineups AND need to incorporate this already mediocre player.

Let us take this even further because this is what a lot of our users will do, what happens when you set minimum exposure on 20-30 players and you want to create 100 lineups? I reckon the results would be pretty unpredictable. Will our users even be able to look through that many lineups and tell if the results are what they want? And if they aren't, how do they use the current constraints to make those lineups. Well..I'm not sure what type of rules you would need to enforce to get what you want, and not even sure if it can be done with the current method. Entering 100 lineups is a lot of money, it is in our best interest that if our users are producing a ton of lineups, they are produced in a predictable manner. If we can't provide that, it would be irresponsible for us to release a feature that we ourselves would not be able to explain the results.

This is what I think users actually want when creating 100 lineups. They would rather have 100 "decently" projected lineups that have good diversity rather than the optimal lineup then subsequently worse lineups that decline in quality very quickly. To do this, we need to come up with a different way to do the solve ENTIRELY, because we need to look for these 100 lineups as a group, rather than one after the other. We have worked on a different way of solving that can do this, but it's not ready for release yet.

If you need to assemble a minimum exposure, one of our recent updates lets you look up the lineups with specific players and delete lineups from your list. Then, you can lock in players that did not get used or were underused and you can calculate MORE lineups and add them to the pool (there won't be any duplicates). This is a much more predictable way to get to your minimum exposures.