Mastersball Fantasy Forum

Hey guys I'm Looking for some advice on auction software. I've tried using quite a few of the popular versions on the market today and just haven't found anything that I both like and also fits our 20-team, 5x5 mixed-league keeper auction set-up. Can somebody that has the MastersBall software confirm that it can handle a 20 team auction with a farm system, keepers, inflation etc.?

Any advice on auction software in general, and MastersBall in particular, would also be appreciated.

After a year of rebuilding, it's a chase year!

Jeff

what are you looking at with the software? We can track players taken, salaries and categories but it won't offer suggestions

I'd also recommend really being proficient with it before using it -- especially in a keeper league.

I personally prefer not to use software -- but it does depend on what you want it to do.

Thanks for the reply Todd. As commish of our league, I use the software to keep track of all the team rosters, remaining salary, etc. during the auction. I also prefer the non-software approach but struggle keeping my sheets AND the software updated - all during a pretty quick auction. So for this reason, I also like to use the software to see projections of available players, a relative list of auction prices for the remaining players, category targets and my march towards those goals, how my team is stacking up against the other teams, maybe an idea of how the real world spending is comparing to the projected spending (looking for lulls to nominate players I like) etc.

Jeff

if your commissioner I wouldn't use MastersDraft Blind.

But -- if you're OK with a little less info, START should provide you what you need and is a lot easier to use and a lot less can go wrong.

It will track roster, standings and totals. It doesn't track money -- but I MAY be able to tweak it to track money. When is your auction?

My suggestion is to download START and play around to see if you can use it for everything but tracking team dollars -- and if everything else is OK, then i can try to adapt it.

For a recommendation -- and I think you can use this with a 10-day free trial -- I've heard great things about Rotowire's software.

I've been a Rotowire draft software user for 5 years but find it pretty clunky to be honest. The software isn't all that well designed for Windows and there are lots of times that the information isn't displayed properly on the screen. But my real issues with Rotowire tend to revolve around the projections and the inflation calculations. With a strong keeper-based league (and a farm system), we routinely see 30-40% inflation - but it's not linear and it's not at all top-weighted. In fact I would say in general the league shies away from spending big and we rarely see a player hit $50. The extra money tends to sit in the closers, mid-range starters, and in the end-game players. With no real way to adjust for this, I usually just turn off inflation altogether and use the non-inflated prices as a relative ranking between players. But for a commish, it does a decent job of keeping track of the teams and the salaries. On that I would agree. I'll check out START - thanks for the tip!

I've also tried roster resource, auction pro and a few others...

Jeff

I think Rotolab is the best. I used it for many years, but since I've cut back to one full-season league this year, I won't be using it. They (Merv) also are extremely responsive when there are questions. It includes BBHQ projections, as well.