What might a full RD2L regular season 30 team auction look like? There are two primary difficulties, duration and fairness, which I will discuss separately. This post is just a first draft and may need some tweaks, but I intend to at least set up a viable prototype to move to auction, which is a massively better format than any type of linear or snake draft that can be implemented for multiple reasons. If you haven’t been enlightened as to why auction is better, here’s just one old ass page that highlights the benefits.

Duration

If we did an auction similar to RD2L Mini’s for 30 teams it would take way too long. How can we shorten the process?

Make every dollar, every bid matter. No $1000 wallets with +$1 or +$5 bids. My proposal for bids / wallets is further down in the fairness section, but a quick preview is $75 with adjustment for badge. Cut nomination. Instead of captains fumbling to type out names for minutes at a time, it will be automatic from top badge downward. If admin team wants to throw some sort of randomizer on it to spice it up, feel free. No max bids. Money in theory will be spent a little bit faster, and no time will have to be spent on rolling for ties. Removing max bids improves fairness as well. Lala Time is an outlier every season, auction would let him finally go for close to real value. When every captain runs out of money it turns into linear draft. Strict bid timer, this by itself will save us hours.

With these changes the auction duration will be comparable to Fantasy Football.

Fairness

It’s a bit funny to talk about, because auction is inherently more fair than linear / EU, which imposes a predetermined discrete difference in value between every player (pick #). In auction two or many players can go for the same exact price if they are of equal value, and price gaps are much more organic, accounting for outliers easily. The difference between the best and worst captains in linear / EU has to be reconciled in the least scientific and controllable of ways, completely up to the luck of the player pool badge curve. With auction we can figure it out beforehand and put a literal price on it.

Here is my initial proposal for each captains starting wallet:

Base wallet is number of picks * average player stars (above a set point that represents base competency). If we are doing 6 man rosters, each captain will draft 5 players. If the average badge is Ancient 1, that is 26 stars. If we arbitrarily set base competency to Crusader 1 (a badge that was mentioned in the town hall), that is 11 stars. Difference is 15 stars 5 players * 15 stars = $75 starting wallet

The difference between a captain’s badge and the average badge is the wallet adjustment. I’m Legend 5, so being one star under the average I would get an extra dollar and start with $76 Lala Time / Tswift is adjusted Divine 7, so each would lose $11 and start with $64 if one wanted to captain.

This is probably the best area to discuss and have some mathletes geek out to offer a better pricing system. But whatever we use, it’s going to be more fair than linear/EU (not to mention more interesting and more exciting).



TLDR base $75 starting wallet, no maximum bids, no nominations, and a strict auction timer. We will have an auction of reasonable duration that is more fair and sehr awesomer than linear draft.

It is only a matter of time before the league moves to this better system; I implore us to not let baseless fears of the unknown cause us to fall the wrong side of history next season.

-gg worst captain ever