We just tried to hold a fantasy baseball auction draft online at FantasyAuctioneer.com with terrible results. Our 8 team, NL-only league had trouble with 2 people joining (25%) and had the site go down twice during the first 30 minutes. While the draft was happening, it was fun, but the whole thing was disappointing because we kept having to pause it to let people get back on or because when the site crashed, not everyone knew it was back up at the same time.

This is definitely a hard problem to solve technically, which is why there are so few auction sites, but it’s amazing to me that none of the majors (ESPN, Yahoo, Sportsline) have rolled out auction draft software yet. I’ve heard rumors at work that our advanced dev. team has an auction draft in the works for next football season, but that would be the first one I know of from the majors.

We’re going to retry our draft later this week on FantasyAuctioneer. If it goes well, I’ll update this review. Otherwise, we’ll be looking elsewhere next year, hopefully at ESPN.com.

Update: Well, at least they care about their customers. We received an apology from the owner of the site, as well as a refund and a free draft both this year and next. Very nice. Last week had more traffic and no issues, so something happened this week. They claim it’s not normal. I’d give them the benefit of the doubt as most people I know like their stuff. I’ll still post an update after Wednesday’s second attempt.

Update 2: I take it back. Aside from a little lagginess in the app, the draft went very well. It’s a lot of fun doing this, though getting together in person is still better. The app has almost all of the right tools and has a few small bugs. None of them get in the way of enjoying the draft. The sound cues are good, too. Overall, I’m happy with the experience there.