Squish (268)
E-roc (127)
Shirley (66)
Jeff (53)
Tommy (53)
Mal (51)
Ken (44)
Amir (40)
TJ (29)
EA released the 2008 edition of its fantasy football site today, which I previewed here. I signed up today to take a look, and am disappointed to have to say that this site looks far from ready for prime time. I’m not really sure why they opened it up to the public in this condition to be honest with you. Screen shots and discussion after the jump.
I tested the site using Firefox on Windows XP and ran into all kinds of issues. Here’s my attempt at a tour of the site, which ran into problems at almost every turn. Click any of the thumbnails for full-size images.
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The home screen you see when you log in. Looks like EA has its own team of fantasy football experts/bloggers. See those four buttons along the bottom – podcasts, blogs, pick ‘em, and archived? The only one that worked was podcasts – the other three weren’t even active links – and the podcasts just went to a plain XML feed with two podcasts in it. Sloppy.
We’re not off to a good start with their “experts” either – the first “Bold Prediction, 2008″ is that Wes Welker will lead the league in receptions. Golly gosh, imagine that! |
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Here’s an individual player-info screen. Nothing too exciting, but it has what you need. |
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I was intrigued to see the Mock Draft feature under the “Draft Prep” section – this is the kind of feature I’d love to see built into other sites. Unfortunately, it didn’t work – clicking it did nothing. Clicking Draft List brought up an empty black pop-up. And clicking Set Draft List brought up a very broken-looking preranking utility. |
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Here’s what I got when I attempted to upload a team logo (under the Team Info section). |
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Not that I’d expect the “stats” section to show much of interest yet, but it really shouldn’t be showing this ugly VBScript error. Is EA even taking this venture seriously? |
You know what, I’m going to stop there. There’s no point in beating a dead horse. I’ll check back on this site in a month or so and see if they’ve rectified these issues. Right now, though, I wouldn’t feel good at all about selecting EA for my league.
If anyone from EA would like to contact me with a response, I’ll be happy to post it here.
Yahoo! fantasy football review | The Hazean 12:30 pm on 7/02/2008 Permalink |
[...] EA Sports Fantasy Football [...]
Sid Winslow 1:36 pm on 8/17/2008 Permalink |
Our league has been using EA Sports for the past 3 years, unfortunately we decided to stick with them this year. We had our draft yesterday, and the issues you list above are just the tip of the iceberg.
1) The pre-draft ranking took me a week to get my rankings set properly, with numerous emails to EA Sports technical support for resolving issues. At the end of the week the issues were still there and I had to manually modify the preset list to come up with anything even close to a good list.
2) Unfortunately I was unable to attend the Live Draft and therefore had to use the auto-pick feature of the website. The auto-pick feature does not work at all, in a 10 team, 18 round draft, only 8 of the 18 players selected by auto-pick were in my top 180 ranked players. The bulk of the remaining 10 were ranked below 300, and the worst pick the system made was my 668 ranked player. I had the first pick in the first round, the auto-pick selected “Larry Johnson”, my ranking list had him somewhere around 254. Based on our leagues ranking system “Tom Brady” was my number 1 ranked player in the pre-draft list.
3) For those league members unfortunate enough to have attended the live draft the following issues were encountered:
a) In the flash draft room there was a ghost team called “undefined” in the draft order. We have 10 teams in our leage and the undefined team was in the 11th spot. The draft order in the flash room showed the 11th team drafting with the 1st and 2nd pick in the 2nd round, and also in the spot that an 11th team would occupy for the remainder of the draft. Of course this skewed the order in the draft window so that it was not obvious which of our real teams had the next pick. The html version did not appear to have this problem.
b) In our league we have the individual defensive positions DE/DT, LB, and CB/S. In the flash version of the application, only LB showed as a link at the top, there were no links to filter DE/DT or CB/S positions.
c) Picking players was very difficult in the flash version. The “Draft Player” button at the top of the screen did not work. We found the only consistent way we could draft a player was to use “Add to Queue”, then have the player highlighted in both the main player pane and the queue pain, then click the “Draft Player” button located below the queue.
d) Some team owners had their players re-sorted after every pick to some default rankings that appeared to be from a couple of years ago. This re-sorting caused the player, Shaun Alexander, to appear at the top of the list. The team’s owner would have to use the dropdown to switch between “EA Draft Rankings” and “My Rankings” in order to get the player list back to the view that they wanted to see.
I am sure that the list could go on indefinitely. I would recommend anyone reading this post to avoid using EA Sports FFL site for any purpose at all.
Sid Winslow
Madden 09: Is it just me?: The Fantasy Football Geek Blog 11:12 am on 8/19/2008 Permalink |
[...] other Madden news, I imported my fantasy team from the EA Sports league that I signed up for earlier, but haven’t had a chance to play with it yet. All I know is that it [...]
Brandon 11:16 am on 8/19/2008 Permalink |
@Sid Winslow: Just to pile it on, when I currently log into the website, two of the major buttons on the first page “Manage Your Team List” and “Upload a Roster to Madden NFL 09″ have the background color and text set to white, so you can’t even see the buttons until you scroll over them…pretty awesome! Maybe their testers don’t use Firefox or something, because this would be a pretty easy issue to notice right away!
Just got an e-mail from EA Sports Fantasy Football: To All EA SPORTS Fantasy Fo… | The Fantasy Football Geek Blog 8:55 am on 8/20/2009 Permalink |
[...] my review of their service isn’t what put them over the brink. [...]