As several people are now aware, there is an extra draft planned to fill out your Second XIs. Your Second XI will be run by your "assistant coach" (ie. a bot - like ElvisSpike earlier in the season) who will somewhat randomly over- and under-rate each player in the database, and draft you an extra 12* (TBC) players to fill in spots on your Second XI team. You won't be able to select these players in your first XI, or draft any yourself, but you will be able to provide recommendations to your assistant coach, just in the form of a list of players. These recommendations are optional should realistically just be players you like - you're not tasked with trying to find good players to try and win the Second XI comp with. There's also no guarantee your bot draft them -- it'll just make them rate them higher, so it'll increase your chances but it may still decide they're too shit to draft or get sniped by other teams' bots. I'm not going to be home from tomorrow until Thursday so I definitely won't need them before then, but Friday or Saturday morning NSW time will probably be when I cut off submissions. You can submit them in this thread if you like, or if you don't want other people to know who yours are you can PM or email them to me. After I get back I'll be sorting that out, starting a thread for fixtures including the pre-season, giving you an "assistant coach's report" (ie. a list of all your players details including preferred batting positions, bowling style, wicket keeping frequency etc) and asking people to officially submit team names and pitch conditions. The simming at this stage will start in February some time. Definitely no earlier and with any luck no later either.
I'm looking forward to seeing all the random county seconds and afghanistan first class cricketers that get selected
The best players who weren't drafted will get picked up, but between bots over- and under-rating players to begin with and people skewing it with lists, they might not get picked up until the middle of the bot draft. I'm not sure you really will find out.
Well you'll have the actual Second XI season I guess. If some random Afghani spinner averages 18 in Second XI you can reasonably speculate that he probably should've been picked in the first 18 rounds.
is the bot going to make sensible second xi balance decisions? like we won't randomly end up with 8 bowlers in one game?
I think that'd only happen if the bot overrated a bowler's batting ability above the batting ability of actual batsmen
2nd XI list, an eclectic bunch Baba Apparajith (Ind) Rahul Chahar (Ind) KC Karan (Nep) Andy Balbirnie (Irl) Donald Tiripano (Zim) Nizakat Khan (HK) Frank Nsubuga (Uga) Barry McCarthy (Irl) Frederik Klokker (Den) Hamilton Masakadza (Zim) Roelof van der Merwe (NL) John Campbell (WI)
I would imagine no, they're just selected so that you have enough players for a second XI, which is why your list should only contain favourites
Would be nice to be able to do a mid season transfer window where we could swap one player from 2nd XI and one player who we drafted but don’t want anymore. Thoughts?