11/19/2004 03:30:38 PM|||Shep|||Yes, indeed. It appears that Yahoo has taken away any form of live updating of fantasy basketball statistics until I give them at least seven dollars and ninety-five cents.

If they keep up this way (ie: If AOL continues to give me free live scoring) only their pre-installed customer base will keep them afloat. As more and more things start to work in AOL, the more and more I start to like them better. Yahoo still has some features that are not even a glimmer in AOL's eye, but seeing as they've been around for at least 5 more years, I should hope that was the case.

Trading

The trading situation at each service has it's ups and downs. I like AOL's interface for creating trades better, since they show you both teams side-by-side. The player's names aren't hyperlinked on this page, but with the rate that AOL is improving, I can see that happening soon. Yahoo requires that you select players from the other team before decided who to give up from your own team. Not a daunting task, but it could certainly be better. They do make up for this, though, by showing you the players and their stats on the confirm page. However, as has been a gripe of mine since the beginning of my time with Yahoo, the stats are season totals (or weekly, or monthly totals). It's not that giving me season totals is necessarily a bad thing. But giving me season totals without saying how many games someone has played is a bad thing. That forces me to open up each player's profile page to be able to accurately compare them. (Remember, I don't have that great of a memory, so I have to switch back and forth between player profiles a lot - especially when a trade involves more than one player from each team).


Why Yahoo can't simply give averages instead of totals boggles my mind somewhat. Perhaps no one has informed them that this is a problem... I'm not saying they need to replace the season totals, since I'm almost sure that is relevant to some people (I can understand other's preferences, even though they may not match my own)... but couldn't they at least offer the option of viewing averages as well as totals? It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to implement.


Still not ready to declare a winner on the trade interface... The picking up and dropping of Free Agents is a dead heat as well.



|||110087475388414461|||At least StatTracker isn't $9.95 anymore...