If you have any questions throughout the season, check this FAQ page. We will be updating this FAQ as new questions arise. We also have a tutorials page, and a user forum.

PC Drafter is currently in Version 7.10 (Revised June 4th, 2009) . Make sure you're running the most recent version! Check this by opening PC Drafter, and clicking on the top "Help" menu choice (not the gold button), then click "About..."

Frequently Asked Questions

• How do I get started?
• What is the difference betweeen paid and free versions of PC Drafter?
• Help! I'm having trouble registering! And I have Windows Vista!
• How many leagues can I participate in? Can I move leagues from one PC to another?
• Can I configure the scoring rules to match my league?
• What about Flex positions like RB/WR?
• Can I run a mock draft for my league?
• Does PC Drafter support Auction leagues?
• How do I update the player projections from inside PC Drafter?
• How do I change the Player selection method before a Mock draft? What about changing during a mock draft?
• My league tends to trade draft picks. Can I do this during a draft?
• I'm always picking players with the same bye week. Can PC Drafter help?
• We are allowed to keep a certain number of players each year. Can PC Drafter do that?
• What if I want to draft a player that isn't in the program?
• Do you guarantee I'll win my league?
• Our league drafts individual defensive players. Can you handle that?
• I don't like your projections. I prefer to use my own.
• I won't be able to take a computer to my draft. Can PC Drafter still help me?
• How can I run PC Drafter alongside my online draft?
• What does PC Drafter do for Strength of Schedule?
• Do you have PC Drafter for the Mac?

Simply select the Setup League button at the top of the main pcDrafter screen. Our Wizard will walk you through the process of setting up your league. Once you have finished, simply press the Update Players button to ensure you are using the latest player projections provided by our friends at 4for4.com. To see screen shots, take a look at our web tutorial to set up your league.

Having a registered copy will enable you to receive all the latest player forecast updates and go to your draft fully prepared to dominate. All forecast data updates after June 1, 2009 will be for subscribers only. The software is the same, though. This way, you can try us out, fully, before you buy. Registration gets you the timely player updates and priority technical support.

You've purchased PC Drafter, or received a registration confirmation through 4for4.com's site page: http://www.4for4.com/members/gold-for-subscribers.php. To register, install and open PC Drafter. Click in the top-most text area, on "Help" (not the gold button, the text link for Help). Then select "Register" and enter your registration email address. The two most frequent causes of registration trouble are entering a different email address from the one you registered under, or installing the software with administrative user rights, but trying to register without having Windows administrative rights. Since registration writes to the Windows registry, you must register with Windows administrative user rights.

When Registering in Windows Vista

Windows Vista has a few additional steps. First, when downloading pcDrafter, you may be prompted by "User Account Control." Select "Allow" to indicate that you know where this program is from. To Register pcDrafter in Vista you need to disable UAC so that pcDrafter can write to your registry. Here's how-- by the way, you may find this useful for other software you need to install on Vista.
1) Click the "Start" button in Windows, then choose "Control Panel."
2) Click on "User Accounts and Family Safety."
3) Click on "User Accounts."
4) Pick the bottom choice, "Turn User Account Control on/off"
5) Click "continue."
6) You will see a confirmation window. Uncheck "Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer."
7) Click "OK."
8) When prompted to Restart Now, click "yes" and your machine will reboot.
9) Open pcDrafter and register pcDrafter normally, as stated above, by clicking the "Help" then "Register" choices in the top menu bar. Enter your email address (the one you registered with!) and click "OK."
10) Turn UAC back on (if desired) by completing 1-8 again, only this time, in step 6,Check the box to use UAC.
11) Turning off UAC is not needed anywhere else in pcDrafter. You should be able to download player updates, save your league files, reports, etc. without turning off UAC again.

To read more about User Account Control in Vista, Google the phrase "disable UAC" -- the top hits are all Vista related.

How much hard disk space do you have? There's no limit in PC Drafter to the number of leagues you can configure and draft in. Each league file is kept in the "Leagues" folder within the PCDrafter directory by default. These files are about 10 kilobytes each, so you'll get about 100 leagues in a megabyte of hard disk storage. By the way, league files are stored with a ".pcf" file extension, and are plain-text. See our help files, or installed documentation on the basics of the file format. There are also a few forum topics on editing your league file for special situations. League files can be moved from PC to PC as long as you've installed PC Drafter. Just email the file, or save it on a memory stick.

Absolutely! One of the great things about pcDrafter is the ability to configure different leagues and scoring rules for the same set of player projections.

During the League Setup process, pcDrafter allows you to select a default scoring style that most closely matches your league. You then have the power to adjust these rules for every position. pcDrafter provides over 20 different statistics you can use. Of course, one of our defaults will probably match your league pretty closely, so there should be little extra work for you. We've designed a web tutorial to step you through this.

You configure this in your STARTERS configuration for the league scoring, either during the New League Setup Wizard, or with an existing league, choose "Edit -> Positions/Scoring Rules" then modify the Starters column. If your league allows 2 RB's, 1 WR and 1 RB/WR flex position, then going RB=2.5 and WR=1.5 is a good way to handle the flex. Because leagues often tend to use RB's more than WR's in the flex spot, we usually suggest RB=2.7 and WR=1.3. If you know your league uses WR more than most, the 2.5/1.5 mix looks good. The same thing applies for leagues with RB/WR/TE flex positions: just modify your fractions to cover the total number of positions that you'll be starting.

Definitely. In fact, we suggest that you take the time to run a few mock drafts to verify your players projections, and compare how Gold performs against average draft picks. pcDrafter makes this process simple.
Once you have your league configured, select the Mock Draft button. pcDrafter will then run a mock draft using your player projections and league scoring rules. You even have the option to stop pcDrafter at your picks, thus giving you a great way to practice your drafting and see how selecting different players would affect your draft. Take a look at our Mock Draft web page. Also, to ensure PC Drafter knows when to stop for your draft pick, be sure to tell PC Drafter which team is yours! Go to the top Edit menu, then choose "League." Select the drop-down box for "My Team" and indicate which team in the league is yours.

Yes. pcDrafter provides auction leagues with the same great features as traditional draft leagues such as custom scoring rules, updated player projections, and accurate draft tracking.

In addition, pcDrafter not only tracks the winning bids made for each player, it will suggest bid amounts for each player and adjust these amounts as the draft progresses. This gives you an edge over the competition by helping you not overbid for players. pcDrafter also provides salary cap breakdowns at a glance, so you always know how much it will take to outbid other teams for the player you really want. Take a look at our Auction League web page.

When you set up your league, the system will prompt you if you want to check and update with the latest 4for4.com player data. Also, any time your league is open, you can click on the ‘UPDATE PLAYERS’ button. We recommend you click on it each time you open your league. It only takes the system a few moments to update all the projections for you. Want to tweak the stats? Take a look at the whole picture: click on "Players" in the top text menu area, then "Projection Grid."

pcDrafter has three selection methods - GOLD, Simple VBD and ADP. All bring something to the table. Before your draft begins, you can go to Edit->League and change the player evaluation method and run a Mock Draft. New for 2007, this year's version allows different evaluation methods for the rest of your opponents, so you can compare GOLD to ADP. But you really can't change evaluation methods mid-draft. See one analysts results of this in our GOLD comparison article.

pcDrafter allows trades of players, draft picks, and even money (if you are conducting an auction draft). Not only will pcDrafter manage the trade, it will can evaluate any potential trades you are offered, so you can be sure that you are making a trade that will help your team.

We can help prevent this from happening in several ways. First, pcDrafter will show you your current roster with all the bye weeks listed for each player. When you are going to draft a player simply look at their bye week on the screen to make sure there are no conflicts.

Better yet, you can tell pcDrafter to notify you if you attempt to select two player at the same position that have the same bye week, or even if you have two players from any position with the same bye week. Use the "Edit -> Options -> Draft" menu choice to configure this.

Yes. You can assign any number of keeper players before you draft begins. Simply select the player to keep, select the team he is assigned to, and then determine which draft pick the team needs to surrender to keep the player. For more info, see our Keeper League page, and be sure to take a look at our Keeper League Tutorials, for either draft or auction-style leagues, to see how easy this is.

pcDrafter is preloaded with player projections provided by 4for4.com for over 700 players. However, if you find a player that isn't already in our player list, simply add the player to pcDrafter on your own and enter their projections.

While we can't guarantee you a trophy, we are sure that your draft will be easier, faster, and more enjoyable than ever before. By reducing the time you need to spend on preparation and paperwork, you'll have more time for thinking about making the best pick (Or just grabbing that extra beverage).

pcDrafter provides a standard set of positions for you to choose from. These incuse QB, RB, WR, TE, K, D, DL, LB, CB. IF your league uses a position that isn't in our list, you can easily add the new position.

Go ahead. While we believe 4for4 provides some of the best player projections available, you can feel free to modify the projections of any player.

While pcDrafter is best used as a live system to take advantage of real-time player valuation updates with our Gold Algorithm and multiple draft views, pcDrafter does provide the capability to print out custom Cheat Sheets if your computer will be unavailable. In this case, pcDrafter will still be able to help you prepare for your draft by running Mock Drafts and providing a Cheat Sheet that is tailored to your specific league. To produce the cheat sheet, From PC Drafter, choose "report"- "player reports", then "cheat sheet", when you get to the "save" box, change the "Save As Type" from .txt to .CSV. Open this file in Excel (or other spreadsheet program). In Excel, choose "Data" from the top menu, then Sort. Format the data one of two ways, or you make up your own:
A) Select Position, Ascending; then Points Descending (key!!), then Last Name Ascending.
B) Select SVB descending, then Last Name Ascending
Use option B if you want to see who is recommended when, regardless of position. Use option A for players ranked by position.
Cheatsheets are a good backup should your pc fail during your draft.

Everyone's draft is different. I take it that your live draft is online, like ESPN or similar.  The cool answer is one of the dual-monitor PC systems, side-by-side LCD screens with lots of real estate for both PC Drafter (on one side) and the live draft (on the other).  Barring that, what about a laptop running next to your desktop?  Even borrowing a friend's laptop just for the evening might work...

Most online drafts have a "mock" or "simulation" feature to try everything out before draft day and ensure you're compatible.  Experiment with this and window sizes before draft day.

If you absolutely can't get a side-by-side view, you CAN run it all on one, but here's what you'll need to do: practice short-cut keys.  The short-cut for switching between two open Windows applications is the ALT-Tab key.  You press ALT, then Tab. You'll see a small window pop up with icons for each application you have running. Each time you hit tab, the next running application gets a blue box around it. When you release both keys, that's the application that becomes active.  They're listed in order of most recently used.  PC Drafter, in live-draft mode, has 3 windows running: the main window, plus your team roster and league position roster.   If you resize your live draft (say it's Internet Explorer) to be the same size AND LOCATION as PC Drafter's main window, then when you hit ALT-Tab to toggle between the two views, you'll always have your two rosters at the top of your screen, and you'll just alternate between the live draft and PC Drafter.  Left hand on the ALT-Tab key, right hand on the mouse (ok, swap that if you're a south-paw).

PC Drafter now displays Strength of Schedule for each player in the lower right portion of the main screen. There's also a variable in the player project file that rates the player's End of Year Strength of Schedule. To see it, double-click any player in the upper "available player" window. You'll see an evaluation of the schedule strength at the end of the last season, imported from 4for4.com. Possible values are Very Easy, Easy, Average, Difficult, Very Difficult, or NA for Def. If this is something you'd like alongside you in your draft, take a look at these reports on 4for4, and print them to take to your draft:
PLAYER SOS - http://www.4for4.com/pre06/fftochot.php
TEAM SOS - http://www.4for4.com/pre06/hotsp.php

So far we've not developed for the MAC platform, but we have run PCDrafter on a Mac G5 running virtual PC. Everything worked, except during the install you might get a warning that "HHActiveX.DLL did not install" that's ok- it's used for some extra features in the help file and doesn't affect PC Drafter at all, so click continue.
PC Drafter's reports can be saved to a file, so printing reports aren't much of an issue either.
If you don't have Virtual PC, though... we can only suggest you borrow a friend's laptop for the draft. It is called "PC" Drafter. ;-)

Quick LInks

MOCK DRAFTS  –  

PLAYER PROJECTIONS  –  

AUCTION LEAGUES  –  

IDP  –  

KEEPER LEAGUES  –  

THE GOLD ALGORITHM  –  

ADP DATA  –  

VIDEO TUTORIALS  –