Since working out the 3 contract offers for every player that elected (rolled) to resign is such a tedious and time consuming (probably frustrating also) process for the commish I have the following suggestion which would alleviate it almost, if not, entirely.

The rolls have already been made by the commish, at least for teams that submitted their FA resignee lists. So, everyone knows who has accepted the possibility of resigning with the team and who has rejected it. Right now for those accepting the process is that the commish has to come up with 3 contract offers in game for each of these players. That entails loading and reloading saved league files ad nauseum which can't be fun and likely takes enormous amounts of time. Perhaps that can be taken out the the equation as follows:

1) Managers electing to resign X player place a post on the FA board with their contract specifics in it.
2) Commish takes the manager offer and inputs it into the game.
    2a) If player accepts the stated offer, then he's resigned.
    2b) If player declines offer, commish replies to managers contract posting with details of refusal (ie, more money, more years, etc)
3) If (2b) occurs, manager follows up commish reply with new offer.
4) Repeat (2)

This is like the MIBL system except that managers are only allowed to negotiate with the players that rolled to resign not with any future FA. Players that failed the rolls are not eligible. This would remove the whole "commish reloads league file ad nauseum to come up with 3 offers for each player" nastiness. It would leave the contract negotiations in the hands of the actual managers. It also allows for the possibility that a manager trying to lowball a player may end up not being able to resign the player  (even though he rolled to resign) if they submit X number of rejected contracts and player decides to not talk anymore and test market. Puts the onus on the manager and not the commish which is where it really should be. It also could deepen the FA pool since if a manager tries lowballing then they have a chance of losing the player after a few bad faith contract offers when the player cuts of negotiations.

I don't see why this approach wouldn't work. After the FA rolls, we already know who is willing to resign and who is going FA. This doesn't affect that mechanism at all. It simply puts the actual negotiations in the managers hands and wipes out a very tedious and time comsuming task for the commish.

Example:

1) Player X has rolled to resign.
2) Manager of Player X posts on FA board, "Offer Player X contract for 4 years @ $5,000,000"
3) Commish inputs offer in game before normal sim and get's players answer
4) If player accepts offer contract extension is completed.
5) If player rejects offer commish replies to (2) with reason for rejection.
6) If (5) occurs manager replies to (5) with new contract offer details.
7) Commish repeats (3) until either a) players signs extension or b) player cuts off negotiations and elects to test FA market.

As Grypht has mentioned, it's pretty easy to come up with contract numbers that will be accepted the occurences of (7b) should be few and far between. It's simulates reality also, a breakdown in negotiations even with a player who is willing to resign. But, best of all, it removes the whole tiresome role of teh commish in reloading the file a million times to come up with player offers.

There could also be some standards imposed like no 1 year offers allow, has to be a 2+ year contract. No contracts over 5 years allowed. I believe Grypht's 3 contract offer options were always in the 2-5 year range so would be the same.

Anyway, it's a thought sort of a comingling of the BBL process with the MIBL process, but now the BBL commish would only have to manually make the FA rolls and not all the 3 offers per player and the manager is in control of negotiations again.

Thoughts?

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Vienna Buzz

Appreciate the post!

I think the main roadblock to this is that owners have the expectation that if they win the FA roll, they WILL have that player next year. While I'm OK with it, I don't think other folks will be as keen on having a chance at losing their player they won the roll on.

Sometimes, players who win the roll will even refuse to negotiate in game, so I have to edit their loyalty temporarily to force them to negotiate, then set it back. It's a silly-tedious process, as you've said, but since our current method overrides almost the entire in-game extension logic...

I was thinking about this in regards to moving to OOTP2007, and hoping that we could get back to relying on the in-game mechanics again.

If we determine that this in-game mchanic does not generate enough FAs for our tastes, we can either try to make adjustments in game to help, or move outside the game again and basically bypass the OOTP extension mechanisms forever.

One external method could be that each teams gets N rolls, where N = number of potential FAs that team has. We can then perform rolls with values such that the chance to go FA is what we want. This would ignore loyalty and homegrownness.

If the team has 5 potential FAs, and the team wins 2/5 rolls, that manager can negotiate with any 2 of their players they want to. Then, that negotiation can just take place in game (which is possible in OOTP2007 to the best of my memory).

If for whatever reason, one of those 2 players breaks off negotiations, the manager can select another player to negotiate with. It's highly unlikely that a manager won't successfully negotiate with 2 of their players.

This is a minimally invasive method of upping the FA pool, made even easier since in OOTP2007 since managers can perform their own extensions.

Ideally IMO, we work within the game in 2007.

Would this idea work for now? Well, it would remove the homegrown/loyalty bonuses, and the Commish still has to do the in-game negotiations.

However, if the player simply will not negotiate or breaks off negotiations, there's no more editing of players and loading/reloading needed. Owner just uses that winning roll on another player.

so Emrys,

Do you have a sense for how FA is going to work come 2007?  I think that's one of the main things we need to figure out.. for moving on, and for our game in general.  There should be a way to figure out a rough percentage of free agents per year by running test sims.  I know some of you guys have experience in that area.

As far as your N rolls method... You're going to lower the overall "quality" of the FA pool that way, if not the quantity.  People will always select their best players to resign.  It takes away the random "superstar decides to go FA" roll that we see all the time from South Beach players. *grin*

anyway, I don't have a problem with toriq's method.  I suggested it myself a long time ago (or some similar form).  I don't see the chance of people negotiating too tightly and losing players as that big a deal.  I don't see it coming up that much really.  And if it does become an issue, you can always test and reload the sim on a case by case basis where it becomes an issue.  Still puts 99% more work on the owners instead of the commish, which is the whole point anyway.

Tempus      

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South Beach Sunburn GM

Good point on the quality vs. quantity, excellent point, thanks.

Yeah, I guess you're right, Tempus. It will come up a lot that I'll have to reload and edit players, but even if I had to do that with half the players, it does take a lot of the work off my plate.

Anyone think of a reason not to do this?

Tempus:

so Emrys,

Do you have a sense for how FA is going to work come 2007?  I think that's one of the main things we need to figure out.. for moving on, and for our game in general.  There should be a way to figure out a rough percentage of free agents per year by running test sims.  I know some of you guys have experience in that area

This is actually a tough one to really measure due to the number of variables. I'm open to test methods, but say I set all teams to CPU in 2007. I save the list of potential FAs and their ratings, sim the season, and at the end of the regular season I see who is still an FA. ( I may have to figure out exactly when the last day to sign an extension is)

I could then compare the first list with the current FAs.

So this is one way,  but does it really capture how things will work in our league? We're looking at CPU owners versus real owners, so this test may be flawed, but maybe worth running.

I think that the only true way to gauge this will be to use it for a real season and see how it goes. Thing is, in real life, the FA market varies from year to year as well, so if OOTP2007 will generate a "realistic" pool, just judging one season's results may not be a good sample size.

The other obvious question, which gets back to something I posted earlier, is how realistic do we want it to be? Is our current method producing "realistic" FA pools?

i guess my thought would be... start (or use the BBL) a single player league with the same settings as the BBL.  Run a bunch of years, only stopping to resign guys as best you can.  Then you just sim the entire season.  Do this for 10 years or so, see what your results are.  Or you could try it controlling multiple teams.  It might give you an idea of how easy it is to hang onto your best players.

You don't necessarily need to know the exact percentage of guys going free agent.. I think it's just as telling to see how many of your own players you can hang onto.  Are you consistently able to resign all of your best guys and stay under the cap?  Do you have to make "tough" decision?  Those are the things we want to know.

I know it's a lot of work, and perhaps other people with the game can help. I'm sorry if I just seem to be throwing work out there for other people to do... i don't have the new version yet, or really any free time to play around with it.. i wish i did.

Tempus

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South Beach Sunburn GM

No worries, all input is mucho appreciated.

I was wondering if anything had been decided on FA, resigning players and giving extensions.  I have already started getting messages from players in-game about extensions and re-signing.  I would really like to give the in-game system a try.  If the in-game system has been beefed up and improved like the rest of the game seems to be, it might work great.  Anyway, has it been decided which way we are going to go?

I'd love to give the in game system a try as well.

I'm wondering this too. I've already seen a couple of players sign an extension on other teams

Ah yeah. Well, I don't see why we shouldn't give it a go. It should be pretty realistic I think as most other aspects of the game are.

Emrysx:

Ah yeah. Well, I don't see why we shouldn't give it a go. It should be pretty realistic I think as most other aspects of the game are.

You sure? I've checked my soon to be FAs and they all give me their exact contract needs, so if I'm doing it in game, odds are I'll get to resign all of them.

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Vienna Buzz

That'll happen to some lucky managers, but there should be some players who either ask too much or test the market.

I signed Gatti for a good deal, but the others are asking for a lot so from my perspective it's doing a good job.

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GM of Chattooga Eagles
The Eagle's Nest

are we supposed to be going ahead and resigning guys in game?  I wasn't aware that we were given any direction on this.

Tempus

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South Beach Sunburn GM