Hey, me again

We just did the training camp sim in the CSFL today, and noticed that every single free agent lost a significant amount of their ratings. I didn't run the numbers, but by eyeballing it, every free agent has lost about 3-5 OVR.

Some older players already on the decline lost more than others (as they should), but this is going to put a serious dent in in-season free agency, if not kill it outright. Considering some players refuse to sign contracts in the free agency periods altogether, this is a pretty big loss for the depth of a league's free agency pool.

Here's a pretty average example of someone who didn't get signed during the FA periods, but probably would've found his way onto a roster quickly, who has lost so much of his abilities by not being on a roster.


A couple questions:

1) What was the rationale behind such extreme losses?
2) Are free agents on a 1/1/1/1 training regimen for training camp or something? Can this be adjusted in a patch? Nothing to this scale happened in PF20.

If you want my input for tweaking it for realism:

- I think younger free agents should stay the same or increase at a lower rate than they would if they were in training camp with a team, but maybe lose some of their position skill? After these rating crashes, players I was looking at calling up eventually are no longer worth trying to develop. IRL, players in this situation wouldn't be chilling on their couch, they'd be working with their trainers to stay ready for their opportunity. Might take them a little extra time to get up to speed once they are signed with a team, that's why I think there should be a bit of a loss in position skill.

- Older free agents should lose some ratings but not as severe as it currently is. As it stands, there are now very few reliable veterans in our league's free agency to call up mid-season in case you need emergency depth, as a result of these losses. This could become a pretty significant problem.

This was a requested change from the community... basically if players are not signed and they miss camps they start to lose their skills. It makes team try harder to resign guys, participate more in free agency, and value draft picks more than just waiting to fill a roster with guys chilling at home.

Brooks_Piggott wrote:This was a requested change from the community... basically if players are not signed and they miss camps they start to lose their skills. It makes team try harder to resign guys, participate more in free agency, and value draft picks more than just waiting to fill a roster with guys chilling at home.

Interesting. I don't agree with it at all, but see where they are coming from.

The CSFL is the only league I have experience with, but now entering the fifth season of that league, I think there does need to be some amount of talent available in season. Most teams do not field full rosters (though we are trying to make a better push for that) due to players asking for outlandish extensions. 50+ man rosters are in the minority at the moment.

Calling back to my last post about FA, I think it would be nice (in PF22, I guess this would be too big an ask for a patch) to have one extra sim post FA before training camp where teams can sign some practice squad guys and try to fill out their rosters. We had an issue this year with a lot of players refusing contracts in FA, disappearing from our own individual FA lists pre-training camp, and then they have now tanked to no longer being useful.

So I think this could use some cleaning up. Just my $0.02.

The goal is to only have unusable players (or really greedy/old ones) hit FA wire after the 10 rounds. If you're having that many guys hit the wire either your teams aren't offering enough in extensions (or making trades for guys they can't re-up) or you're not offering enough during free agency to sign guys to new deals. If you're finding realistic contracts and deals that players are refusing let me know and we can look at tweaking the logic, but most of the examples I've seen are lowball deals where teams are trying to get lucky versus actually looking at ratings, personalities, team makeup, age, etc. I'm not saying tweaking isn't in order, but I haven't found enough concrete examples to even know what dials to turn to make it better.

All this would be great, but the fundamental argument I'm favour of it evidently is to make teams try harder to resign players. Many times, the players we are discussing, aren't worth resigning in the first place, or someone would have taken them after a few rounds of FA, or, would have kept them on their initial roster, which again, would have been great, but players on a team ask for an exorbitant amount more than they either deserve (based on either their ability or their stats would suggest they should get) or, will actually sign for in free agency.
Examples of players asking for 5-6-7 times more when on a roster than they actually sign for after are basically every single player on a roster.
Also, if the contract logic of players signing either in FA (37 year old taking 7 year back heavy deals over 2 year balanced to greater amounts), or a player resigning an extension to less than they were going to make the following season (which can be abused by giving a repeat 2 year back heavy contract and keep extending every season, so as to never really even go above 70% of the contract the AI signed) or if the entire finance of the contracts was better, then again, it would be fine. Given currently you can't offer guaranteed and non guaranteed contracts, signing bonuses, and that bonuses for some reason increase the entire amount of a contract instead of being a bonus, then sure, the rest would have been fine.
This change just seems like a change that was made to address the symptom, not the underlying condition. The same underlying condition that is at fault for a large number of other issues.
Fixing contracts and logic behind contracts would go a huge way towards alleviating many many other things. Also, making the "values money/playing time/close to home" play some part in decision making as well would be great, cause currently, it's just a bar to fill up the screen.

Brooks_Piggott wrote:The goal is to only have unusable players (or really greedy/old ones) hit FA wire after the 10 rounds. If you're having that many guys hit the wire either your teams aren't offering enough in extensions (or making trades for guys they can't re-up) or you're not offering enough during free agency to sign guys to new deals. If you're finding realistic contracts and deals that players are refusing let me know and we can look at tweaking the logic, but most of the examples I've seen are lowball deals where teams are trying to get lucky versus actually looking at ratings, personalities, team makeup, age, etc. I'm not saying tweaking isn't in order, but I haven't found enough concrete examples to even know what dials to turn to make it better.

Question: would you consider a league minimum deal a realistic contract offer for players that are still available in Free Agency Stage 10? If they are still available at that point, it would seem to make sense that the minimum may be the best deal they can get.

Rizzo wrote:

Brooks_Piggott wrote:The goal is to only have unusable players (or really greedy/old ones) hit FA wire after the 10 rounds. If you're having that many guys hit the wire either your teams aren't offering enough in extensions (or making trades for guys they can't re-up) or you're not offering enough during free agency to sign guys to new deals. If you're finding realistic contracts and deals that players are refusing let me know and we can look at tweaking the logic, but most of the examples I've seen are lowball deals where teams are trying to get lucky versus actually looking at ratings, personalities, team makeup, age, etc. I'm not saying tweaking isn't in order, but I haven't found enough concrete examples to even know what dials to turn to make it better.

Question: would you consider a league minimum deal a realistic contract offer for players that are still available in Free Agency Stage 10? If they are still available at that point, it would seem to make sense that the minimum may be the best deal they can get.

I would say no. Not given that guys can be offered 7 year minimum deals. This is easily exploitable to scrap up all the remaining free agency talent by a team for a minimum price.

We have seen that issue in previous ddspb games and I would hate to see that appear here. Simply put guys shouldn't be forced to sign minimum deals in fa10 because they might:

1. Think they can get a 1 year deal prove they are good enough and maybe get an extension for more money or go back into FA next year when teams might have more cap or there position might be in more demand.

2. This would be incredibly exploitable given the current contract mechanics in game.

Rizzo wrote:

Brooks_Piggott wrote:The goal is to only have unusable players (or really greedy/old ones) hit FA wire after the 10 rounds. If you're having that many guys hit the wire either your teams aren't offering enough in extensions (or making trades for guys they can't re-up) or you're not offering enough during free agency to sign guys to new deals. If you're finding realistic contracts and deals that players are refusing let me know and we can look at tweaking the logic, but most of the examples I've seen are lowball deals where teams are trying to get lucky versus actually looking at ratings, personalities, team makeup, age, etc. I'm not saying tweaking isn't in order, but I haven't found enough concrete examples to even know what dials to turn to make it better.

Question: would you consider a league minimum deal a realistic contract offer for players that are still available in Free Agency Stage 10? If they are still available at that point, it would seem to make sense that the minimum may be the best deal they can get.

Disagree. You are then handcuffing players into enforced 5 year contracts, when even logic would dictate that a player would rather wait for an injury and take a 1 year min and hit FA the following year again. But again, in the meantime, he would be sat at home watching TV on his couch and regress to the point hes untouchable, especially not a youngster. Maybe a 32-33 year old or older might consider his next stage of his career.

This is what a contract offering screen looks like in Football Manager, which is in the same ball park of a type of simulation.
The options and combinations are endless as to what can and cant be adjusted but the key parts are "loyalty bonus", aka guaranteed contract or signing bonus, yearly wage rises (as opposed to yearly wage rise per bonus), renewals after criteria are met, or team/player options, release clauses for injury prone players or "Team Rule Violations" which then dont count towards the cap.
The options in a game that is based on a sport with a hard cap should be far more than 4 bonuses, which arent bonuses but pay rises and weighting should be more, and should also reflect not only the overall of a player, but his morale and situation on the team as well as the stage he is in of his career.
Once such contracts are fixed correctly, many of the other things in the game will line themselves up as well.

that sounds great st0n, let us know when you are done coding it and are sure its perfectly complex and unexploitable.

Also, many of those features didnt appear in FM before the game was 20 years old, give us a little time...Try playing championship manager 1998 to see where they were after 5 years of Dev (with more devs and money than us).

Anyhow, while certainly contracts can benefit from more detail, I disagree that this is the root cause of as many problems as some people think. The drop in ratings for players that dont attend camp reflects that they dont have access to state of the art facilities, teamdrills and staff that those in camp has. That is the thought process behind it. It separately serves as a fix for several multiplayer leagues who had issues with some owner stacking up big contracts to 25 players and signing the rest at league min after the FA phase. Is the drop too steep? maybe. Will adding more complex contracts and negotiations stop the multiplayer exploit, probably not.