Key things missing from the game?

[dinger775]

Hi All, new player here.

Overall I've found the game to be solid, though there are a few things that really pull me out of the immersion and has killed my motivation to play.
I'm wondering if anyone could help me change settings to fix these issues.

1) Free Agency - Only the very top players get signed during the offseason free agency period. Following the free agency period you can just sign high 70s or even 80s overall players on 1yr contracts at minimum value. Therefore if you try your team is automatically stacked because you just spend all your money on the top talent in free agency and fill the roster with a bunch of good players at minimum values. Also the CPU controlled teams don't take advantage of this.

2) Positional value in contracts - It's impossible to do any sort of realistic team building because QB's are so cheap and non-premium positions demand money just based on their overall rating.

3) No salary cap penalty from early releases - Unless I am missing something, it appears you can just get out of bad contracts by releasing players early with no penalty?

Other things that would be helpful if improved:

Play calling in game - I've found it impossible to call a blitz on defence. Trying to figure out when to call timeouts at end of game scenarios is difficult. Not sure if we can spike the ball?
Trades - it would be great to be able to add players to trade block or have a Madden style things where you can select a player/draft pick on your team and click 'see offers' to see which teams would be interested. Trying to do trades manually is very time consuming in this game.
Coaching strategy - Is there a way to adjust 4th down aggressiveness on offense? This is key to driving higher scoring for your team.
Staff - Why are all the staff ratings always so low? I haven't seen anyone above 3 stars in the game yet. Almost every coach is 1-2 star rated in nearly every attribute.
Player development - Younger players only improve by like 3-4 overall in a full year (including training camp) if they are lucky. I don't understand how to develop top draft picks.
Undrafted free agent Rookies - When you finish a draft there are a bunch of high quality rookies available to sign on minimum contracts (I just signed a 79 overall rookie QB this way!)

[TheRivals40]

The cap hit for cutting players is a setting in the league options. The default is a 0 percent penalty but it can be changed.

[slaphappy]

The free agency thing.. check those high rated players. Most of them would be locker room cancers and they are there for a reason. You might be able to fit them on your team without upsetting your chemistry .. most can't. Sign them and see what happens.

[peterk1]

Therefore if you try your team is automatically stacked because you just spend all your money on the top talent in free agency and fill the roster with a bunch of good players at minimum values.

With default values, you're correct.
You should update your settings so that the cost of those guys is linked to their OVR. You can still get good deals, but they won't be steals any more. Let me make a quick search and dig up my settings for you.

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I set my values to this and am getting a good game

Salary Cap: 100M (about 2M ave per player)
OVR 95+ : 3M
OVR 90+ : 2M
OVR 80+ : 1M
OVR 70+ : 750k
OVR 60+ : 500k
Draftee: 250k
Max Contracts: 10M

[dinger775]

thanks guys

[AKH]

If you want to be able to call blitzplays, go into the plays.xml file (just search your hardrive for it) and copy the plays from the blitzes playbook at the bottom into the 'default' offensive playbook. Then they will appear in your dropdowns.