[Buane]

As far as I'm concerned, OOTPXI would do well to add a few new changes geared towards Online Leagues. There are some aspects of the game that aren't perfect, but sort themselves out in AI leagues. In online leagues, with a league full of human managers, these weaknesses are really brought straight to the forefront.

The Free Agency system needs an overhaul. Or at least, a seperate "online" setting for use in online leagues. The current system is at the mercy of the AI engine which basically decides what a player is worth, with that player scoffing at any offer it deems is too low. Now sure, players' demands do start to come back down as free agency moves along, but while AI teams will attack any free agent with escalating offers over the entire course of free agency, human teams will smartly spend their money elsewhere. Why wait around doing nothing from November to February to see if the high-risk high-reward 39-year-old catcher who wants $20 million dollars will drop his demands to something more realistic, when you can just go sign the average 28-year-old catcher for $10 million dollars. Or heck, why not go spend that $20 million on a different position altogether?

The result of this is either one of two scenarios. One: good players' careers get cut short because by the time their demands drop to something sort of reasonable (if they even drop that far at all), the money has been mostly spent over the course of the offseason, and the player no longer has any suitors even at the reduced price. Or, two: players sign contracts worth less than what they were offered during free agency.

It is the second scenario here that is the most frustrating in an online league. It's not uncommon for a player who's asking for $20 million to turn down offers of $14 million in November and December. Then in March as Spring Training is beginning, or perhaps on Opening Day, that player accepts a deal worth $8 million. How do you feel if you're the team that offered $14 million, got turned down, and had to spend your money elsewhere?

How should the system work? Well, quite simply, players should never discard an offer if it's the best offer they've received so far. The relationship between that offer and the offer the player is looking for should determine how long the player waits before accepting the deal, but it should never be completely disregarded just because it's "too low." If I offer the catcher $4 million instead of the $20 he wants, he shouldn't tell me to get lost, but he should instead wait until Spring Training is about to begin before he signs it. This turns the free agent market into a much more market-driven system. Players contracts are worth what the league decides they're worth, not that the game decides they should be worth.

While we're on the subject of when a player signs, another thing that plagues online free-agency is the sniping of players by other teams as the season approaches. Everyone who's ever been in an online league has had the following happen to them:

First offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Second offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Third offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Fourth offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Fifth offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Sixth offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Seventh offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Eighth offseason sim: Player A loves his offer.
Final offseason sim: Player A has received a better offer from Team X, and has signed a contract with them instead!

It's not uncommon to download a newly simmed file and find that the player who's favored your offer all offseason has not only gotten a better offer from another team, but has signed with that team, sometimes on the same day. There needs to be an option for leagues to set a "grace period," or the amount of days a player must wait before signing a contract after receiving a new top offer. NO online league can sim the offseason day-by-day, so being able to mandate that free agents must wait 7 days to sign a contract gives other teams a fair chance to make a counter-offer without the player being stolen away from them.

Now these changes would move the free agent system towards being market-driven, something it's not at all right now. Instead of having to pay players what they're asking for, the league would set its own worth for players. Aging, injury-prone first-basemen who are worth $8 million would now get $8 million, and not the $15 million that they're demanding.

As a by-product of a new free agent system, you would greatly enhance the viability of using the Free Agent Compensation System in online leagues. In theory, the compensation system makes sense to use, both from a realism perspective and a parity perspective. And in my experience, there are leagues out there that want to use it, but two things are stopping them. For one, and this is speaking as the Commissioner of an online league, why would I ever want to use a system in my league that I have absolutely no control over? Solution: make Player Types (Type-A, Type-B, No Compensation) editable in the player editor. Emulating the convoluted, ill-conceived compensation system of the real world was a questionable choice at best, but giving the commissioner no control over what players are what type is a deal killer.

The second thing that stops leagues from using the Compensation system is the concept that now, not only do you have to pay that aging catcher the $20 million he's demanding, but you have to lose a 1st rounder just for the priveledge of overpaying him. In a system where the market truly sets the price for each player, each league would put its own price on the loss of a first rounder. There's nobody who would ever overpay to get an average player AND lose a draft pick doing it...but to get an average player for a reduced price? That might be worth the loss of the pick. Under the current system, that doesn't happen, because players will refuse to even look at a contract that's too far beneath their game-mandated demands. So, in my opinion, for Free Agent Compensation to work, the free agency system has to be changed in the manner which I outlined above.

There's a litany of things that could be changed, or adjusted, or added, as far as online leagues are concerned. They work very differently than solo-play leagues. I'm not going to pretend to tell you which part of your customer base is most important to keep happy. And, as such, I'm not going to pretend that the online-league player community should get everything it desires either. But this issue is at least a good start, and fixing it would go a long way to solving some long-standing problems that plague online-leagues with every passing season.