Payroll shows leading FA offers for all to see

[Rondell Tate]

I'm in an online league and we're bidding on free agents.
In the HTML (haven't checked in-game yet), it lists my team's payroll at the top of the home page.
That total ($70,374,300) includes not only my team's payroll (approx. $40M) but the amount I have bid on free agents in auctions where I have the high bids. As it only seems to affect the leading bidder on free agents (I happen to have four "leading" bids), it gives a pretty good idea to anybody paying attention who can do math ($70M - $40M = $30M) what they have to beat in order to have the high bid on the top free agent in the pool.
Were I leading in bidding on only one player, it would give other teams an exact dollar value to beat.
By browsing the league and taking careful notes of the discrepancies between values on the home page and the "Player Salaries" page, and of the tips the game provides (e.g. "I still like Burlington's offer best,") an opportunist could pretty easily "win" most of the free agent auctions he wanted to fix ...

[TribeFanInNC]

I just want to double check...are you sure it is only the leading bids? I know when you make a bid, the game adjusts you budget so you do not offer more money than you have to spend. But it does this for all offers. Is it really only updating the top offers in this manner?

If so, that is a little surprising. I suppose in either event, it still could be an issue.

[Rondell Tate]

Originally Posted by TribeFanInNC

I just want to double check...are you sure it is only the leading bids? I know when you make a bid, the game adjusts you budget so you do not offer more money than you have to spend. But it does this for all offers. Is it really only updating the top offers in this manner?

If so, that is a little surprising. I suppose in either event, it still could be an issue.

I didn't do an exhaustive survey (because we're still in the FA process and I didn't want to tell the whole league "Hey, look what I'm bidding on Earl Grant"), but I did check with our commissioner and asst. commissioner and it looks like that's the case.
The commish, for instance, is bidding aggressively (three bids) but thus far unsuccessfully for Grant, the same pitcher I'm after, but his payroll figure only reflects players he has under contract (around $71M). I didn't ask what his current bid is on Grant, but given our salary structure it would be at least $15M to $20M, so clearly is not included.
It's not just my team. One other team has a disparity of almost $20M. Again, I haven't asked them to tell me who they're bidding on, but it seems likely that they have a significant FA bid out on somebody.
I also checked and other teams can see my adjusted total of approx. $70M.

I don't mind it updating my budget on my own team's screen ... in fact that's really useful. But posting it so everybody can see what teams are planning to spend is wrong.

Btw, one possibility I wondered about was whether the game has awarded me Grant (the winter meetings just ended) but hasn't processed that decision to the point of making the transaction happen where it's visible to the players. If so, it's much less of an issue, obviously.