An Alternative to In-Game FA Compensation?

[ShaneCarson]

So I do not like the way the game does FA compensation. One of the few pitfalls I've learned to turn off.

Without it though, I feel some teams will continue to toil in the cellar so I've come up with a bit of an alternative that could help and I am looking for input on how to make this better.

My idea is to take a bit from the NFL and designate a "franchise player" every season. This player would be someone who's contract expires at the end of the year. The player must be designated during the pre-season. If that player walks at the end of the year and is signed by another team, you would then get that teams first round draft pick. If you resign that player, trade that player or that player retires, you then do not get compensation for the player.

While playing with AI, you would have to be honest with yourself on which player should be designated this tag for the AI teams. As well, you shouldn't be able to tag a middle reliever with this tag as there should surely be someone better.

Can y'all think of any more rules or a better way of going about this? I want it to be a more simple version that employed in baseball now and would like it to work.

[Afino]

The GUBA turned the 2nd round of the draft into a "sandwich" round for FA compensation.

The formula is based on VORP in the last 3 years, how much they signed for, and other unknown (except to the guy who came up with the formula) components.

There are still type A and type B free agents.

In a 36 team league:

- top 8 picks are protected for the worst 8 teams that make our lottery
- next 20 picks are for the top 20 free agents under the formula
- last 8 picks are for Type A free agents - the top 8 out of the 20 above - the former team gets another pick for losing them.

To compensate for "losing" a round, we added another round's worth of players to our draft pool