I'm not sure this is a bug, but I certainly don't understand it!
 

I'm playing in the EIHL as Sheffield, and I'm just about to start pre-season before Year 2.

In the middle of season 1, I signed a young Finnish FA winger called Aleksi Jarvinen and he was lights out on my 1st line, with an extra half star still to improve.

I signed him on 8th November 2018, on a 3 year contract, $92,500 a season.

Now a Finnish team have just signed him for free. I didn't get a transfer offer either. What's more, his new team are paying him $38,500 a season so he's not only left but taken a big pay cut in the process!

Can anyone shed any light on this one? He def wasn't a free agent (its 9th July 2019), and I absolutely didn't want him to leave. Since he arrived last season he had 55 points in 43 games!! :crying:

It's just happened again, the following day. My Finnish Defenceman, Henry Mantyla. He had 1 year left on his contract, and I literally offered him an extension the day before he magically ups and leaves to sign with an team in Liiga, Finland.

What is going on?! Do Finnish teams have some sort of contract breaking rights to young Finnish players? Or does Liiga just not respect EIHL contracts?

Well, I guess IRL the British team would leave him go and/or he'd have an out-clause in his contract, so while the game certainly doesn't handle well the situation, the move is not unrealistic in the end.
The bad part is that he moves for less than half the money he makes!

What is the programming logic in it happening though? There must be some kind of parameters to it?

Another 2 players that I've just signed have also now left, 2 days later. They were Free Agents for that summer, signed with me for less than a week, then went elsewhere. That's not terribly realistic.

Also, do I have the ability to take people's players for free? And pay them 50% of their salary?? That'd be sweet!

Yes if they just signed with you, then, it's not too good.
If they left midway through the season, then I'd say it wouldn't be too bad, although the system should be revamped with players explicitally asking for out clauses.

I can't really plan my roster with hidden contract clauses.

Can these be seen in the editor for a player? Are there any other hidden clauses to be aware of?

No, you can't see them. I guess that most of the top European leagues can just get your players from your team at their will. That being said, they should at least repeat the player's salary

The database setting for the Liiga-EIHL relationship was wrong, it was set to allow off-season transfers from the EIHL at no cost when it should've required the normal transfer process. I've fixed it in the database, and have asked if we can get the change into an update we're going to have to release next week to deal with the eSellerate changes mentioned at the top of the forum. That won't, unfortunately, affect an existing game, though.

I'm 99% sure that all/most of the top players have some sort of clause that would free them should an offer come from the likes of the SHL/Liiga/KHL and so on.
One problem with the game is that the players (in European leagues) never ask for clauses.

Thanks for exploring this one and getting to the bottom of it.

Not ideal that I'll have to start my game again for the change to take effect, but I was only a season in and as this was my first game on FHM5, it was a bit of a tester/learning process anyway.

Will the update mentioned above be packaged as a hotfix and be available through the forums I presume? If so I'll keep an eye out for it.

It now looks like it's not going to be necessary for us to release an update for the eSellerate change, so unless a game-breaking problem presents itself, there won't be a hotfix coming. So, higher-level Finnish players are probably best avoided while playing in the EIHL, since they're the ones most likely to be targeted by the Liiga teams. But when one does get signed away to the Liiga (it'll only happen during the offseason), if you're not in challenge mode I don't think it'd be unreasonable to switch to commissioner mode and edit him back to you, since that's not really the intended behaviour.

Hi Jeff, what about the issue with players not being claimed if they are waived by human teams in the NHL? Granted it's not game breaking, but I'd have said much like this bug with the EIHL that they are both serious enough that they have a significant effect on gameplay in those leagues.

Sorry for derailing the thread.