[Cinnamon J. Scudworth]

Originally Posted by Buane

I'm still waiting for someone to give me a reason why free agents shouldn't just take the best offer they receive during free agency? And when I say "best" I don't just mean the most money, they can weigh all the other factors they weigh in the current system. Why does the current system have to be so needlessly complicated and have demand windows that change as free agency goes on and have players who don't remember that a team was willing to give them more two months ago?

I think the main limiting factor in all of this is that, at present, the process of free agent negotiation is entirely user-driven. By "user driven" I mean that the human player is responsible at all times for making an offer. Free agents can't sponteneously message you with an offer of their own. The real problem with letting free agent take "the best offer they received during free agency" is that, well, maybe you as the human player decided at some point that you were going to move in a different direction instead. Now you're going to be stuck with a player because of an offer you made (and was rejected) a month ago? I think there would have to be a substantial revision to OOTP's programming here, and I think part of what has made this thread unexpectedly contentious is that the problem is being presented as an urgent need to fix, when really, the changes necessary to fix it would be foundational changes to the way that the free agency process works in OOTP, which would probably have to be implemented over several versions.