Quote:
Originally Posted by Mets Man
One of the things I have been able to exploit in OOTP over the years has been signing whatever guys I want during the free agency period, and then trading them off if necessary (if I happened to overstock on certain guys I don't need).
As a result, I've set a house rule for myself that doesn't allow me to trade any player that I have signed within 1 year. This has made my experience more enjoyable as I have to now think whether I want to take a chance in offering a free agent a contract and be stuck with him.
However, without this house rule, I can just take my chances in signing my my fallback options and then get rid of them afterwards via trade (if I successfully sign my main options).
For example, if I have 3 relievers that I'm interested in getting, but I'm worried I'm not guaranteed to get all of them at the price I want, I usually have 2 or 3 fallback options just in case. However (with the house rule in place), the risk in signing those fallback options is that if I successfully sign one of them - this may hinder me from getting my main options OR at the very least leave me to be stuck with a fallback option I don't need. Without the house rule, I can safely sign all my options (including fallbacks), and wait to see if I sign my main options, and if I do successfully sign my main options, I can easily just trade the fallback options without consequence. Furthermore, I can also sign the fallback option, and then if I need to free up more money to raise the offer on another guy I really want, I can easily dump the recently signed fallback guy's contract via trade without consequence.
My proposal for the new OOTP is to maybe make it so that you can't simply just trade off guys who you've recently signed. Perhaps somebody can see what the stats are on how many players have been traded within the first year of a new contract signed in real life. I can't imagine there are too many cases. First of all, trading a guy during his first year of a contract would cause distrust to the GM doing this, possibly hurting his reputation with other players in future dealings. Secondly, not many teams would actually want a player that was just recently signed because otherwise they would have signed him themselves in the first place since they were just a free agent. Why lose a player in a trade to get this guy now when they could have gotten the same player without giving up any assets via free agency?
I'm not sure what the best way to implement this would be, but as an example - Front Office Football made it such that whenever you tried to trade a player in the first year of his new contract, it would give a message saying "The team is not interested in trading for a player who has recently signed a new contract". This dialogue message appeared whenever trying to trade a player on the first year of a new deal, I believe.
|
If anything was done the bold part would be the way to fix this issue IMHO. I've suggested many times that the trade module should have a "GM reputation" that can be positive or negative depending on how reliable a trader you are. Make unrealistic offers trying to screw the AI-GM will result in that AI-GM having a lower chance of making any deals with you, etc.
This same thing could be brought into player dealings. Screw too many FA over and other FA are going to be reluctant to sign with your club.
I would not want a hard rule in place that would not allow me to trade a recently signed player. Too me just not realistic as there is always the chance the guy is just, legitimately, not working out and my option to try to rectify that situation shouldn't be taken away.
Not sure I'd put this high on my priority list as it is a user issue and easily controlled. I would guess a hard rule would be easy to code, though I wouldn't want it. The more complex GM reputation would take more time and testing and IMHO not worth the effort for the "sign and trade FA" issue. Just my 2 cents.