[rylinus]

One of the parts of the game that seems most unrealistic is what happens when you draft an "impossible" player. We all know that despite the "impossible" name tag, enough money will sign the player. But for reasons that seems very unlikely in real life, in OOTP the player will give you a base demand but claim he wants more than the demand. Then, even if you exceed the figure he gave you by millions of dollars, he will often cut off negotiations entirely, not even giving you a chance to counter-offer. These players have agents and they entered the draft with an eye on making some outrageous figure if they could get it. Why reject a good faith offer by slamming the door altogether? It doesn't make sense. These are not really negotiations at all.

For what it's worth, I do not recall a single actual negotiation over my last 20 or so seasons of drafts. The "impossible" player either takes or rejects the initial offer every single time. This also seems remarkably unrealistic to me and seems like an easy fix.

What would make more sense is if the player asks, for example, for 2 million dollars, you offer $4m and he says he won't sign for less than $5m (or $15m) and you have one more chance to get it right. That sounds like what Boras or any other agent would do assuming the kid is legitimately interested in going to college or is willing to take the risk.

In addition to being realistic, I think it would make the game more fun. When you see the "impossible" rating, you would know you may have to pay through the nose but you don't know how bad it will be. If you have a decent store of cash you can take a risk and see where negotiations go. You can reassess as the negotiations deepen, especially as you see what your other picks may have signed for. And maybe, to make this more interesting, you could have players that give you one last chance, terminate negotiations and then come back to you later asking to open them up again. I really like this feature in free agency and would work nicely here as well. In real life a player might let his agent tell him to hold out for a little while, but when he is looking at no $$ and going to school, he might ask him to open negotiations up again. Or, also like real negotiations, the player could reject an offer, ask for more, and as the window for negotiations is closing come back to the team and offer a new figure. We know in real life that many of these deals happen right at the signing deadline. Why not in OOTP?

Lastly, I would add that if we are going to call the rating "impossible" it should probably be just that. Maybe that kid only wants to play for his hometown team. I am assuming that in real life there are examples of this but I think it has to be a lot more rare in real life that very good professional baseball players turn down millions just to go to college. Instead, have a "extremely difficult" or "extremely unlikely", something that signals what the situation really is.