RFA bug fix yet?

[JeremyTyler28]

I made a post that went unanswered last month wondering if the bug where RFA's leave the NHL for the KHL for basically no money has been fixed. With the playoffs going on I've been wanting to play FHM4 again but this bug was a bit of a game breaker for me

In 2 seasons I saw Dylan Larkin, Jesse Puljujarvi, and Tomas Hertl all leave for the KHL on July 5th for 2 year, 660k contracts. Its both unrealistic considering what these guys could have made in the NHL, and it basically makes qualifying an RFA to try to get compensation back a useless strategy, and made the GM mode I was playing unplayable. Hoping this was addressed and someone might have some info, thanks.

[JeffR]

No changes yet. It's a little complicated to fix, because there are a couple of issues that create the problem:

The contract negotiation system, largely borrowed from OOTP, tends to result in players preferring to sign a contract if there's an acceptable one available, even if they might be able to get a better one if they wait. And the way negotiation works, if they really don't like a team's offer (e.g. they're just given the minimum qualifying amount), it essentially doesn't exist to them. That's not really a problem in baseball, where there's one dominant league and MLB teams pay far more than other leagues. Other leagues can't usually compete for the salaries major league-level players want. In hockey, that doesn't work so well - there's considerable overlap between the high end of the KHL's salary structure and the mid-low end of the NHL's.

So unless an NHL team can get a player signed quickly, the player is willing to look at other leagues, and it's very possible for an NHL team to make a "bad" offer to an RFA, get locked out of negotiating for a while, and a KHL team to swoop in and grab him. There is a cutoff for player skill where the player will insist on NHL money, but it's a bit of a clumsy workaround and can't be set too low, or the KHL teams run into roster and money issues, so it doesn't help with players in the skill range you're talking about.

Now, if the NHL teams could sign players under KHL contract, there'd be no issue, since they could still get the player by back by offering him a new contract. But since there's no NHL-KHL transfer agreement, the NHL has to respect KHL contracts. So if a guy signs in the KHL, he stays there until the end of his contract. In real life, there are various ways, mostly a little shady, of getting around that - players who "retire" and then sign in the other league a week later, players buying out their own contracts, and so on. In the game, that's not possible (yet); it's black-and white and a contract has to be played out.

So both things really need to be addressed to fix the problem properly. The antiquated negotiation system needs to be replaced, and I'm hoping we can do that this year. And there needs to be a little more flexibility in the way movement between the NHL and KHL is handled. That's probably going to be the tougher part because it has to be balanced to limit the number of guys abandoning contracts to no more than a handful or two per season, so it's similar to the real-life level and we don't get a hundred players a season moving between the leagues (or none at all.) It'll probably require some specialized hardcoding, which we generally try to avoid, but I don't see another way around it.

[ohms_law]

FWIW, my suggestion is to focus on the negotiation aspect first and then you guys can circle back to the NHL - KHL situation later. If it's easy to code in for a couple of "superstar" level players to become available to switch every season then do that for now as a stop gap.

By the way, I think the negotiation issues are a problem in OOTP as well. As you mentioned it's hidden a bit in OOTP because for most people MLB is all their worried about. But people play fantasy leagues and whatnot in OOTP, and the problem has been noticed there as well. OOTP has to deal with similar issues with postings from the ***, for example. Maybe all of you guys can come together and develop a really strong negotiation system for both games? It's a cornerstone game mechanic for any sports management game anyway, so it's worth spending a significant amount of resources on to get right.