New Game Option - No AI Cap penalties.

[Bode]

After discussing the salary situation with Skydog/Kcchief19, I think a simple game option would solve the problem I'm experiencing, and probably others. It also wouldn't require major development time from what I can tell.

I think if there was an option to turn off salary penalties to AI teams it would solve their cap problems in pretty much 99% of cases. Since they could release players and get the full savings, they wouldn't ever have gimped teams full of rookies.

What I mean is give the option to allow retirements to have a $0 hit to the AI. Also, allow player releases to have a $0 hit to the AI. In this option I would still personally like the ability to have those penalties hit my human controlled team. I can manage dealing with those penalties, but many AI teams cant.

I'm assuming if this option existed that it would be basically impossible for an AI team to bust in any large way. This would then make the Free Agency period very realistic every year. In order to build a solid team, you would need to capitalize on the rookie draft, which is truly how it should be. At the moment, many years end up with way too much talent in the FA pool if you have teams busting. Obviously, you can choose not to draft these players, but they just end up on another team they shouldn't be on and that becomes imbalanced as well.

Anyways, I welcome feedback from other players, but I know after playing over 30 seasons during a few different sims that this would take the single player version of the game from being very good to being amazing for me. It would produce the significant long term challenge that I am looking for.

At the moment I find it much too easy to constantly produce a winning record. I believe there should be situations where you lose. That is the normal cycle of any professional team in a sport with a salary cap.

[Vinatieri for Prez]

Very interesting idea. It would seem a very easy addition to a patch. It could even be modified by perhaps having a zero hit, maybe only a 25% hit, 50% hit, etc. This would still help out AI teams but keep a little bit more realism.

[stevew]

It's probably a lot harder than it sounds. But if it was able to be implemented, it may be the answer to a lot of the problems that people see.

[Ben E Lou]

Has anyone besides Bode seen these problems in 6.0d over the long haul?

[Narcizo]

Nope. Occasionally there's an odd 5-7 year 60+ rated guy who you can pretty certainly grab if you want, just by offering a lot more than the other teams but I can't say I've seen swathes of great free agents.

[perez24]

Agreed, but I haven't really run any long-term leagues yet.

[dbd1963]

I saw it a couple of times. I had run a league from scratch, with the game-generated scrubs in 1960. I saw a few teams absolutely blow their cap and have to dump everyone, and I mean everyone.

[Ksyrup]

I haven't looked at it in-depth, but I'm in 2030 with my current career and don't recall seeing large numbers of guys being released by one team in one off-season. I've been getting the typical spread of FAs - a few 60s, the occasional 70-90, and number of 50s, and a bunch of 40s and below. And, when I've paid attention, they seem to be fairly spread out amongst different teams (either as free agents or outright releases).

That said, when I gave up Detroit to take on a project in 2026, my new team, Baltimore, was $22M over the cap with 35 guys on the roster. I wonder how the AI would have dealt with it - I released 4 or 5 very good but hugely overpaid guys.

[Eaglesfan27]

I've run dozens of test leagues most of them starting with default NFL rosters and cap settings at 28-80 or 50-80. I've seen this problem, but not nearly as frequently as Bode indicates. I certainly don't see teams getting into cap hell every year, but I do see instances of teams that usually have done well for a few years getting into cap trouble by trying to keep many of their stars. I do occasionally see high ratings guys released at times, but it is usually guys who have shown themselves to be injury prone or in the beginning of decline.

However, I don't think these instances are that far from reality. Look at the cap hell SF got themselves into that led to them releasing many veterans not so many years ago. Talented teams or teams that constantly defer money, eventually get into trouble in the actual NFL, so I don't see this as nearly a serious issue as Bode does. If there is ever an option for a reduced cap cost for the AI when they release players, I doubt I would use it unless I was wanting to make things much more challenging for myself.

[Eaglesfan27]

Dola -

I much prefer this than the frequent moving of stars that we've seen in previous versions. Teams do a much better job of keeping their best players in this game and that really adds to immersion for me.

[dbd1963]

I'm not sure there has ever been an NFL team that has had 0 players on its roster before. That's what clued me into the problem, the screen where you can see the roster breakdown. Every now and again, a team would release everybody.

I'm interested to know if this is a problem that is specific to starting a league from scratch, rather than if you run from the default.

[Bode]

Dbd,

It's not. I've created this problem under every league scenario. Real players with x factor and without, fake players, It's caused by one of 3 things.

A very stupid release mid season of a player with a massive contract. See the thread where houston released Mario Williams with an $80 million contract.

A bad luck retirement year where 1 or more high contract players retire.

Finally, it's caused by AI teams oversigning with current money and getting themselves in such a large future cap hole, that the only way out is to release players. However, that creates a viscious cycle many times.

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Eaglesfan,

I do want the game to be more challenging. I want rosters to stay together as much as possible, and releases to only happen when they make sense. The only way to get around this problem is to not sign players who got released, but that solution sucks too, because AI teams sign them and then for 1 year they are insanely good, until they bust the next year or 2 from cap problems. I want the field to be even and stay even and this appears to be the only way to accomplish that. So you can either win the super bowl every year by picking up these players. Or lose every year to the AI teams who did pick them up.