Single Player House Rule Idea: "No Haggle, No Hassle"

[QuikSand]

Basic idea: you never haggle when signing or renegotiating a player -- you may offer what he wants, and that's your only choice.


Pro:

-reduces some of the advantage gained by being much better at contract structuring than AI rivals

-makes it much tougher to load up without long term consequences (good players frequently want long term deals with backloaded contracts)

-some minor strategy arises, like timing best moment to offer a mediocre player whose requests are a shade over minsal (I get this a lot, and enjoy it)

-if played deeply, might make the "loyalty" rating have some real value


Con:

-you end up with a lot of one year contracts, and that means a lot of guys to re-sign every year

-when players slide into late free agency, it becomes very simple to see exactly who would join your team and for what, defeats some of the mystery of free agency


For the advanced - compound the challenge by removing renegotiations as well, let all your players go into free agency with your only re-signing options being on their terms, in the open market (meaning anyone good enough to start a bidding war likely leaves you).

[Subby]

I like the advanced version of this.

[stevew]

It gets tedious when you end up signing the same guys to one year nearly minimum contracts over and over. But I think this is a pretty good idea.

Future versions, if ever there is one, should send you an email and be like players W,X,Y and Z all have a contract demand of less than 1 million dollars. Click the button to make this series of offers.

[QuikSand]

Right now I'm fiddling with a career using:

no renegs
no haggling
1/3 cap reduction
no quality WRs (<50/50, <50BPR)

I just saw a fairly mature team win its division twice in a row, but then the QB (nothing special overall, but a good fit) held out for big money and I simply couldn't afford to pay it. We went with an unproven 3rd year guy and he threw something like 25 interceptions, leading our team to a 5-11 season and a high draft pick. The old QB then pulled an Elvis Grbac and retired mid-career, leaving me with no good option, and forced to cut my star DE to clear up 15% of my working payroll.

Not a bad set of outcomes, it's more challenging than I'm used to.

[Pyser]

if it starts getting too easy just trade away first rounders. rest looks good.

[Dutch]

I've been doing no-haggle for a while because I am tired of negotiating at such a minute level of detail. Call me lazy, but I prefer the rookie salary model to the "ripe-for-exploitation-anything-goes" salary model used for free agents...particularly in SP...but also in MP.

[QuikSand]

if it starts getting too easy just trade away first rounders. rest looks good.

thinking about this too, now

[QuikSand]

Several seasons playing with these rules:

no renegs
no haggling
1/3 cap reduction
trade my 1st for CLE 3rd every year
no quality WRs (<50/50, <50BPR), no drafting/signing WR with BPR range entirely >50

Kind of mixed results so far. It's fairly challenging to get power talent, but my team manages to earn a bye week half the time, maybe. I'm spending a lot of time on chemistry and minor-tier players, which is okay for me (I rather enjoy it, oddly) but I expect it would get redundant for many.

On the good side - it really does force a lot of intriguing personnel decisions. Check out that 55/55 4th year RT who is now a free agent... he'd be a great fit! And he only wants $300 bonus and $900 salary to sign! In a standard setup, this is an easy guy to lock up to a 3 year deal or more - but here, if all he wants is one year, I can put in my offer, fairly often get him, but after a season as a starter he will have new ideas about contract demands. There's something a lot more realistic about that, to me. I have plenty of long-term affinity and backup bums who keep coming back year after year for minsal (usually I have to wait them out a while) but I do lose a lot of guys who get a solid year for us and get paid elsewhere - including a title-winning QB who bolted after a 3yr stint with us.

It's not perfect, but it's not a bad spot on the difficulty/enjoyability/complexity scale, I think.

[QuikSand]

I fired up SP a bit recently, and this is now basically my go-to set of rules, including the twist that every contract is done in open free agency (no re-signing RFAs). It's fairly tough to keep star players, and when I do stumble on a free agent "value" signing it's frequently on a backloaded contract (that I'm not used to dealing with) or just a one year deal and then the guy splits for real money. It's pretty solid... and for playing remotely (for me, logmein) it's brilliant as it wipes out nearly all the need to use the keyboard, which is really nice.

[Julio Riddols]

The set I use for a challenge is I only obtain new players through the draft and I only re-sign them to deals they ask for. This leaves me fighting the cap often enough and losing a player or two a year that I would have rather kept. I make no trades unless offered them by the CPU and no FA signings except for UDFA to fill roster spots. That along with 0 cap increase seems to give the CPU the best chance of being competitive and leaves me not always making the playoffs, which is the best I can ask for probably with this iteration of the game. My hope is in the new version we will be able to set house rules in game if they're needed.

[aston217]

Too many offseason FAs is tedious, so I wouldn't like the 'no renegs at all' thing. Otherwise, I don't see any cons here.

I'd add, you're not allowed to sign anybody but rookies in late free agency.

CPU teams WILL land themselves in cap hell and release a buncha guys in late FA. Find all your targets in the 12 stages before then, and use late FA for rookie UDFAs only.

One downside would be you can't compete well in early FA, which is fine if you like to play the conservative spending GM style. Some people might be frustrated when outbid by CPU teams.

As for renegs, I don't think any hard or fast rules need to apply since they'd be too hard to remember, but there should be a certain amount of "letting key FAs test the market." It's no fun if you can never keep anyone, ever, particularly when you can't compete in the market anyway.

For me, I think it's a lot easier to "hold back" when you are comfortable with and feel involved with your roster. So you got to be able to keep some of those unheralded guys around, while consciously policing yourself to avoid building superteams to bully the AI.

Also, the far less amount of time I could devote to a league where I'm not playing against other real players is a handicap in itself -- not gonna look hard through the draft class, or gameplan much, etc, etc.

I like the "set your own SP house rules" idea in a future game. Applying your-team-only cap hits of arbitrary %s would help a great deal.