Looking at the New Negotiations System
 

During my initial look at the way it's handled now, I noticed a couple of things.

1) There are more holdouts. During all of my single player time with FOF, I think I had 2 hold outs in many dozens of seasons played. My initial test (about 6-7 seasons) had 3 holdouts.

2) A lot of the players will only accept 2-year deals when doing the Bonus+minsal contracts, which would require you to renegotiate with them every season. This causes you to have to give them a huge bonus every year. My star FL did this to me for all 6 or 7 seasons that I ran the test. He costs me 8-9 mil in cap room each year, even though I officially only paid him the league min. salary. Each year I had to give him another bonus.

3) A lot of the players asking for small bonuses a good sized salary also fall for this contract. That is bad. If a guy is asking for about $1m in signing bonus, and then a 3 year deal of say $1.5m, $2m and $3m, he should not go for a contract that pays about $1m bonus and then $760,000 for each of the 3 seasons. This could be the problem that Jim was alluding to in the other thread.


So now I'm going to run a more detailed test and here's how I'm going to do it.

1) ALL contracts will be given as Bonus+minsal in renegotiations.
2) I'll sign FA's (only what they are asking) to fill holes.
3) I'll only renegotiate contracts with drafted players in the last year of their contract, unless they hold out (Not sure I hear too many renegotiations with drafted players until their last season anyway in real life).
4) The AI will handle gameplans, depth charts, etc. Just trying to get from one season to the next.

And let the test begin...

Okay - that sounds like more, but it's certainly not a solution to the perceived problem. It just sounds to me like having plenty of players running around, starting for your team, and being productive while on multi-year minsal deals makes them *a little* more likely to hold out. It's not an offset - just a logcial (mathematical) extension of the system already in place, I think. But in any event -- it's not like it's happening 25% of the time, or anything that might give you any real pause in using this exploit if you were playing all-out.

Feel free to ignore this part as some already have.

That would be my opinion, as well. With all those guys running around being underpaid, the percentage of holdouts will likely increase. It just a by-product of the bigger problem.

(Edit - I just realized I said nearly the exact same thing as QS. I knew I had seen it before)

That's pretty much the point of doing this though, to see if the perceived problem actually is a problem. People seeem to be saying that anyone can team any team together and stay comfortably under the cap if all the do is offer Bonus+minsal contracts. So that's what I'm going to test.

Settings for the legaue:

Using fake players, turned chemistry off (since most MP leagues don't use this), it's on Wall Street difficulty and of course, turn off firing because this is a test. Be bad if I suddenly was fired in the middle of it. :D

Here's my Initial Roster.

hmm Lumpkin and Fitzhume aren't fake players :)

I go through all of the players that are at the end of their contracts. I decide which ones I want to keep (to good to star players) and which ones I probably won't want after the season (crappy players).

One problem I have already is my starting FB did not ask for ANY bonus money whatsoever. That seems pretty bad. Every player, ESPECIALLY the ones on the starting roster, should ask for some money upfront.

Other than that, nothing serious. All of the other players I resigned were backups who were asking for a little bonus plus just above minsal. I gave them minsal. No major talent had their contract up for renegotiation so instead of posting another large roster posting, all I did was free up a million in cap room.

2 North Plainfield Plague on the fake roster there... cool.

sab, when you get to it, can you post the players original asking price, as well as the minsal deal he signs? if its not too much trouble.

Well, I accidently left the global option on that says the AI auto signs players. :) At the end of the season my cap room is $15,770,000.

My team finishes 10-6 and loses in the first round of the playoffs.

NP Pyser, when I do this with a big name guy, I'll post the details of the contracts.

At the start of FA, I have $9,170,000 in cap room available. Which is second least in the league. A lot of teams have a LOT of cap room available.

My biggest need is ILB, followed by T and C (according to the game).

The ILB I sign is Scott Sterritt, he's a 62/63 player. His contract is a 6 year deal, $3,780,000 bonus with his salary being $860,000, $2,160,000, $2,860,000, $3,420,000, $4,040,000, $4,640,000

I'm going to renegotiate it next year to a Bonus+minsal to see how that turns out. I let my scout do the draft and let the AI sign the draft picks.

Here's my roster before any renegotiations

Hmmm. Something's up. The "exploit" just isn't working anymore. Every single time I try to do it for the expensive players, and even the not so very expensive players, the agent wants more signing bonus money. I usually fix that by just shortening the contract length, but that increases the amount of cap room I pay each season for the prorated bonus.

I noticed that my initial test was under the Main Street difficulty (didn't realize that earlier). This test I'm doing under Wall Street and it doesn't seem to be working. (What difficulty do the MP leagues run under?)

I'm going to have to approach this differently because I ran out of cap space trying to do the renegotiations with my star players.

Yeah, it doesn't seem to work as easily under Wall Street. I was playing around with it tonight, and you have to increase the signing bonus.

After thinking about it, I'm not sure it is as big of a problem as I originally thought. If anything it makes you consider how much risk you are willing to take on as a gm. You'll be giving up lots of money for players who might get hurt or bust. The advantage you gain up front (if there really is one) is more than made up in what happens when you give up 16 to 20 million in guaranteed money to someone who suffers a career ending injury. Then you are hit with a pretty sizable cap hit.

Also, the more signing bonuses you hand out in renegotiating might play into how much you'll have available for coaches and other free agents. Jim did some tweaking to the financial system which makes your bottom line more important. Spending lots of money in signing bonuses could come back and hurt you in coaching and scouting decisions. This is speculation to some degree, I haven't had much time to see how big of an effect your profit margin makes.

As for me, I think the risk alone is too great to really use this "exploit". The more guaranteed money you give up, the greater your chances are of one or two players severely crippling you.

Just some thoughts, what do you guys think?

Several Tucker Tigers as well. The fake names of rookies in the default rosters are mostly (all???) IHOF names.

capologist, heres why i disagree.

you are handing out the exact same bonus they ask for in many cases. so really, the exact same risk is there. you are just paying less salary each year. if you had to double the signing bonus, then sure, theres a huge risk. but as it is, if you look at 5.0d, where they only accepted what you offered, you really aren't giving them any more of a signing bonus with the "exploit" as you did with any other version.

Yeah, I know you are handing out the same amount of bonus, but you are also more tempted to hand out those bonuses. You might be able to get a comparable player through free agency or the draft without as high of a bonus, but yeah I do see your point, too.

That's not what I saw in my test with Wall Street dfficulty. Most of the players wanted a higher bonus. I was able to sign many of them by reducing the number of years they were signing on for, but that increases the amount of bonus that gets prorated each year.

Say I try to sign a player to a 5-year deal with a $5mil signing bonus and minsal throughout but he says he wants a higher bonus or more money. In the case of what he was asking, I'd have to pay $1mil in prorated cap. But say I have to reduce the minsal contract to three years. Now I have to pay $1.66mil per year in prorate.

I did not see this in the Main Street tests. That's why I asked what difficulty level the MP leagues were played on. In my short test above, on Wall Street, it doesn't work.

I tried to run a quick test, i was on Wall Street and I quickly gave up because I too wasn't getting the complained about result, either because there were very few players asking for 3 years and the ones asking for 4 and 5 years were not succumbing to the "bug".

I did get 1 guy on my roster whos asking price was $14 Million whom I was able to lower down to $8 Million though, but this was by adjusting the bonus higher (slightly) along with doing some work on the yearly salary, not just by keeping the bonus the same and offering the minnimum yearly salary.

I used the default fake name file (didn't "install" the real names file) so if that's the file you use for the IHOF...then yeah, they'd be the same names. :)

I think it might be all, or at least all the top ones. Taking a look around now...

Edit: Maybe not all, but a very high percentage. Even some amazingly obsccure guys are in there. Roman Minnich lives!

in the USFL a very short test on one team had a CB sign w/ no increase in bonus $, minsal...

but a QB did not sign for minsal, wihtout that increase in bonus money.

Let's try to flesh out what would actually make sense to see here -- maybe that might help.

Veteran player, whose current salary is for just this season:

Y1: S=4,000,000 + B=1,000,000

He has several years left, so re-signing him to an extende deal makes sense for us. We open his screen, and perhaps his initial demand might look like this:

BONUS = $5,000,000
Y1 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y2 = $3,200,000
Y3 = $4,500,000
Y4 = $5,500,000
Y5 = $6,000,000

All in all, he wants $5, up front, and he wants 5 years for $25m. Presumably, the $5m up front is very important -- but it serves two purposes: it's guaranteed cash, but the cap hit it threatens makes the future years' salaries more likely to actualy be recognized. He might not see all five years of this deal -- but down the road he migth be in position to renegotiate again, on terms he'd accept (presuambly more guaranteed monay as a trade-off for a salary shift). And remember - getting cut isn't necessarily a bad thing in the NFL -- if you're a decent player, getting cut makes you a free agent, able to sign for whatever you can get.

Anyway -- we might expect that this player might budge a bit. Maybe he'd accept a deal with only $4m up front, worth only $20m for the five years -- some actual negotiation might be involved, but that woul make sense. He starts with an optimistic assessment of his worth, then settles on something reasonable. That sounds okay.

It's also possible that he'd go, in concept, for a somewhat lesser deal with more money guaranteed up front. The Bonus+Minsal deals we're talking about here, generally. But how much bonus would make sense?

$5M bonus plus five years of $800,000 just doesn't make any sense -- compare that to the reasonable "compromise" described above, and it doesn't pass the small test. The player is giving up too much (as Jim has agreed) in these cases.

I'm thinking that a reasonable result might be, in a case like this, about a doubling of the signing bonus. If you're really willing to commit all the money up front to the player, and assume all the risk of injury - then maybe a fair bonus-heavy offer to this player might be something like:

BONUS = $10,000,000
Y1 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y2 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y3 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y4 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y5 =$800,000 (minsal)

Totals $14m over the five years, a little more than half of the original deal, but it's nearly all guaranteed. This reduction in overall salary (and here, the player is basically signing an agreement to play for 'no more than' the minimum for all five years) is offset by the guarantee of payment even if he's injured or his play declines. In my judgment, this would be a pretty fair offering.

I guess you could debate the wisdom of whether a bonus of $6m or 8m might be enough, or maybe not until you hit $12 million -- but it seems logical to me that you probably have to see some reasonable escaltion in the bonus amount to make the future year minsals worth it. Recall -- since the future year salary amounts are so low, they no longer become assets (where in teh initial contract, the player was hoping to get that amount each year, and not be cut) now they become liabilities (where the continued contract prevents him from getting more on an open market, in most cases).


That's basically my thinking -- there's nothing conceptually wrong with multi-year minsal deal, but it ought to carry a substantial increase in bonus money for the team, and really raise those issues of "how much of a risk do you want to take" for the team trying to decide if this contract is worth assuming.

correct me if im wrong the problem was that some players aren't requiring more bonus $ right? I do see your thought process there but they would most certainly require more in bonus money to take that.

Yes, you are right. Using his example, the players are accepting this contract:

BONUS = $5,000,000
Y1 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y2 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y3 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y4 =$800,000 (minsal)
Y5 =$800,000 (minsal)

They are giving up their salaries but not asking for extra bonus money to compensate for it.

Not to complicate things, but maybe some of this depends on how old these guys are? or their loyalty? or their hometown? or their agent? or their emphasis on playing for a winner, etc.? Couldn't this account for renegotiating on favorable terms for the team so they get to stay, etc. I am not saying there is no problem, but it could go a lot deeper than we think.

That takes care of that one, then. At least, I like to think I'm brilliant.

Edit: Ok, this misplacing of posts is starting to become really annoying.

no, in our multiplayer league this was used with everyone from 2nd year players to 13 year vets, players with low, middle, and high loyalty, agents with very high, average, low subbernness, etc. Almost the entire 44 man roster was renegotiated like this.

About multiplayer leagues difficulty level, i think i remember that Jim stated before that there isn't dificulty level in multiplayer, you only can choose dificulty level in single player. Will do a forum search as mybe i'm wrong.

I agree with sabotai and Suicane above. I was messing with this yesterday and I wasn't seeing it on the Wall Street difficulty. We need to find out from Jim and see which difficulty level the MP leagues are playing at.

Or just rerun the test on a 1-player MP league...

Peyton's Real Life Extension:
Bonus - $34.5 million
year 1 sal - $535,000
year 2 sal - $665,000
year 3 sal - $1,000,000
year 4 sal - $1,000,000



BUG! EXPLOIT! SHOWSTOPPER! GAMEBREAKER! YAHTZEE!

Manning's contract has roster bonuses of $9 million in 2006 (year 3) and $10 million in 2007 (year 4), which you conveniently omit. For those years, the Colts will not be paying him huge signing bonus and minsal kinds of deals.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004May17.html

but they are not guarenteed. roster bonuses aren't put into FOF (i don't think) as they aren't "salary", this still breaks your fragile ideal of the Deion Rule. Jim has repeatedly said it's not getting put in FOF because it's not as simple as people want to pretend it is.

I've been bombing through a SP game, and, for kicks, using this "exploit" as much as I can, just to see what would happen (also, I treat SP as "entertainment", so anything that makes it easier is fine with me).

I am playing on Wall Street level.

My conclusions (to add to the mix, I'm not saying these are set in stone):

1. The exploit rarely works on players who are requesting a contract of a length other than 3 years.

2. It works for renegotiations, but doesn't seem to work much for new signings.

3. Understand that you can really only use it once every three years, per player. The problem is the ever-compounding bonus money. If you reneg a guy to a 3-year, bonus-heavy, minsal deal, and then do it again the next year, he's suddenly carrying a big cap number. If you do do this, however, you'll get the neat deal that his contract will start to show his cap number going down (i.e after a few renegs over successive years he'll now show a contract with cap numbers going down over the 3 years of his current contract). The bad news is that when he hits the 2nd or 3rd year of the now decreasing-cap-number-contract, he'll probably hold out.


Anyway, just my $0.02. :)

They do guarantee he will not play 2006 for $1 million plus the pro-rated bonus, as your post seems to indicate. For purposes of satisfying the Deion rule, they are counted as salary, since they are essentially the same thing - money the club has the option not to pay if they are willing to take the cap hit.

Do you just not listen or don't understand?

The issue isn't whether or not a bonus/minsal deal is appropriate, but the fact that players are willing to give up too much to accept it.

In real life if Manning were asking for:
Bonus - $34.5 million
year 1 sal - $7,000,000
year 2 sal - $8,000,000
year 3 sal - $9,000,000
year 4 sal - $10,000,000

But then ended up renegotiating for:
Bonus - $34.5 million
year 1 sal - $535,000
year 2 sal - $665,000
year 3 sal - $1,000,000
year 4 sal - $1,000,000

Then your analogy might make some sense. But that's not what happened.

So you don't think Peyton would have liked more salary up front but instead took a backloaded, bonus heavy, minsal contract because he's dumb?

The fact is that Peyton's deal is not unlike many others in the NFL yet a lot of you don't want to see that. You aren't privy to Peyton's negotations so you have no idea how they went. We DO know the final result however.

for the millionth time, THE....... DEION....... RULE......... IS........ NOT...... MAKING.......... IT............ IN.......... FOF...........

or does Jim need to say it a few hundred times more?

Read above.

The Deion rule might not be as simple as it seems, but it does seem like an easy thing to code into a game like this to prevent exploits like this. Especially since FOF doesn't include roster bonuses and escalators.

The complaint is NOT that the end result of the contracts is necessarily unrealistic, but that the negotiating process isn't. If a guy asks for a big bonus and big salaries, and you offer back the exact same bonus and min salaries, is he just going to say "yes"? Or is he going to ask for a bigger bonus to take the minsal? That's the part I think you're glossing over.

I don't see a difference between the player asking for minsal+huge bonus intially and negotiating down to minsal+huge bonus with backloading. if the end result is the same and consistent with the NFL then what's the problem? Player demands have ALWAYS been fooked and have been broken for a while.

Chubby,
What I meant by the Deion rule is the oversimplified statement that the first three years of any player's salary must equal the prorated amount of the signing bonus. This is a simple way to prevent this exploit. There might be some technical nuances to this rule that I don't know. I've looked on the web and can't find anything that makes it seem more difficult than this.

Gosh I'm glad he's here to dictate to us what will be in the game.

But, anyway, we were debating Manning's real world contract, and you were trying to claim it matched the exploit you love so much. The roster bonuses (which are considered salary for the purposes of the Deion rule) make that very much not the case. Unlike the exploit which would have Manning actually playing out the duration of such a contract in FOF, his real deal actually has the Colts paying him a bunch of money, and costing a ton against the cap, OR making a hard roster/renegotiation decision.

Bottom line is that if Manning plays the third and fourth years under that deal, the Colts pay him 10 and 11 times what you are claiming he plays for. Not even close to the in game contracts that have people upset.