FOOL Discussion: Player Development Budget
 

Player Development Budget was something new added in OOTP12 that we have been using for a few weeks now. There have been some mixed reactions to it thus far, so I want to start a discussion to determine if we possibly need to alter it or remove it all together, or if it is fine the way things are.

Each Pre-season prior to the start of Spring Training, a team can increase or decrease the player development budget depending on what focus they want their team to take for the next full year. This can not be modified again until the preseason in the following year.


My personal hope was that it would force teams to make a tough choice if they want to go into a short term rebuild phase for a few seasons where they increase their player development budget, but have less money available for free agents, or if they want to spend heavily on free agents but have less money available for free agents.

Some of the issues we have encountered:

- Even though the game is set to allow full budget to be spent without owner interference, I am not sure if player development budget takes that setting into consideration or not. There appears to be a few teams that have a few million extra available to be spent on things.

- Some teams did not like the fact that Cash can not be spent on this. Since it is not an expense, but a budget, how much cash you have on hand plays no part in what you can set it to.


- Some teams did not like that you can't make changes at the start of free agency, so this forces you to make decisions 2 seasons out to try to determine how you want to set this.



--------------------------

Some possible changes we could make to try to address things:

- I can manually set all owner's spending tendencies to be exactly the same to even things out, but that will only last until an owner dies and new owner replaces them. Then things will start becoming uneven again, so not really a long term fix and something that I would not think makes sense to pursue.

- We can decrease the "average player development budget" setting which dictates what level equals average development. This would allow more teams to exceed that easier, but in my opinion also removes the strategy involved with this and makes the whole setting somewhat pointless.

- We can completely disable the player development budget setting if you all feel this additional strategy does not add much to the game or makes things too difficult.


So thoughts?

I really don't have an opinion at this point. I like it as is but I certainly see the problems that are there are very real. I've just been planning 2 years ahead in that regard.

I think I'd vote to disable.

You can only change it once per season...if you miss a sim, or forget then it has a 2 yr effect on your club.

I vote for disable too. I think it will just cause too many headaches.

If we had access to it more in the offseason, I'd say keep it. Its way too easy to miss it in the one stage we get to change it, so I vote to disable it.

I don't like the thought of this. THese extra features have not been stable thus far. I would want more patches before even considering it. It does seem that players are asking for more money lately in FA so I don't even think it would be a positive at present time.
disable