[MIJB#19]

Writer's rant: This fourth consecutive season of .500 ball is seriously hurting my interest to write about what could (should?) have been a powerhouse team during that tenure. Seemingly I've become one of the worst playbook makers both on offense and defense, despite that this is still the same game as the one we finally got our first and (so far?) only bowl victory in. It keeps getting tougher to think this ship can be righted, especially knowing that next season the decline of the roster strength will be unavoidable due to the snowballing of overpriced contracts.

The latter a direct result of a bug (I have no other word for this annoyingness) in the way contract renegotiations in the MP environment work differently from SP and make it a somewhat random roll of dice whether a particular player will or will not accept an offer that has much more or even much more guaranteed money that what he asked for. In SP it's cut and dry: the player will always accept the upgrade, in MP, you need to find the magic number for every single player, which is a serious pain in the you-know-where when there are only 3 stages after the random volatility rolls to offer those contracts.

I don't fancy the 'needs more testing in SP' approach, yet - much to my chagrin - I have spent plenty of time redoing the playbook (in that one stage per season when it's technically possible to change it) and analyzing what plays do and do not work on both offense and defense. But when that quite simply feels like it's been a waste of time, it's making playing this game more frustrating than it had already began when this became a necessity to remain competitive with teams with inferior rosters that did figure out the magic numbers that somehow work.

It's becoming a vicious circling catch-22, it dwindles down my interest to initiate trades, prepare for the draft, hence aggravating my roster building skills and as a result take away the little advantages I somehow seemed to have over teams yo-yoing from 9-7 to 5-11, rinse repeat.

A design change and a bug fix don't appear to be on the horizon, so it becomes a question whether I'm willing to throw nearly 16 years of playing this game away. Well, most certainly I am not! The white flag will not be raised, especially not thrown into the ring like a towel either.

[end rant]

2086 isn't entirely lost, we're going into week 17 (tomorrow) with the season still salvageable. So more on that later...