Will there ever be more flexibility in the trade screen?

[beatle]

Will there ever be more flexibility in the trade screen? I was hoping that there will be more options in the trade HQ. For example, if one is looking for draft choices rather than players there is no way to actualize that. You just might get players back. I liked the trade screen in the old versions of FOF. It may have taken longer to get what you wanted via negotiations, but it worked. This version you are locked into what the AI is giving you one time and that's it. I had one team say they are interested in a player but could not offer enough. Well, I would have taken some draft choices, and the deal would have been done.

Hopefully, in future updates the trade screen will be updated in the future for more flexibility. Just a recommendation.

[NawlinsFan]

Wouldn't it hold true though that the AI is offering what they value your player at? You note you would take additional trade picks to seal the deal but maybe the AI is working well in that it realizes that your player, although they are interested, is not worth more then what they are offering or can afford in picks or players. Personally, IMO, I like that at times it is difficult and the AI doesn't just give away the kitchen sink for a player.

[sachmo71]

speaking of trades, has anyone ever had the AI offer them a trade? if so, where does it show up?

[james17]

Yeah, this is one area of the game I'd like to see revert to the FOF8 model. I mean, I would at least like it to be more interactive. Right now, it's a one shot deal with a pre-ordained outcome.

[beatle]

Well, I noticed that for highly rated players it is very difficult to trade those players to teams that are not very good. All I am saying is that I agree with James17 that FOF8 model was better regarding the trading model. Some flexibility would be better to make the game more interesting in the trading of draft choices that you want not what the AI dictates, especially what years those draft picks are in as well. That reflects real NFL negotiations. A more balanced approached.

[NawlinsFan]

Originally Posted by sachmo71

speaking of trades, has anyone ever had the AI offer them a trade? if so, where does it show up?

I have. It showed on the "manage" screen as an icon on the right side of the page about a third of the way down. I didn't know what it was and clicked on it revealing someone had made me an offer. If I hadn't clicked on it I wouldn't have had a clue.

[Colly]

I'm enjoying the game and like the way I can shop players for trades.

However, I can't for the life of me figure out how to try and trade for a specific player. or renegotiate what the AI has offered me for my player. Is this possible?

I see in the thread that the AI may offer a trade, but I've never had that happen, or at least not that I've noticed. At least reading this thread I think I now know where to look for that.

Maybe an email notification that lets the player read emails and news and choose when to delete those items might be more useful than a news list that clears automatically would be better.

[bblom23]

I actually don't mind the way the trades are at all. Seems right to the point - What are you willing to pay for this player/pick?

[Marmel]

The only thing I don't like about the trade screen is when a team is interested in my player at a99 level, has plenty of cap room but then tells me they don't have enough to offer me.

How do they know? I would have taken a 7th rounder for this player, at least make me some kind of offer!

I agree a little wiggle room for negotiation would be nice, but I do kind of like the way it works now. Saves me a ton of time and if you think about it, but not too hard, negotiation room is really just window dressing. You don't actually negotiate with the AI, it is just programmed to ask for x and settle for y (I would guess, unless Jim developed some serious AI!). The current method is probably my offer is z where x>z>y or something close to that?

[cupofjoe]

I'm very split on the trade mechanism in this version. I don't like that there isn't flexibility with trading. At the same time, I can't "game" the system like I did before. It definitely makes it harder, which I appreciate. I don't know what a midle ground could be

[Kcarr716]

I would love to see a trade mechanic similar to nfl head coach 09 implemented. Something where you offer a trade for sale and interested teams offer a list of packages from least to most preferable and you negotiate back and forth as to where on that scale you land. It limits you to only trading with teams interested in your pick and only for packages they would give but gives some flexibility in terms of choosing which package you want and different situations depending on how wanted or unwanted your piece is. Also, it feels in general the compensation in draft pick trades is significantly lower than real life

[Colly]

Now having had a few hundred hours in the game I must say I'm quite disappointed overall in the trade mechanics.

I like the fact I can ask a team what they want for my player or what they'll give me for a certain pick and vice versa from one of their players or picks and what they'd take from me.

However, it's all a bit shallow and one-sided.

Shallow in the sense you can't mix and match players/picks or negotiate from an initial offer.

One-sided in the sense (unless I've missed it somehow) that the AI never initiates a trade. Also, when I review league transactions history for the season I'm the only one making trades. I've never (in more than five years of league history) seen any AI team trade. Maybe it's just an RNG peculiarity I don't know.

[Haiku]

Originally Posted by Colly

I've never (in more than five years of league history) seen any AI team trade. Maybe it's just an RNG peculiarity I don't know.

AI makes player trades, but too few.



Also heavily makes trades on picks during the draft.

[cupofjoe]

Although I do appreciate that it's harder to take advantage of the AI, it would be great if it can be tweaked somehow that adds slightly more flexibility.



Granted, there's a reason why nobody is happy with any trade system of any sports game (slight exaggeration)...especially football. I don't see a way to make the majority of people happy with whatever trade system that comes up. I've never designed games before and I can't imagine the difficulty of trying to program a relatively realistic trade system.

[Solecismic]

In general, I like the idea of weighing in on topics like this because it's great to share contemplations with people who understand this type of game and are into the same idea of what a game can be as I am.

I don't post a lot because I don't want to get into arguments about the direction of features or the game itself. People get frustrated when they feel very strongly about something and the person who has to make that decision feels differently. I also have dozens of emails with feature requests (some I like, some I would be less enthusiastic about) that could keep me busy for the next year if I went ahead and did them all.

The last time I posted, support received several emails worried that I was "despondent" about the game.

I'm not. The Steam review algorithm frustrates me because negative reviews control where your game is found when people search for games. They have an outsized individual weight for games that aren't selling in the tens of thousands. This is mostly a criticism of Steam, which has to focus on the 5A titles for its own livelihood.

So if a former customer throws out the thumbs down after 15-20 minutes with the game without even reading the guide to the interface or taking the trouble to see how things are organized - naturally, I wish they'd never been here in the first place. Which bothers me because they are among the minority of gamers who, again, understand this type of game and are into the same idea of what a game can be. I'm not despondent by any means, but I feel increasingly anachronistic.

I'm also mostly thinking that I went to the proverbial well once too often - something I've often worried about in the last few years. That FOF8 was the finished product and reinventing it to introduce a new direction was a bad idea because I am a solo developer and my efforts to expand didn't result in expansion. I've been trying to do that for more than ten years now, but it's difficult when you have something this large, but so specific. When I refer to my failures, it's in failing to grow into something larger, like OOTP. I have hopes that FOF9 can be the base of a new company - when I rewrote the game, I did so with that in mind - more readable code, data structures that can be more easily revised. I do not think I will ever write an FOF10 on my own, but who knows?

So take what I say here less seriously. One advantage I have is that I can turn on a dime. If I think something's a good idea, I can do it. On the other side of that equation is that FOF9 is in a more competitive world, where there are very few solo developers remaining. Gamers (particularly younger gamers) want a very different introduction to a game - I'm inevitably (as I quickly approach 60) out of touch and there are far more games out there, far more teams than solo efforts. Right now, I'm investigating a new project that I think better suits my strengths. We'll see. I don't talk specifics about the future because I can always change my mind.

Back to trading...

One challenge people seemed to enjoy with FOF7/8 was "trading for the entire first round." There was kind of a love/hate relationship with that concept. Hate that it was possible, but love also because it was a way to "negotiate" for something that offered a form of beating the game itself.

I think it's still possible in FOF9 - there is no AI that looks at your team's supply of draft picks and says "no team will give you more". But teams are firmer about not taking on contracts they don't want. They are also firmer that any trade must both A) improve their team and B) the trade itself must have a perceived positive value. FOF7/8 had wiggle room there, plus some room for "negotiation" which became, in itself, a mandatory part of the game for those who want to build through trading.

Trading between AI teams is difficult. There's a lot of trying - if you go into debug mode (of course you can't - only I can run the source code in a debugger) and add tracing lines for when pieces of the AI begin and end - you'd notice that the AI trying to trade takes up a disproportionate amount of the AI. At times, I've spent days working on optimizing that extensive trading code so that teams can try even harder. The result is some fancy temporary structures and more actual trading there than in the past.

There isn't that much trading in the NFL outside of the draft itself. Then it's like "holy heck, what's going on there?" Because during the draft, A) becomes much easier to satisfy once a particular player is available for drafting. So one change I made was to increase in-draft trading between teams - you'll notice that the in-draft AI is the slowest AI in the game - it's doing a lot there, and what it's doing has been endlessly optimized.

The third category of NFL trading peaks during training camp and is almost always in the form of low-round-pick for player who is about to be released. That's really kind of uninteresting in a game world where players can't be endlessly evaluated as they are during training camps. I've thought a lot about practice squads or increasing the roster size to 60 or 70. But it doesn't seem like fun to me. The value would 100% be in dealing with in-season injuries. But it would also add to the frustration for gamers who don't want to spend half their time managing players who will hardly ever see the field. That pain is for real-life NFL GMs.

The AI isn't much interested in that kind of trade, because when they want to release players, everyone else wants to release players. Finding a fit there... you're fitting players who don't add to the team unless something happens - a level of AI that would multiply the amount of time needed to evaluate those decisions. I could take the time to add that to the algorithm, but it would be significant and falls into that category of "nice, but no".

Player-for-player trades are rare in the NFL because dead money associated with contracts accelerates when players are traded. The salary cap makes player-for-player trading very difficult. You both lose a player and you lose cap room for next year. If you trade for a player in the last year of his contract, you're often trading for the right to renegotiate - there's a level of negotiation built into the process of trading that no AI could handle properly.

NFL trades are almost exclusively in the form of one player for one or two picks. Over the last two full NFL years there only have been 11 trades involving more than one player. Only 14 of the 32 teams have even been involved in those trades. It has been almost two years since a single trade has been made involving more than two players (Russell Wilson for three players with far less value and a package of picks).

Of the other ten trades, three were training-camp-both-are-getting-released-anyway trades, two were similar but at the immediate beginning of the new year, one also at that time, but involving a throw-in where the primary value was a third-rounder. The other four trades were right at the trading deadline.

So that's the significant piece that isn't in FOF9 - there's no right-at-the-trading deadline AI where A) can be met simply because one team is uninterested in the pain of becoming less competitive.

Last year, there was one such trade (Terrell Edmunds and two low picks for Kevin Byard). The season before, Chicago paid a lot to add Roquan Smith and threw in someone they'd release anyway and Miami went all-in to get Bradley Chubb (and signed him to a nine-figure extension two days later).

It could be worth the time to add such an AI, even within the scope of just trading picks for a player, but could it be abused? There would have to be an anti-tanking AI as well.

In the end, I think the trading in FOF9 is fairly realistic given the lack of practice squads and extended rosters, but the player-for-player restriction, something that the NFL doesn't prohibit, obviously makes it look less realistic. I think that would add almost zero value for what it would take to implement.

[garion333]

The new trade function is one of the things I prefer in FOF9, even if I understand the complaints against it. I'm almost always interested in gaining more picks, generally for vets who I don't think are worth re-signing to that second contract. Trade to the AI, get a couple picks and let the AI deal with their demands? Priceless.

Problem for me is i end up with 12 picks a draft. I loved having that many picks in prior versions. In this version where the popups obscure information and there's a lack of draft player cards? I will actually let the AI handle the end rounds just to get the draft over with!

[Haiku]

Originally Posted by garion333

Problem for me is i end up with 12 picks a draft.

I agree that the current system can be easily abused for acquiring more picks. I managed to offload some players and got 5 picks for them, which I then traded for 13 new picks in later years. In 2025 I had 16 picks. I think I'm no longer going to trade picks for picks.

[garion333]

Originally Posted by Solecismic

The last time I posted, support received several emails worried that I was "despondent" about the game.

I'm not. The Steam review algorithm frustrates me because negative reviews control where your game is found when people search for games. They have an outsized individual weight for games that aren't selling in the tens of thousands. This is mostly a criticism of Steam, which has to focus on the 5A titles for its own livelihood.

So if a former customer throws out the thumbs down after 15-20 minutes with the game without even reading the guide to the interface or taking the trouble to see how things are organized - naturally, I wish they'd never been here in the first place. Which bothers me because they are among the minority of gamers who, again, understand this type of game and are into the same idea of what a game can be. I'm not despondent by any means, but I feel increasingly anachronistic.

I agree about the drive by negative reviews, in, general, but there's only three of those types for FOF9. I think they hurt the score significantly more in the first week or so when there was only a few reviews, but they're fairly well balanced out now.

My point is that most negative reviews have significant playing time associated with them, but I feel somewhat like they're being somewhat dismissed because of the three dipshits who gave up after a half hour of confusion.

Anachronistic? Absolutely! Happens to us all, right? That said, as has been suggested by some (myself included), it does seem like releasing FOF9 as an Early Access title initially would've helped with the bugs discussion. But you're old school, what's a few bugs between friends that get fixed? Yeah, nowadays they're majorly frowned on and can dominate a game's discussion.

Live and learn, I guess... I know, we aren't devs, so what we ask/suggest/think is easy may not be.

[canuxrok]

Thanks for the explanation and window into your world. Really interesting to hear how the thought process goes.

[james17]

Yes, Jim, thanks much for the explanation and taking the time to do it. Ironically, the more that I play, the more I love the game and now appreciate the trading process.



Really, the only thing I'd like to see added is a sortable print roster function, so I could keep track of contracts and the ratings of players off-line. But I understand the complexities of adding this. So, maybe in FOF10?