2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

[Heroesandvillains]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

Neo, when you have some spare time, could you post the exact steps/settings for the 30 team workaround?

That way, it could be looked over, and posted in a new thread for everyone to see/use...without having to dig through this one.

Then, if we/you find a single team workaround, we can post them side by side and let OS members pick their poison.

Good work, man.

[Neolithic]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

My 30 team workaround:

I use 30 team control (with 1 team having my profile, the others with dummy profiles with everything on auto) Your team can have it's stuff set however, you want everything on manual, go ahead, I used auto for the sims for the sake of speed. Play your season out like you would normally, if you want to inspect pending trades every day to make sure crazy things don't happen, by all means. That stuff is up to the player playing really. Budgets on or off don't seem to matter (I only did a couple years with budgets on, the only thing I saw was for whatever reason, a couple teams had 90/90 rosters as of the start of the offseason, I just went into their roster and released the lowest rated guy on the entire roster to open up a slot and make it 89/90)

Once the offseason hits I would do the following:

Handle your team however you like, tender, non-tender guys, offer arbitration, don't offer arbitration, it's your team, do what you like.

Make offers for FA's as per normal.

OPTIONAL STEP: stop the sim the day before you have to have all arbitration offers made and go through all teams and if you feel a team should offer a guy arbitration but have not, make an offer for arbitration for them. I haven't done this in my sims yet, but it's something I've considered due to people reporting arbitration offers vanishing.

Proceed as normal till Dec 2nd. On Dec 2nd go through every team, and make offers to every "contract renewable" player on a team. *** I haven't played around with offers much, I've been offering the default contract offer that shows up, I think you can change them all to lowball offers of 1yr/50k and it won't have any adverse effect. 8/10 guys don't take the default offer before Feb 28th anyways, but making all offers 1yr/50k will pretty much ensure all of them will not accept the offer by Feb 28th.*** The other thing that you can play with is having an age limit on your offers, say, anyone 30 years old and over even if they are renewable, do not offer a contract and let them fall off into FA and either rot or get signed on their own merits.

Once you have made the offers, proceed through the offseason as normal, and on Feb 28th, or 29th if it's a leap year, the CPU will renew everyone that hasn't accepted the offer you made them on or before Dec 2nd. You obviously have to manually renew the players are your team anytime after Feb 15th if you have your profile setting on manual for that stuff.

This is the basic workaround. Thus far it seems to work. Hopefully SCEA will have a patch that takes care of this soon!

[Instant C1a55ic]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

My 30 team workaround:

I use 30 team control (with 1 team having my profile, the others with dummy profiles with everything on auto) Your team can have it's stuff set however, you want everything on manual, go ahead, I used auto for the sims for the sake of speed. Play your season out like you would normally, if you want to inspect pending trades every day to make sure crazy things don't happen, by all means. That stuff is up to the player playing really. Budgets on or off don't seem to matter (I only did a couple years with budgets on, the only thing I saw was for whatever reason, a couple teams had 90/90 rosters as of the start of the offseason, I just went into their roster and released the lowest rated guy on the entire roster to open up a slot and make it 89/90)

Once the offseason hits I would do the following:

Handle your team however you like, tender, non-tender guys, offer arbitration, don't offer arbitration, it's your team, do what you like.

Make offers for FA's as per normal.

OPTIONAL STEP: stop the sim the day before you have to have all arbitration offers made and go through all teams and if you feel a team should offer a guy arbitration but have not, make an offer for arbitration for them. I haven't done this in my sims yet, but it's something I've considered due to people reporting arbitration offers vanishing.

Proceed as normal till Dec 2nd. On Dec 2nd go through every team, and make offers to every "contract renewable" player on a team. *** I haven't played around with offers much, I've been offering the default contract offer that shows up, I think you can change them all to lowball offers of 1yr/50k and it won't have any adverse effect. 8/10 guys don't take the default offer before Feb 28th anyways, but making all offers 1yr/50k will pretty much ensure all of them will not accept the offer by Feb 28th.*** The other thing that you can play with is having an age limit on your offers, say, anyone 30 years old and over even if they are renewable, do not offer a contract and let them fall off into FA and either rot or get signed on their own merits.

Once you have made the offers, proceed through the offseason as normal, and on Feb 28th, or 29th if it's a leap year, the CPU will renew everyone that hasn't accepted the offer you made them on or before Dec 2nd. You obviously have to manually renew the players are your team anytime after Feb 15th if you have your profile setting on manual for that stuff.

This is the basic workaround. Thus far it seems to work. Hopefully SCEA will have a patch that takes care of this soon!

You talking minor league or everyone? Cause we all know there are players that are good beyond 30. I couldnt justify letting go of a decent arm or bat for my team, or any cpu team just cause they are over 30.

[Heroesandvillains]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

You talking minor league or everyone? Cause we all know there are players that are good beyond 30. I couldnt justify letting go of a decent arm or bat for my team, or any cpu team just cause they are over 30.

That part was just a suggestion. You can use your best judgement there.

[Neolithic]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

yeah, it's sort of a judgement call. Tweak it as you see fit really. The main point, is to make sure teams tender offers to their younger talent with the higher potentials instead of letting them go.

[Heroesandvillains]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

My 30 team workaround:

I use 30 team control (with 1 team having my profile, the others with dummy profiles with everything on auto) Your team can have it's stuff set however, you want everything on manual, go ahead, I used auto for the sims for the sake of speed. Play your season out like you would normally, if you want to inspect pending trades every day to make sure crazy things don't happen, by all means. That stuff is up to the player playing really. Budgets on or off don't seem to matter (I only did a couple years with budgets on, the only thing I saw was for whatever reason, a couple teams had 90/90 rosters as of the start of the offseason, I just went into their roster and released the lowest rated guy on the entire roster to open up a slot and make it 89/90)

Once the offseason hits I would do the following:

Handle your team however you like, tender, non-tender guys, offer arbitration, don't offer arbitration, it's your team, do what you like.

Make offers for FA's as per normal.

OPTIONAL STEP: stop the sim the day before you have to have all arbitration offers made and go through all teams and if you feel a team should offer a guy arbitration but have not, make an offer for arbitration for them. I haven't done this in my sims yet, but it's something I've considered due to people reporting arbitration offers vanishing.

Proceed as normal till Dec 2nd. On Dec 2nd go through every team, and make offers to every "contract renewable" player on a team. *** I haven't played around with offers much, I've been offering the default contract offer that shows up, I think you can change them all to lowball offers of 1yr/50k and it won't have any adverse effect. 8/10 guys don't take the default offer before Feb 28th anyways, but making all offers 1yr/50k will pretty much ensure all of them will not accept the offer by Feb 28th.*** The other thing that you can play with is having an age limit on your offers, say, anyone 30 years old and over even if they are renewable, do not offer a contract and let them fall off into FA and either rot or get signed on their own merits.

Once you have made the offers, proceed through the offseason as normal, and on Feb 28th, or 29th if it's a leap year, the CPU will renew everyone that hasn't accepted the offer you made them on or before Dec 2nd. You obviously have to manually renew the players are your team anytime after Feb 15th if you have your profile setting on manual for that stuff.

This is the basic workaround. Thus far it seems to work. Hopefully SCEA will have a patch that takes care of this soon!

Sounds good to me.

Let's wait for all the testers to look this over, and then...if it's okay with you and the Mods, you can create a thread for this workaround.

Thank you for the post. I'm all in for this method...assuming we get a trade logic patch that resembles the single team franchise trade logic.

[maddguuns]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

I just thought of a workaround that won't do anything in the way of helping you guys test, but could be something useful for those that are trying to play now.

In the past few years' version of the game, if you offered players on your team a contract, regardless of years and money, they would automatically sign it when you advance to spring training. So the workaround for 30 team control would be to offer the low ball contracts like others have said to every player with less than 6 years service time. Then do not renew after February 15th, but rather offer a new contract the last day of February for something like 50K and for the number of years it would take until FA eligibility. For example, if I have a player with no service time, I would offer him a 6 year/50K per contract. He should sign it automatically (unless they finally fixed this glitch which is highly doubtful). That will take care of him for 6 years and should keep things fixed for quite some time.

It would be very tedious, but if done correctly, you should only have to do this once during the first off season and only have to worry about high potential draft picks after that. And those guys usually sign multi-year deals anyway right?

I tried this....it didn't work with my O's in single team control. Just did. Lost Arrieta and Tillman to the FA list because they didn't auto sign with me.

[andrewochs615]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

is there a single team work around like if you turn budgets off or do you bave to use 30 team?

[maddguuns]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

If I was forced to use a workaround, I'd rather opt for 30-team control and renew all of the players when needed. Then of course I would have to watch pending transactions closely to avoid any ridiculous trades. I don't want to have to guess and trade where a player is gonna go.

I really want 1-team control and good trade logic. But there isn't a good enough workaround.

Also, we're not totally sure that the budget has to do with teams not renewing their young players. Budget is just speculation.
I truly believe the problems lies within the CPU "not knowing" how to offer (renewable) lowball contracts to younger players (only having the choice of signing to what the player WANTS vs. releasing the player to FA).

I think what I did was kind of a bootleg cover up of the real underlying problem. However, personally, I hate 30-team control because I am in no way interested in wasting a bunch of time with the drafts. It's the God factor, i don't like it.

Single team control with appropriate logic is definitely the hope here, but when I just arbitrarily signed a bunch of dudes to low, long contracts, and it seemed to help for a few years, I figured I would investigate that a little more. I don't really like it as a work around, but if it makes how much I would need to involve myself in other's affairs, I may use it.

[Heroesandvillains]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

Hustlin...

Great!

1 team control. Attach your one and only profile to 1 team, with lineups, training...everything set to auto.

In the franchise menu screen, set all budgets to off.

Sim the season and sim all drafts. Sim the Playoffs and advance to the offseason.

For this sim, advance one day at a time until the day after the exclusive negotiations period.

On this day, offer all players that are arbitration eligible AND contract renewable a default contract...the one the CPU automatically let's you offer. Sim the remainder of the offseason.

Once you reach spring, save a screen of the FA pool. Do this until the 2014 season.

Try to save often, incase we have questions on prospects, etc. Maybe a save at the beginning of the season, the beginning of the offseason, and the end of the offseason.

Just make your offers on this one day only, and allow the CPU to do the remaining offseason offers for you.

Hopefully this makes sense.

Thanks a lot man.

FYI...every one else, I'm curious to see if the days contracts are offered are the key here. The last tester offered them on day one. I want Hustlin to offer on day 6.

Is that okay?

This is one of the more successful single team sim results, and the steps the tester used. A handful of good prospects ended up in FA...but no 'known stars' from what I saw and not too many A guys.

Hustlin, if you varied this at all, please respond and I'll edit the post.

The auto drafts and the automatic offering of contracts across the board should not be essential to this 'workaround in progress.' A lot of it was mainly to hurry the sim along.

This should be the base for any further testing...being varied where seen fit.

[Neolithic]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I just want the game to be the best it can. I've no issues with anything I've done being re-posted or what not.

My gut tells me there won't be a single team workaround. But I"m gunna see if I can find one.


My gut also says that as good of a game as MLB 11 is, and mind you I"m jaded as an OOTP player, franchise mode needs to be gutted and rewritten. I'd love to do a write up sometime on what I would want in an MLB 12 franchise mode at some point. But first, I'm going to work on single team control sims. And then finally start my franchise for me to actually play :P. I don't like how my Cubs suck something awful in most of the sims I've done so far....that's gunna change!!!

Again, hopefully SCEA comes up with something that takes care of the issues we've found, so they CAN get to work on a total rewrite of franchise mode for next year ASAP!

[tabarnes19_SDS]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

Thanks for the kind words everyone. I just want the game to be the best it can. I've no issues with anything I've done being re-posted or what not.

My gut tells me there won't be a single team workaround. But I"m gunna see if I can find one.


My gut also says that as good of a game as MLB 11 is, and mind you I"m jaded as an OOTP player, franchise mode needs to be gutted and rewritten. I'd love to do a write up sometime on what I would want in an MLB 12 franchise mode at some point. But first, I'm going to work on single team control sims. And then finally start my franchise for me to actually play :P. I don't like how my Cubs suck something awful in most of the sims I've done so far....that's gunna change!!!

Again, hopefully SCEA comes up with something that takes care of the issues we've found, so they CAN get to work on a total rewrite of franchise mode for next year ASAP!

This is where I disagree. Franchise mode may not be perfect, but it is the culmination of many years of progressively building off a foundation. If this mode is gutted and rewritten, we would be essentially at square one. There are some problems with it, but it's actually one of the deepest "playable" baseball game franchise ever built.

My grandma always said, "be careful what you wish for." A NEW franchise mode might not be any better, in all likely hood it will have more bugs. For next season I would just like to see the bugs ironed out, more stats, some TLC I guess.

[Heroesandvillains]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

Neo, since you seem awesome at this stuff...

If you feel like running a single team sim, read post #327 for Hustlin's starting point.

I have a feeling you're the guy to find the workaround, if one's possible.

This sim managed to keep 'stars' out of FA...maybe you'll discover the secret sauce to address the prospects.

But, uh...no pressure! LOL!

I'd do it, but it's clear that your knowledge on real baseball contract stuff is deeper than mine, thus giving the test the brainpower it deserves. Hustlin' too. And several others in here. I just think I'd be willing to accept some oddities that some of you other guys would dry heave over...

[Neolithic]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

hmmm, perhaps I worded that a touch strong. I say rewritten only because I don't know how they have written the franchise mode they have. If they can implement everything without it conflicting with the franchise mode they have written, all well and good. So, yeah, probably worded that a little strong I guess

[Knight165]

Re: 2013 Franchise Issue Explained (With Pics)

I think what I did was kind of a bootleg cover up of the real underlying problem. However, personally, I hate 30-team control because I am in no way interested in wasting a bunch of time with the drafts. It's the God factor, i don't like it.

Single team control with appropriate logic is definitely the hope here, but when I just arbitrarily signed a bunch of dudes to low, long contracts, and it seemed to help for a few years, I figured I would investigate that a little more. I don't really like it as a work around, but if it makes how much I would need to involve myself in other's affairs, I may use it.

Apart from the time....you can take the "God" factor out with the square button for the CPU suggestion during the amateur draft.
That's what I do rounds 1-2-3....team selection screen....square button for team suggestion....X for picking that player.

M.K.
Knight165