Fixing Free Agency

[TMJOHNS18]

For many of us the Offseason is one of the high-points of the CMF experience. It's an opportunity to reshape your team, pick up that big name player, or get the added depth you need. Where the Resign and Draft stages offer at least some uncertainty, the Free Agency stage offers little to none.

While EA has been changing the FA process over the past few years, I still feel there is something lacking to it. Sure, in M17 if teams offer equal contracts players may favor one over the other (prestige, location, etc.), it really doesn't have much of an impact when any team can bump their offer a few notches and have more total points than the rest.

In online CFMs this turns into a bidding war (best being when DaddyLeagues had real-time bidding), which is in a way is fine, but ultimately comes down to who updated their bid right before the commish advanced. In offline however, there is zero competition. The CPU collectively will either not bid or even bid lower than desired, allowing the USER to swoop in and grab key FAs.

What I would like to see changed for Free Agency is the addition of an 'Agent'. Basically, this would incorporate what the game should have now (proximity to home, legacy, depth position, market price, etc.) and the players would have a set contract. This contract could either be flat (where teams that favor players desires would have higher % chance of landing) or could be unique to each team (less desired teams pay more).

In addition, some of these players would NOT be available to all teams, which would in a way be the 'Agent' feature. Players that prefer to play near home, for a winning team, etc. would only be available to offer a contract by teams who meet their requirements. As weeks advance players would become available for more teams.

This is what I think could help improve Madden's Free Agency, got anything to add? Got a better idea? Tell me!

*btw, got this idea after reading Geodude's badge thread (http://www.operationsports.com/forum...dge-ideas.html). CFMs need to be more unique.

[Mattanite]

I would love to see an improvement like this to add more depth to CFM. I sort of touched on it in the badge thread with "value", some players being under or overvalued for a specific reason/badge. Building a more in depth and dynamic profile for both the team/GM and the player would be complicated but could achieve that depth.


So you might have a player who wants to stay local (Tony Romo) and only for a contender, so Teams further away will have to pay a lot more than local teams and "non-contenders" may not be approached by the player/agent. On the flip side, you might have teams rebuilding or going through a youth movement or that won't take such an injury risk player who will then avoid making Romo an offer.


This idea of a more in depth player profile needs to be added into an additional round of undrafted free agents after the draft, where GMs recruit UDFAs.