[Cubit]

Here is Neolithic's 30-team control workaround for the "too many good/young free agents" bug that everyone sees in the franchise mode. He did some great work with this:

Quote: Originally Posted by Neolithic

A quick re-post for new people to the thread: 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!

There is currently no workaround that uses just 1-team control.