[adembroski]

In their endless pursuit of being casual-friendly, EA just screws one thing up after another.

Two big franchise additions; player tags and free agency.

I was kind of excited. Player tags are a pitch I made in '13 but it got cut for time. But here's the thing: So far as I can tell, they don't work. Well some do, but some are just text on the screen, they don't actually do anything. Look for a guy with a Day 1 starter tag starting over a higher rated guy. That's specifically what the tag is supposed to do.

Next is far more important and, imho, damn near game breaking. The newly structured contracts.

You can't actually play cap-over-cash anymore. It used to be that the more you paid up front, the more you could push salary back toward the end of the contract. That was the entire game. It's how the Rams do what they do. And it's a risk, because it doesn't free you of the bill, it comes due eventually. Now it does not. They've taken that away completely. No matter how you attempt to structure your contract, the yearly cap numbers are the same.

I thought when they said there would be "team friendly" and "player friendly" contract options, they were talking about quick ways to select reasonable offers that ranged from salary loaded to bonus loaded, but no, you can't make that choice. There is effectively no difference between the two except that bonus money is guaranteed against the cap. Well then I might as well just go all salary and minimize all bonuses. It makes no difference except now I can cut them whenever I feel like it with zero repercussion.

It is possible to make the game simpler by adding options like pre-built contracts, but what they actually did was just dumb it down to the point that salary negotiation is more or less predetermined.

Oh, and if anyone here has ever had a guy accept a team friendly contract, please tell me, because I haven't seen it once. If it only works 1 in a million times, it might as well not be there, because the risk of annoying the player and having him refuse to negotiate further isn't worth it.