Just sharing some experiences from free agency and checking to see if others employ this strategy.. We all participate in bidding wars on occasion. And when in a bidding war, sometimes the price gets too high. I'm not talkin the max contracts, I'm talking about the players that you find value in for maybe 6 or 7 mil. Maybe your leading the bidding early and you feel confident you're about to land your guy and just before this happens suddenly there's another person chasing the same player. The bidding goes back and forth and before you know it the prices up around 8 mil. This is where I switch gears. Or I at least I have in the past depending on the situation of course. So I have driven the price into the 10 or 11 Mill in dollar range with no intention of signing the guy just simply driving the price up so whoever it is that's after him has to pay much more than I was willing to. This strategy serves two purposes. Number one, it's satisfying to see someone over pay for a player. Number two and most importantly if other owners are overpaying then they're locking up their finances for future seasons and I am effectively creating an advantage for myself. now this isn't the case every time because the value of player is in the eye of the beholder of course so if someone's worth 7 million to me he very well could be 12 million to somebody else. But in my experience I've seen some of these franchises that have gone too far and signing players they've suffered the consequence in later years and I've even seen owners leave a world because they have bad contracts and no financial room for future strategies. Does anyone else do this? It's not something that can be done every year simply because I may not have the budget to drive a price higher if I don't have the freedome of budget. Anyway.. just my two cents on FA Tom Foolery.

I think we've all done something like that. IMO the thing you always have to decide for yourself is what a player is worth to you. If you see someone going over it, god bless 'em.

The problem I always have with this is there are 31 other teams in the league. And I can bet the other 11 that I’m competing with in the playoffs are not one of the ones that overpaid for said player.

I do this with IFA's.

Posted by strikeout26 on 11/16/2019 6:34:00 PM (view original):
I do this with IFA's.

+1

In both cases, how do you avoid not getting stuck with the player? If the other guy drops out that cycle, isn't that a risk?

Posted by opie100 on 11/18/2019 4:21:00 PM (view original):
In both cases, how do you avoid not getting stuck with the player? If the other guy drops out that cycle, isn't that a risk?

That's the trick to playing chicken ... knowing when to flinch

Posted by opie100 on 11/18/2019 4:21:00 PM (view original):
In both cases, how do you avoid not getting stuck with the player? If the other guy drops out that cycle, isn't that a risk?

If my Max was 8 mil and I managed to drive bidding to 11 or 12, that's good enough for me. I might even drop back down to 9 or 10 after driving it to 12 if I lead for consecutive cycles. Checking to see if the other guy bailed out.. in which case I will go even lower on the next cycle. If it's been a back and forth war, the system doesn't usuAlly award the player unless someone hold the lead for multiple fyvles

Posted by XxX44XxX on 11/19/2019 4:18:00 AM (view original):

Posted by opie100 on 11/18/2019 4:21:00 PM (view original):
In both cases, how do you avoid not getting stuck with the player? If the other guy drops out that cycle, isn't that a risk?

If my Max was 8 mil and I managed to drive bidding to 11 or 12, that's good enough for me. I might even drop back down to 9 or 10 after driving it to 12 if I lead for consecutive cycles. Checking to see if the other guy bailed out.. in which case I will go even lower on the next cycle. If it's been a back and forth war, the system doesn't usuAlly award the player unless someone hold the lead for multiple fyvles

Pretty much this, but I don't think "the system awards the player" for any reason. I 99% believe the signing time and date of players/coaches is predetermined, and any narrative we apply to the process afterward is just gaps we're left to fill in.

If I'm right and that's the case, then all of it is really nothing but a game of chicken.

Have you ever raised it to 12 and then got the player?

I use the New* value from the trade screen to eliminate teams who can't "afford"said player to focus the money if i want said player or help drive the price. caveat is i have to have the time to put in the work in, so not every season /every player. I also use this to help with who has what money left to transfer and who has spent what in the international players game. (int signings page & franchise profile page) you can gain valuable insights into who has money to spend and who you are potentially bidding against

Opie, I would never do this with a player I absolutely did not want. I only do it with players I think could be a ML player. For the marginal ones, I might bid it up a bit just to get others to spend more money. And I look at the budget page to see who has money to spend. If I get burned in the end and spend more on a player than I wanted to, so be it. It's just a game.

Posted by damag on 11/19/2019 6:56:00 AM (view original):

Posted by XxX44XxX on 11/19/2019 4:18:00 AM (view original):

Posted by opie100 on 11/18/2019 4:21:00 PM (view original):
In both cases, how do you avoid not getting stuck with the player? If the other guy drops out that cycle, isn't that a risk?

If my Max was 8 mil and I managed to drive bidding to 11 or 12, that's good enough for me. I might even drop back down to 9 or 10 after driving it to 12 if I lead for consecutive cycles. Checking to see if the other guy bailed out.. in which case I will go even lower on the next cycle. If it's been a back and forth war, the system doesn't usuAlly award the player unless someone hold the lead for multiple fyvles

Pretty much this, but I don't think "the system awards the player" for any reason. I 99% believe the signing time and date of players/coaches is predetermined, and any narrative we apply to the process afterward is just gaps we're left to fill in.

If I'm right and that's the case, then all of it is really nothing but a game of chicken.

See, I disagree with this. But I could also be way off. This FA period that we just had in Riley told me a lot.

Didi Rivera was a guy I expected to be bidding on the entire time so I jumped the bid high off the bat. No one else bid on him so he signed right away (after about 6 or so cycles) I know with type A players in the past they have gone right to the end of FA because there has been a bidding war.

so maybe there is an algorithm? If a guy gets bid on by multiple teams or the first bid is beat then wait X days to sign, else wait Y days to sign.

the other thing I found interesting too was I signed Louis Gallo which was my former guy who was a Type A pick player. Despite waiting for him to lower his price with no one bidding on him he still waited 2-3 cycles to sign. Where as guys with no comp picks in my experience will sign the very next cycle If they drop their bid.

I've gotten sniped before without the chance to counter (irritating), so I'm always curious how that works, and how that factors into raising bids. Sometimes raising a bid scares the competition into moving on to another player, and like Hockey says, you might get them right then. But I suppose that requires at least a cycle for them to see that they've fallen behind.

Since I'm just blabbing here, two things:

1/ Long time ago, it wasn't HBD but one of the other dynasty games, I ran into the ever popular problem of "I was leading the whole time, then the very next cycle the %^$^* player signs with the other guy!!!" Outrage. So I started thinking what kind of coding would do that. THEN I started thinking, what would be the SIMPLEST thing to code? The obvious answer, predetermine all the time frames. If you predetermine everything, then whatever narrative the bidders come up with ("boy I had a savage bidding war going against the Dustbusters that one time") is 100% hindsight, imagination, blarney.

2/ Flash forward, remember that time some dude figured out that there was an IFA glitch; that by messing around with the player code in the IFA prospects' player cards, he could see EVERY IFA for that season, the entire SEQUENCE they'd appear to the scouting pool, including FUTURE ones? NEVER while I have been here with WiS have I seen the developers scramble so fast to patch something.
What it proved was a peek behind the curtain, that the entire IFA class is generated and predetermined at the start of the season.
If the sequence is predetermined, why not the dates/time frames?

YES. There could be modfifying algorithms. There could be something for example that says if a Type A player gets multiple max bids he holds out till the end. But I've also seen max level players sign at the first cycle.

IF you wrote up a "bidding war" algorithm, or if you simply said "Player X will sign whatever best contract is in front of him at or anytime after Cycle 39", what practical and observable difference would it make?