Good point bruceleefan and bripat42. As my old mentor used to say, the basis of this game (and really all of WiS) is money management. We dislike gutting a roster and tanking so an owner can spend 40+mil on IFA. We (some) discourage veteran owners trading overpaid veterans to new owners for cost controlled prospects. We have in-game limits which govern the use of the 25 and 40 man rosters, and budget manipulation. These are all about preserving the significance of 185 mil.

Posted by bripat42 on 5/12/2021 11:01:00 AM (view original):

Posted by damag on 5/12/2021 8:04:00 AM (view original):
Good point bruceleefan and bripat42. As my old mentor used to say, the basis of this game (and really all of WiS) is money management. We dislike gutting a roster and tanking so an owner can spend 40+mil on IFA. We (some) discourage veteran owners trading overpaid veterans to new owners for cost controlled prospects. We have in-game limits which govern the use of the 25 and 40 man rosters, and budget manipulation. These are all about preserving the significance of 185 mil.

I think I probably disagree with you about the need for "preserving the significance of 185 mil." That number is only significant because it's what you get when you divide $5.92 billion by 32 -- and $5.92 billion is the only hard cap in this game, and that's what needs to be preserved.

Took me a second, but I get you.

There is no salary cap in the mlb, but we have a salary cap in HBD so the comparison to the NHL or NFL makes sense. If we're going to go that route though, be careful because the NFL does allow cap carryover. Now the main reason that they allow cap rollover is to protect player salaries from frugal owners.

I still give a +1 to the idea, even if the players we play with in HBD don't have feelings or a collective bargaining agreement, it would be a nice added feature for us owners. Even if we have to lose half of it due to prospect to player payroll conversion, it makes use of late season cash.

It doesn't seem like it rewards good planning, I get that it sucks to have extra unused money, but this is a game about leveraging your advantages of we start making it easier to succeed without planning then I think it is ultimately a disservice.

I could probably be on board with extra cash carry over but the tax (penalty) should be higher than just the standard 50% more like 75%. The point should be to discourage it as a strategy while providing something to do with that cash.

I would even be on board with 75 percent penalty. It's not just just IFA though. Sure, sometimes the IFA class is garbage and you get stuck with a bag, but what about when you budget as if you'll lose all arbitration hearings and you end up winning the majority of them and have a bunch of cash, but your 25 man mlb roster is already accounted for. That $ goes down the drain too so I don't buy the money management argument all that well. Sometimes you manage the money fine and you end up paying the price because you win arbitration hearings or the IFA class is terrible.

Posted by bripat42 on 5/13/2021 8:53:00 PM (view original):

Posted by tlowster on 5/13/2021 6:02:00 PM (view original):
There is no salary cap in the mlb, but we have a salary cap in HBD so the comparison to the NHL or NFL makes sense. If we're going to go that route though, be careful because the NFL does allow cap carryover. Now the main reason that they allow cap rollover is to protect player salaries from frugal owners.

I still give a +1 to the idea, even if the players we play with in HBD don't have feelings or a collective bargaining agreement, it would be a nice added feature for us owners. Even if we have to lose half of it due to prospect to player payroll conversion, it makes use of late season cash.

I think you're being too literal with my reference to the NHL/NFL. My point isn't to draw a 1-to-1 comparison or suggest there should be a 1-to-1 comparison. My point is that prepaying bonus money is not allowed in real life in any league that I know of with a salary cap. Part of why I dismissed the NFL as "a bit more complex" is because I really didn't want to go down this rabbit hole of some kind of "yeah, but ..." 1-to-1 comparison. But, since we're already down here -- no matter how much cap carryover there is in the NFL, signing bonuses, regardless of how the contract is structured, cannot be applied to seasons that predate the term of the contract.

Regardless of all of that, such a rules change in HBD would not be be used by owners to find a home for inadvertently unspent money. It simply would be a tool for tankers to intentionally push money forward so they can spend less during their tanking seasons and more when they finally dip a toe into free agency or have young players with contracts they want to extend. I don't believe advocating for that makes this a better game.

Now that is a fair point. New rule = new way to manipulate. You convinced me. I'm off the band wagon.

One thing that I find super annoying managing my minors - when a player goes to the DL, all of his player settings are reset (rest/def rep/PH). This can be very annoying especially for player rest where I allow bench players to rest every position. It would be nice to be able to return these settings to what you had pre DL

Posted by tlowster on 5/13/2021 7:32:00 PM (view original):
I would even be on board with 75 percent penalty. It's not just just IFA though. Sure, sometimes the IFA class is garbage and you get stuck with a bag, but what about when you budget as if you'll lose all arbitration hearings and you end up winning the majority of them and have a bunch of cash, but your 25 man mlb roster is already accounted for. That $ goes down the drain too so I don't buy the money management argument all that well. Sometimes you manage the money fine and you end up paying the price because you win arbitration hearings or the IFA class is terrible.

That is the point of the game though. Although a lot of the game is strategy and using your cash wisely there is an aspect of luck to it as well. I feel like 95% of owners put their chips (money) on either IFA, HS or College, if some are rebuilding I've seen them put into 2...... I don't think 3 is possible. (The other 5% buy as many guys as they can in FA and don't even look at prospects. Every day more and more of me thinks they might be the smart ones). People get up in arms if they put 20 million into college and then the first 5 studs in the draft are HS and vice versa. If you put 20 million into IFA you run the risk that there might only be 1 or 2 or potentially 0 stud IFA players but that is part of the game. When you put your money into prospects, that is the chance you take, regardless of the route you decide to go.

No idea if this has been mentioned but my #1 quality of life addition would be:

The ability to search for players based on current and potential ratings regardless of level or contract status.

Currently we have a player search which is based only on last name or the trade search, both of which do not provide anything of value.

Posted by hockey1984 on 5/19/2021 10:31:00 AM (view original):

Posted by tlowster on 5/13/2021 7:32:00 PM (view original):
I would even be on board with 75 percent penalty. It's not just just IFA though. Sure, sometimes the IFA class is garbage and you get stuck with a bag, but what about when you budget as if you'll lose all arbitration hearings and you end up winning the majority of them and have a bunch of cash, but your 25 man mlb roster is already accounted for. That $ goes down the drain too so I don't buy the money management argument all that well. Sometimes you manage the money fine and you end up paying the price because you win arbitration hearings or the IFA class is terrible.

That is the point of the game though. Although a lot of the game is strategy and using your cash wisely there is an aspect of luck to it as well. I feel like 95% of owners put their chips (money) on either IFA, HS or College, if some are rebuilding I've seen them put into 2...... I don't think 3 is possible. (The other 5% buy as many guys as they can in FA and don't even look at prospects. Every day more and more of me thinks they might be the smart ones). People get up in arms if they put 20 million into college and then the first 5 studs in the draft are HS and vice versa. If you put 20 million into IFA you run the risk that there might only be 1 or 2 or potentially 0 stud IFA players but that is part of the game. When you put your money into prospects, that is the chance you take, regardless of the route you decide to go.

Definitely agree -- lots of luck and/or timing involved. That is why I would prefer to never be one of those teams that decides to hang back and be less competitive for a handful of seasons (i.e. rebuild). Sometimes when you decide to do that, you end up still getting guys that are just above average. In order to get the big time prospects, you either need to be really bad for consecutive seasons, have a super low player salary (i.e. less than 30mm) or you need to get really lucky with the timing.

Fix it so that guys that are out of options, on the 40 man, have to clear waivers every year if you want to send them down. MLB does this. Otherwise, you have guys holding ML players at AAA until they can use them.

This is probably a bigger suggested code change but I didn't know where to put it. Instead of a single blanket International Scouting budget, which is a black box and a bit of a crapshoot, give an option at budgeting to say "yes" or "no" to scouting each of the countries where IFA's come from. Associate a price with each country that depends on how often players come out of there (i.e., $3M to scout Dominican Republic, $100K to scout the UK, something like that). The Int'l Scouting budget for each team would be the sum of the prices of all the countries they choose to scout. And then each team sees EVERY IFA from their scouted countries, and none from the countries they haven't scouted. More realistic, a lot less luck of the draw where you spend a lot on Int'l Scouting and see a million prospects but miss the couple of best ones.

I would love to be able to see past my Top 500 on my draft rankings. In a perfect world I would rank my players like this:
1. Major Leaguers
2. DITR candidates
3. ???/unscouted fliers

But I usually run high enough scouting to where I don't end up seeing any unscouted players. I've tried workarounds with the draft settings, however I usually can only grab 1 or 2. I would rather draft those unscouted players instead of some random 48 overall player because I've seen unscouted guys turn into big leaguers. But I can't manually move them forward because I don't see past my top 500.

In a dream world, I would love to be able to just export/import my draft board via a .csv or whatever, but I imagine that's a bigger task.

Not really game related, but i'd love to see World Chat get an overhaul. Can get tricky keeping up with posts the way its currently layed out.

I had another thought. It'd be interesting to and an umpire to the game. They did something like this in the hockey version of OOTP where the refs have different penalty calling preferences. Here is my fleshed out thought on this:

You would know who the ump is before the season series and the ump would stay the same for all of the games. Playoffs all umps would be 'neutral' not effecting the game at all (more on that later).

Umps would have 2 different ratings categories. Argumentative and strike zone. Argumentative would be either less likely, neutral or more likely. The more likely the Ump is to argue, the more likely players with a high temper or argumentative managers are to get tossed from a game. Strike zone would be more balls, neutral, more strikes. and its exactly how it sounds. I'm guessing the Ump would have an effect either or batter eye or pitcher control to have this cause an effect.

Anyways, might be a little way to add a bit of a change to the game. Also if you have a pool of umps for your league you could learn to love and hate certain ones because they seem to keep screwing over your team or making calls against you.