I have come back to play What If after more than a decade hiatus. I been playing open leagues and have been enjoying rediscovering the game.

One obvious issue with the game is that as salaries have not changed in a very very long time the obvious under priced players seem to be well understood and are constantly used which can be boring for the player base and lead to frustration for new players.

From what I understand it seems that resources dedicated to updating the site are severely limited which may make a full scale salary review unrealistic. A simple solution for a refresh would be a random adjustment to all salaries of +-15% (got to be enough to be meaningful but not enough to ruin the structure). As deadball pitching and perhaps switch hitting appear structurally miss priced I would suggest adding a constraint that these types of players are unable to have salaries reduced. The salary floor would also remain in place.

I would be interested in others thoughts of this idea? Would such a change even be possible from an admin perspective?

Salaries changed a ton in 2015-17 when the site made its ill-conceived foray into dynamic pricing.

I'm not at all convinced that there is a real problem right now with the salaries. There are a ton of different ways to put together a competitive team in an open league. just4me's recent posts have shown this. I have several different OL teams going right now, all very different in roster composition, all doing well.

Random salary adjustments would seem to serve very little purpose to me. I guess I am not completely opposed to it, but I don't think that's the problem with SLB really. Until they decide to really re-build the algorithm, everything else is just tinkering around the margins.

I wonder if just rolling back all the dynamic pricing changes would be beneficial?
Seems like all it did was make some of the best and most interesting players essentially unusable except in no cap leagues.

I don't know why they counted usages for non-Open Leagues. I think if it weren't for that, dynamic pricing could have worked fine.

Posted by TulsaG on 9/18/2020 1:38:00 PM (view original):
I wonder if just rolling back all the dynamic pricing changes would be beneficial?
Seems like all it did was make some of the best and most interesting players essentially unusable except in no cap leagues.

Or at the least a roll back with a caveat of if players increased over a certain % then only get rolled back a certain %. Ballpark #s off top of head (60% and 30%). Example, if a player went from $8m to $13m (62.5%) they’d get rolled back to $9.5m (70% of the $5m increase removed). This should at least mitigate a little the Addie Joss effect of having him become and instant cookie again on a rollback.

Posted by crazystengel on 9/18/2020 1:43:00 PM (view original):
I don't know why they counted usages for non-Open Leagues. I think if it weren't for that, dynamic pricing could have worked fine.

100%

Posted by just4me on 9/18/2020 1:43:00 PM (view original):

Posted by TulsaG on 9/18/2020 1:38:00 PM (view original):
I wonder if just rolling back all the dynamic pricing changes would be beneficial?
Seems like all it did was make some of the best and most interesting players essentially unusable except in no cap leagues.

Or at the least a roll back with a caveat of if players increased over a certain % then only get rolled back a certain %. Ballpark #s off top of head (60% and 30%). Example, if a player went from $8m to $13m (62.5%) they’d get rolled back to $9.5m (70% of the $5m increase removed). This should at least mitigate a little the Addie Joss effect of having him become and instant cookie again on a rollback.

Yeah I like this idea.
I have no issues with a $4M player that consistently does well becoming a $5M player, or $10M going to $12M. It's when $4M becomes $7M and $10M becomes $16M where it gets pretty silly and not really productive to the game.
The idea should have been to mitigate players that were undervalued by raising them slightly, not jack them up so high they were essentially taken out of the game.

I also had this kind of funny exchange with my dad last week. We share the account and both started playing again earlier this year after many years off. After a couple open leagues he wanted to play a Theme League that was more modern players, so I found him a $140 open style league 1969-2019 players only. He was quite excited by this, getting to use his favorite players from the last few decades, while trying to build a winning team.
Me: So with $140M you can get more or less what you want within reason
Dad: Oh good! I can use 2000 Pedro!
Me: No you can't
Dad: Why not
Me: *explains dynamic pricing*
Dad: Oh that sucks.
Me: You can use 99 Pedro though, I could argue he's just as good, but like $8M less.
Dad: That doesn't make any sense
Me: I know, but that's what they did.

Next I got to explain why he really can't use 95 Maddux either
Followed by why 2018 pitchers are a great bargain

The fact this conversation even happened suggests there is a flaw in the system LOL

There were at least 5 problems with the dynamic pricing - caveat that most of this happened while was on hiatus from WIS and I may have the details not quite right:
1.) As mentioned above, lumping all leagues in together rather than just considering OLs. 1920-21 Ruth did not need a price increase.
2.) Not re-setting the counter after each increase. I think this was the big flaw. Once Joss was adjusted the first time, they should have reset his counter of "number of times used" to 0. They didn't, so he and others (89 HoJo...) got the max increase like every time.
3.) They didn't appropriately balance the increases with the decreases. Their method required the total salary in the database be equal. A relatively small number of players got big increases...a huge number of players got negligibly small decreases. So while a bunch of players immediately became unusable in OLs, there was no counterbalancing influx of players who were now better values.
4.) There was no need to increase the salaries of 200K players. Who cares if 200K Hughie Jennings was on a lot of teams because he provided a lot of PA. He sucked, and there was no need to raise his salary. Basically there are no 200K players from pre-2016 in the database anymore.
5.) They allowed salaries to differ for the same player. Like 1902 Bernhard, who now has different salaries for his CLE combined and his PHA combined versions, which makes no sense.

Basically they took a decent idea and botched it thoroughly.

It frustrates me because I had lunch with Tom Z in October 2015 just prior to this being announced, and I shared some concerns with Tom (specifically #1 and #5 above)...I didn't think about #3 or #4 and never would have imagined they would have screwed up #2.

Wow, didn't even realize #2 happened. That's probably a bigger screw up than #1.

I wonder some of us came up with a good solution, such as just4me's upthread, and it got enough backing if they'd considering doing it?

With whatifsports site layout/design/look/format as well as the rest of the world, i think it would be best to wake up tomorrow and it would be 2002 again. i think that would be best for everyone.

I agree that a partial rollback and/or a better implementation of dynamic pricing would be a better solution than a random adjustment (although I have no idea the time required/feasibility to implement this).

The fact the best and most iconic seasons in MLB history are largely unviable is a pretty big issue.

Personally I see little variety in the best teams in most open leagues (deadball pitching/switch hitters are overused/out of position catchers). I try to build different teams that avoid the obvious cookies because I find this more fun. It appears Just and others do the same. People are choosing to play sub-optimally due to the stale pricing which to me indicates there is a problem with the current salaries.

I know deadballers are popular, but I strongly believe modern pitchers are a better value and more consistently lead to more wins.

Most my OL teams are testing the limits of the sim or proving viability of differing strategies. Shoot, I’ve got a team of only Seattle Mariners in 1st in an OL (and tracking for 93 wins) that was inspired by the jonjoerob and bru teams...

I’ve also got a $50m team that just started in an OL and 9 games in is 5-4 with three 1-run losses (and a .621 expected W%). If I can keep a $50m team competitive in an OL, you better believe people can win with just about anything at $80m, even bringing in a ‘00 Pedro or ‘20/‘23 Ruth... (I picked up ‘95 Maddux and ‘19 deGrom off WW and will leave them in AAA until after AS break).

And if you want to have fun with some of your next teams, check out bounties thread. I throw out gift cards for owners winning with unique and fun strategies targeting certain types of play. I have a couple new bounties launching in the next few weeks, too.