Because I enjoy making interesting decisions, I’d love a cycle between the end of spring trading and opening day where any player not on the 25 man ML roster is automatically waived if they are out of options.

This is probably too big of a tweak for this thread but I’ll throw it out anyways.

let commissioners determine how many votes get a player into the hall of fame.

or let the guys that get into the hall be based off of percentage of votes cast rather then number.

too many times in good worlds I see first ballot HOF guys get 16 votes because 12 of the owners forgot or accidently got rid of their votes. 16 out of 20 is 80%. 16 out of 32 is 50%. 80% should get you in.

Posted by NickKappel on 12/15/2020 9:03:00 PM (view original):
Thanks for asking, adlorenz! We definitely appreciate you taking the time to listen and consider some ideas. First of all, HBD is a fantastic game as is, and most of what I'm about to suggest is nit picking. But here it goes.

Here are a few off the top of my head:
1. Update ballparks
2. Make arbitration rulings less random. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for winning/losing a case
3. Ability to opt into receiving sitemail/email when trade chats are sent to you
4. World chat is a mess. Can this be fixed to create threads (similar to the message boards) instead of one season-long word scrabble?
5. Capping future season salary far below current season salary. I get the intent behind this, but it really can hinder options for well-intentioned owners
6. Add a withdraw and return button on the coach hiring pages
7. More flexibility in bullpen usage. I'm not sure how this would work, but if my best SUA is 60 vL and 90 vR, I don't want him entering in the late innings of a close game if three left-handed bats are due up
8. Expand player records to list more than just the top 5 in each category (top 10? 20?)
9. Show which owners voted for which players in HOF/Awards voting
10. Reshuffle playoff seeds after each round so top record plays worst record. I've seen too many should-be ALCS matchups in the ALDS
11. Show how many other teams (but not necessarily which ones) are bidding on a free agent
12. Change listed position on HOF ballot to primary position played
13. Increase time of free agency/decrease time of Spring Training
14. The "prepare for regular season" cycles should count as rest days for players. They're currently placeholder days in which they don't recover from fatigue
15. More time between budget day and arbitration day

A few ideas that have already been suggested that I like:
1. 4th dot
2. Multi-year coach contracts
3. 20-pitch min. for starters
4. 6-year minor league free agents demanding multi-year ML contracts
5. Ease up on career-threatening injuries, especially to high-health rating players and especially if they don't ever return to their previous ratings. Injury recoveries now are so dependent on the timing of the injury
6. Get a notification when a trade is rejected/accepted

Big +1 on item 6 regarding "withdraw and return button" in coach negotiations page. This seems ripe for a quick fix situation.

Really appreciate you hearing us out. A few items that have already been listed:
1. Ability to set daily lineup without changing default lineup. This is what the “edit lineup” button on matchups seems like it was intended to do.
2. Dial back the injuries.
3. Can we simplify coach hiring?

These would help:

• Multi-year coach contracts.
• Add a blue button to the red, green, and yellow ones.
• HOF position defaults to the one played most often by that player in the ML.
• Enable the ability to negotiate contract extensions before the old one is ready to run out.

Frivolous but fun:

• Add historic ballparks like Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.
• Enable the ability to choose your own team colors.

Seemingly little things that are annoying and should be fixed:

• The Asian player naming system. Asian names and birthplaces are not interchangeable. Japanese, Chinese, Korean names are separate and distinct. This seems to be currently set at random, which causes unrealistic combinations. For example, most of the players I have that are listed as born in Japan have Chinese surnames (or else they're named "Martin"), which is completely unrealistic. It's 2020; show some sensitivity to cultural differences and fix this, please.

Things mostly already mentioned but wanted to call them out again:
1) Please allow the option of keeping pitchers in with no-hitters beyond their max pitch count. It is insane to see a pitcher pulled with a no-no at 8.2 innings with his team ahead 11-0. This is not hyperbole. It happened to me.
2) Fix the Asian names. Please. It's kind of, well, insulting and tone deaf.
3) Increase negotiation ability with free agents. Also, it's strange that during the FA signing period, you can offer a player a one-year contract when they're asking for four and get them to sign, but once the season starts they won't budge off their demands.
4) Allow negotiation with your own FAs that are hesitant to resign. If I have a super stud player that may go max or close to it, why can't I offer it during the previous season?
5) Coach hiring is a miserable exercise. Find ways to simplify it - perhaps as suggested, start with multi-year contracts? Or reduce the number of coaches who want to move on by allowing us to offer higher dollar contracts during the rehiring process and have them accepted? Similar to what I'm requesting in the FA negotiation process.
6) Injuries have been discussed here repeatedly. As it should.
7) Some kind of individual adjusted steal system. I get the problem raised earlier that owners would simply turn off stealing for the slugs, but perhaps some sort of system that doesn't eliminate base stealing on slow players but reduces it more than we can now. It's kind of silly and unrealistic to see a player year after year have one or two successful steals in fifteen to twenty attempts all because the same team has a few jackrabbits that need to steal as much as possible.
8) Lefty/righty pitching specialists that work.
9) Draft - can the guys who say they want to be drafted in the first five rounds, and get drafted in the first round - like they wanted - just sign already and skip the drama of waiting a week or three?

I'll think of more...

Glad someone else mentioned it, I wasn't about to be the only one.
The game has an absurdly deep base of player names; latino names are fairly faithful; the rare european names are a little creative...

But the Asian names look like someone went out of their way to screw with them.

I would like to see an innings cap to minor league games. Sometimes it takes me days to recover from a 17-inning LoA game that destroys my pitching staff. It's a minor thing but qualifies as a quality of life improvement for me.

Posted by keithjs on 12/16/2020 10:58:00 AM (view original):
I would like to see an innings cap to minor league games. Sometimes it takes me days to recover from a 17-inning LoA game that destroys my pitching staff. It's a minor thing but qualifies as a quality of life improvement for me.

++1

Posted by bripat42 on 12/16/2020 10:45:00 AM (view original):

Posted by hockey1984 on 12/15/2020 10:46:00 PM (view original):
This is probably too big of a tweak for this thread but I’ll throw it out anyways.

let commissioners determine how many votes get a player into the hall of fame.

or let the guys that get into the hall be based off of percentage of votes cast rather then number.

too many times in good worlds I see first ballot HOF guys get 16 votes because 12 of the owners forgot or accidently got rid of their votes. 16 out of 20 is 80%. 16 out of 32 is 50%. 80% should get you in.

This would be acceptable only if there also was an option to vote for zero players and to have that count as a vote. There have been plenty of seasons when I haven't voted for anyone because I didn't think anyone was worthy. The system you are proposing, hockey1984, would completely dismiss such assessments as worthless.

I'm ok with having a button that says you have cast all the votes you want to cast. Or that you aren't casting votes for any of the players. At least then its something conscious and that way passive owners don't dictate who does and doesn't get into the hall. Nothing worse then having a guy miss by 1-2 votes and then at the beginning of the season have an owner post in the chat 'Crap! I forgot!'

Posted by bjschumacher on 12/16/2020 1:15:00 PM (view original):

Posted by keithjs on 12/16/2020 10:58:00 AM (view original):
I would like to see an innings cap to minor league games. Sometimes it takes me days to recover from a 17-inning LoA game that destroys my pitching staff. It's a minor thing but qualifies as a quality of life improvement for me.

++1

This brings up something that may only be a logic adjustment:

Say you get into one of these games and burn through your entire active pitching staff. Who does the sim put in? In my experience, not the most rested starter, not the guy slated to start next, not a position player, but usually the starter who just started the previous game.
Now that's good for ending the game in a hurry, but what it really does is cook the pitcher so badly you have to re-jig your rotation to skip his next start.

Minor league pitchers at 0/0 is a problem. The tryout camp pool needs to be larger.

Make injury recovery more realistic. A guy with an ankle sprain will recover to 100% and shouldn't take a ratings hit, same with a sore shoulder, etc. Even some surgeries cause no real drop off IRL.

I've thought of a few creative fixes to the coaching problem:
1. Have minor league coordinators. Similar to how there's only one fielding coach, make there be one minor league coordinator for hitting, fielding, etc. No individual coaches*.
2. Set a budget for each level on how much you want to spend (ie. 250k AAA, 75k rookie, etc.). You wouldn't actually hire anybody, you would purely just say "I want to spend 250K on AAA coaching)", etc. You'd have a minimum for each level, but you could just invest however much you want over that into each. Maybe this can be done after major league hiring, so people can utilize 100% of their remaining budget on the minors. This would also mean no individual coaches*.
*Obviously if there's no minor league coaches, then how would they develop into major league coaches? I would suggest 1 of 2 solutions:
1. New coaches are produced each year similar to rookie ball, except they start with ratings in the 70's.
2. Have the system "assign" coaches based on your level of minor league coordinator or budget invested. These coaches would develop as they normally do.