I posted a few weeks ago looking for community feedback regarding an issue we were having with users maintaining and building their minors. You may review original post and responses
HERE. This is only a problem with less than 5% of teams, but when minors are neglected both from personnel and financial perspective, it becomes a real time-consuming headache to fix manually by customer support, and sets that franchise back years. The teams we have to fix on a weekly basis usually have 99% of payroll allocated to ML, and then typically have only a handful of players in their minor league teams. I understand this is a new user problem, or people that are just interested in majors and winning WS and prizes, but the game was built on the premise of building a "Franchise" and true dynasty. Its particularly harmful when users sell out for a few short years and leave another user to pick up the pieces of a shattered franchise.
I would again love feedback, my solution is based off community feedback, is multi-tiered, and it is as follows:
1.)
A min budget will be maintained for all levels. This means min contract x 20 players. -Yes, I know this a band-aid solution that will not fix every issue as players signed above level min could take money away from the budget and rosters may still be depleted. But its a good start and I think good practice.
2.)
Increase health and stamina for prospects and particularly tryout players. If the AI needs to sign players for a team we know there stats will not be fantastic, but I think they should still be serviceable to eat innings, not drop to 0%, or get injured. I think overall, prospects generally need a little boost so I may consider changing some of the distrubutions of generated players in general SLIGHTLY.
3.)
If Rosters are incomplete at start time of ML,MIL,RL schedules AI will auto-sign players. Self explanatory, but we will now auto-sign FA/TryOut prospects to depleted teams how we see fit in an algorithm.
4.)
AI Signing Penalties. The AI will never be as good as a true human coach, so any moves it makes comes with a penalty. If you HAVE BUDGET, in addition to signing player you will receive 50% of contract penalty that counts against payroll next season. If you DO NOT have budget, the players salary+100% of contract penalty that counts against payroll next season. EX. (Have Budget) You have 100k budget remaining we sign 35k player. You will have 65k remaining this year and next year a penalty of 17.5k counted against payroll. EX (No Budget) we sign 35k player, next year you have a 70k penalty counted against budget. **If owner leaves team the penalties are reset, so new owner is not penalized.
Again for 95% of users this change would not effect you, especially those in strong worlds with commissioners that stay on top of team affairs. The change will only makes leagues more competitive and fun, and penalize users that are not playing the game as intended. The ultimate bonus is will save 10+ man hours a week CS has typically needed to manually fix these teams daily.
I appreciate everyone's feedback.
Regards,
-Chris
WIS