*Minimum Contracts: What to do?

[nunccoepi]

...one player can just grab a high value contract, and basically do nothing but have as much TPE gain as someone with a minimum contract who does everything available to them.

That is EXACTLY what would make contract money more appealing though....and isn't that what we want? That's just basic economics.

[timeconsumer]

The problem right now in terms of economics is that our league is essentially the reverse of real life when it comes to how money works.

IRL money is a scarce resource. You can only earn so much. You can only earn it for so long. There is no guarantee how much a given amount of time and effort will return in cash. There is no guarantee how long you will still be able to earn. In this league I know that I can always go write 600 words and make $1m. I know that if I don't do it this week, I can do it next week. I know that my career in the NSFL will last as long as I want it to, and that I don't have to worry about being unemployed next season. There is zero scarcity with money, making it worth very little in our minds.

And IRL we can spend as much money as we like, on whatever we like. If I have $100m I can go blow it all on 20 helicopters right now and be out of money immediately. In the NSFL I can only spend so much and on a select few options. Full training and equipment is $20m per season, that's it. If you're like me it's even less when you get capped and everything costs me $11m per season.

So combine these two factors and really all economic principles are out the window. The psychology of money is out the window. If I'm a real football player I'm negotiating for lots of money because I could be out of the league in 3 years and develop early onset dementia in 20 years and so much for my life, but hopefully I made enough to set up my family. In the NSFL none of that uncertainty applies. I know exactly what my future expenditures are and what my earnings are. I can plan it and time it in such a way that my printing press fingers can easily give me exactly as much money as I need with minimal effort.

And raising the costs of equipment, reducing the impact of jobs, raising minimums...all of that won't necessarily fix that fundamental problem that money isn't scarce and consumption is. To be honest I don't know what the answer is to that problem, or even if it is a problem. But I can tell you that changing the inputs and outputs of the system won't change much.

[Beaver]

Yeah, economics isn't the way to look at this for the reasons stated above. Game design is.

In our game the "loot" is TPE. Right now all TPE (except fantasy, which is max 5/season) is earned on a fixed schedule: ACs, training, PTs, etc once a week and equipment and season predictions, etc once a season. This makes TPE gain extremely predictable and NSFL dollars are just future TPE waiting to be exchanged (with some exceptions - archetype changes, etc) so its value diminishes extremely quickly once you have enough money to earn however much scheduled TPE you personally want.

The first $6m of a season (is a season 6 weeks here?) or so is very valuable because it's worth 30 TPE in training. The next $6m for equipment is worth 16-20 TPE in specific attributes that have varying usefulness to you. Each successive $3m for equipment is worth less and less since you'd naturally prioritize the most important stats first and after you've reached the point of being able to purchase everything available ($20m-ish depending on position), each marginal NSFL dollar drops to near worthlessness.

For me, weekly training and $6m worth of equipment is the sweet spot and $12m a season is ezpz to get with a job, fantasy, and media so not only is there no benefit to me to take a big contract, it's actually detrimental to me since it makes my team marginally worse off. If that's true for me, who's relatively disengaged in this league, it's likely true for the majority of the league and it's stupid to expect a majority of the league to act against their own best interest for the sake of realism. If you want players to take more than the minimum you have to incentivize that.

edit: I should note that I fucking hate updating so I would very much welcome a change where it would make sense for me to take a $6m/yr contract without eating up 8% of my teams' cap. 8% may not seem like a lot but after you factor in OL bots, send downs, and inactive roster fillers that suddenly becomes more like 15-20% of the active player budget.

[Roly]

I think its a culture thing like some guys have already said. When the culture is take minimum deals to help the team, people tend to do that. The real question is if everyone takes minimum contracts to help the team, where does the savings end up?

I think if you wanted to make money have more purpose, give it more outputs. For lack of other word, more bling and pizzazz that players can flaunt with money. The playing cards were a type of this extra, unnecessary, but "status-enhancing" output for money.

People spend their money on things that show their status. So make more outputs for the money that show status. This is in both life and gaming. People spend XP on the gold shoes, or spend real money on the fancy car. So build some status symbols guys can purchase. Or wait for the culture to change (like slm mentioned earlier).