Make Money Mean Something

[Molarpistols]

I don't really understand why everybody hates players taking minimum contracts so much. At the higher TPE levels, the minimum contracts really start adding up. Otters are looking at some fancy footwork staying under the cap after S6 if we want to keep everybody as is. That's with most of the players taking minimum for their TPE.

I get it, a lot of our high earners taking minimum is why the Otters are 2x Champions with a good shot at a third this year, but if our players want to play here, I don't know why the league wants to make that impossible. Every other team in the league has the option for minimum contracts too.

Eventually there'll be enough players in the league with high enough TPE that there won't be enough cap space around to keep all the higher earners on rosters, even at minimum contracts.

I don't know, just my thoughts.

[HENDRIX]

This just feels like something that will further separate those who have a ton of time to invest into media/graphics/league jobs from those who can't, which I'm not entirely for being that the point of this league is fun and the gap is probably discouraging to new users. I'd much rather just have mandatory minimum contracts based on TPE because a lot of the players who skimp out on contracts do so because their league job makes up for the small contract so it's a win-win for them. If we had minimum TPE based contracts then I think we'd also need a soft cap and a hard cap so really good teams can sell out for a short window at a dynasty or have to budget really strategically to maintain success.

Only 1 team wanted to fix them in the past, so there's almost no chance something will change in regards to that.

[dropbear]

I don't really understand why everybody hates players taking minimum contracts so much.

Because it makes free agency and contract negotiations basically redundant. There's no excitement to it because in the end, the money isn't worth anything.

[speculadora]

I don't really understand why everybody hates players taking minimum contracts so much.  At the higher TPE levels, the minimum contracts really start adding up.  Otters are looking at some fancy footwork staying under the cap after S6 if we want to keep everybody as is.  That's with most of the players taking minimum for their TPE.

I get it, a lot of our high earners taking minimum is why the Otters are 2x Champions with a good shot at a third this year, but if our players want to play here, I don't know why the league wants to make that impossible. Every other team in the league has the option for minimum contracts too.

Eventually there'll be enough players in the league with high enough TPE that there won't be enough cap space around to keep all the higher earners on rosters, even at minimum contracts.

I don't know, just my thoughts.

I dislike it because the minimums, even at the higher levels, don't create a huge problem. Yeah you won't be able to fill out an entire roster of $1M contracts but $4M is nothing to pay players who are close to maxing out their builds. On top of that the rule is flawed in a way where you don't sign a guy to 3 years at "minimum money", you sign him to 3 years at whatever the minimum at the time is. So, if you're clever enough, you can pay a max earner $1M per season until he hits 800 TPE and then $4M per season for the rest of his career. Seriously, $4M is roughly 5% of a team's total cap space. That's not exactly a challenge to fit into your budget. Plus, when it comes time to make decisions on who you guys have to let go the decisions are simple and position changes make them ludicrously easy to get past.

I really don't have a problem with good players taking pay cuts to play somewhere they want to or where they can win. The problem is not a result of the players as much as sim league design. The fact that players have gigantic supplementary incomes be it through jobs or media/graphic payouts AND the team is not on the hook for any of that money AND that those players are actually capped in terms of what they can spend creates a situation where by players can accept a minimum contract and be no worse off for it. Really the only benefit to taking a gigantic contract right now is to either avoid having to do point tasks or to stockpile money so you can avoid doing them in the future. The problem is that even if a player wanted to do that the cap is so tight that nobody would give them the time of day. In reality that situation probably doesn't arise because nobody is really looking 10-20 seasons into the future here. Basically the idea (that I'm now coming around to) is that uncapping the amount of money player's can spend helps dissolve the competitive balance issue that the current structure creates/is capable of creating and creates a more realistic free agent market place.

I'm really not sure about this last point. I don't think there's much of an argument to be made that there is already a lack of incentive to take a big contract for most players. Even as more players approach high TPE totals I don't foresee guys clamoring for big contracts because of it. If anything my expectation would be that you'll just have more players who are fine on the minimum until they have to keep up with regression. I'm not an expert and don't know enough about the regression system to really make a compelling point here, though.

[nunccoepi]

What do other leagues do to address this issue?

[37thchamber]

My suggestion for this was to tier equipment price based on player TPE (as we do with contracts, and attributes themselves), which then doesn't increase available TPE.

But I think the response to that was that it would be too much work for bankers (I disagree personally, and it's not like I don't know what bankers do, but whatevs)

Anyways, this is partly why I suggested the move to a more automated system for these sorts of things (updates, training etc). That way you could build a shop in PHP or something, which automatically retrieves the player's TPE and displays the correct equipment price (for example), getting around the whole "too much work" issue.

[ItsJustBarry]

I dislike it because the minimums, even at the higher levels, don't create a huge problem. Yeah you won't be able to fill out an entire roster of $1M contracts but $4M is nothing to pay players who are close to maxing out their builds. On top of that the rule is flawed in a way where you don't sign a guy to 3 years at "minimum money", you sign him to 3 years at whatever the minimum at the time is. So, if you're clever enough, you can pay a max earner $1M per season until he hits 800 TPE and then $4M per season for the rest of his career.

Its a flawed system for sure. I just hit 800 TPE and I am making $2M a year on my contract which still has 2.5 seasons on it. I have pushed for contracts to increase each off-season based on TPE but I am the minority and it will likely never happen.

If you want a change, you may need to explore options where contract money and other money are separate. Have contract money be good for certain purchases that can't be bought with media money. If the league won't force higher contracts through TPE gains, we need to make the players want larger contracts.

[bovovovo]

My suggestion for this was to tier equipment price based on player TPE (as we do with contracts, and attributes themselves), which then doesn't increase available TPE.

But I think the response to that was that it would be too much work for bankers (I disagree personally, and it's not like I don't know what bankers do, but whatevs)

Anyways, this is partly why I suggested the move to a more automated system for these sorts of things (updates, training etc). That way you could build a shop in PHP or something, which automatically retrieves the player's TPE and displays the correct equipment price (for example), getting around the whole "too much work" issue.

This is a really interesting idea to me I haven’t heard before. Would you mind elaborating a little more? Concerning tiered equipment prices

[timeconsumer]

if you're clever enough, you can pay a max earner $1M per season until he hits 800 TPE and then $4M per season for the rest of his career.

:ph34r:

[timeconsumer]

But to be real, let's keep this all in perspective here.

Pro Training for an 8 week season = $8,000,000
Pro Equipment for one season = $12,000,000
Total Cost to Sustain Max Earner = $20,000,000 per season

Now let's account for the Earnings.

Twitter Payments for an 8 Week Season = $4,800,000
Fantasy Payout: $1,000,000
Minimum Contract: $1,000,000

Total Earnings so far: $6,800,000

That leaves $13,200,000 left to be earned each season for a player. So how can he earn that? Well, writing is an easy way, right? We all do media for money.

With the new payscale a 1,000 word article pays $1,644,000. So the player needs to write 8 of those in order to fill the gap and afford the rest of their season bill. That actually fits perfectly in at 1 article per week during an 8 week season. So in total this player has to write 8,000 words of media to afford being a max earner. Let's add into that the words needed to write all the PTs which comes to 350 words/week and we're looking at another 2,800 words.

So a max earner on a minimum contract needs to: Do all twitters every week, participate in fantasy, enter predictions, and they have to write 12,800 words in 8 weeks to sustain maximum effort. That is 228 words per day. Essentially they are writing one Weekly PT every day to be a max earner.

Look I'm not saying that is a backbreaking amount of work, because it isn't. But I don't think we can assume that everyone is going to want to put in that much work here. I really expect that once people retire their first character and the loyalties from the early days of the league aren't as strong we can expect a lot more players to be negotiating for higher contracts to reduce the amount they have to work.