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.
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.
![[Image: h5Ta7H1.png]](https://i.imgur.com/h5Ta7H1.png)
