On the topic of taking money out of the economy, I'm not sure that is going to do a whole lot to increase the value of contracts. It will always be much easier to make money from media than your contract.
One proposal that I would put forward for consideration would be to make media/Twitter/graphics payouts be a multiplier of whatever your salary is. So every single way of making money in the league is dependent on whatever contract you've signed. You would still be able to make far more money from media than your contract, but the actual amount of it is dependent on how hard you negotiated. That would incentivise every player to challenge their team to give them a good contract, and really make GMs sweat in terms of budget caps!
On the other side of the coin is the availability of things to spend money on. On this, I have three ideas:
Buying another player
This would allow only the top earners the option to purchase a second player, allowing them to run two characters at the same time. Consideration would have to be made for how the user tags along with the player. I would propose that the second player is treated like a bot player, in that the user does not follow the player and join locker rooms etc, but simply has the ability to manage and update them.
The price would need to be high enough that the player pool doesn't double overnight, something like $50m feels about right. You could potentially then offer the ability to create a 3rd/4th player with a doubling cost each time ($100m, $200m). Once these players retire, the user would then need to pay again if they wanted a second player again.
Not only would these one-off payments take money out of the economy for very little cost, but the user would need to purchase equipment / training multiple times.
Holding off regression
We know why regression exists, but it must be tough for some users to say goodbye to their star players. Perhaps a way to incetivise veterans to part with their money is the ability to give their guys one more year. Each year at the point of regression, players could have the option to pay $10m to push back their regression % to whatever the value is one season earlier. So for example, instead of regressing 20% in their 7th season, a player could pay $10m to avoid it. Then in their 8th season, they could pay another $10 million to regress by 20% instead of 25%.
This would allow very wealthy players to prolong their careers by around two seasons, but at the cost of $70m or so, potentially helping with a HoF push. This would be a low impact way to take a significant amount of money out of the economy from the top earners.
Cosmetic Items
Another proposal would be to introduce the ability to purchase items that don't affect the balance of the game, but provide a cosmetic benefit. Some ideas off the top of my head:
One proposal that I would put forward for consideration would be to make media/Twitter/graphics payouts be a multiplier of whatever your salary is. So every single way of making money in the league is dependent on whatever contract you've signed. You would still be able to make far more money from media than your contract, but the actual amount of it is dependent on how hard you negotiated. That would incentivise every player to challenge their team to give them a good contract, and really make GMs sweat in terms of budget caps!
On the other side of the coin is the availability of things to spend money on. On this, I have three ideas:
Buying another player
This would allow only the top earners the option to purchase a second player, allowing them to run two characters at the same time. Consideration would have to be made for how the user tags along with the player. I would propose that the second player is treated like a bot player, in that the user does not follow the player and join locker rooms etc, but simply has the ability to manage and update them.
The price would need to be high enough that the player pool doesn't double overnight, something like $50m feels about right. You could potentially then offer the ability to create a 3rd/4th player with a doubling cost each time ($100m, $200m). Once these players retire, the user would then need to pay again if they wanted a second player again.
Not only would these one-off payments take money out of the economy for very little cost, but the user would need to purchase equipment / training multiple times.
Holding off regression
We know why regression exists, but it must be tough for some users to say goodbye to their star players. Perhaps a way to incetivise veterans to part with their money is the ability to give their guys one more year. Each year at the point of regression, players could have the option to pay $10m to push back their regression % to whatever the value is one season earlier. So for example, instead of regressing 20% in their 7th season, a player could pay $10m to avoid it. Then in their 8th season, they could pay another $10 million to regress by 20% instead of 25%.
This would allow very wealthy players to prolong their careers by around two seasons, but at the cost of $70m or so, potentially helping with a HoF push. This would be a low impact way to take a significant amount of money out of the economy from the top earners.
Cosmetic Items
Another proposal would be to introduce the ability to purchase items that don't affect the balance of the game, but provide a cosmetic benefit. Some ideas off the top of my head:
- $3m to rent your team's endzone for a week, changing the image to whatever you want
- $5m to change your team's colors in the sim for a week
- $5m to add a custom emote to Discord / forum for the duration of a season
- $5m for a custom role / colour in Discord / forum
