FOF 2004 Rant

[MizzouRah]

Ok, being on vacation and having my laptop with me has allowed me to get back into my FOF dynasty, but I really wish issues like this would get patched or fixed before features are added in a future version.

Too many good players being signed for league mins.
Nolan wins SB, is the MVP of the league and then is not resigned by Seattle and is signed by Detroit for $830,00. Are you kidding me? They also have Joey Harrington at QB along with another great QB they signed for $830,000. Forget new features, I want FOF2k? to get better at AI teams handling their players. Too many times I see players who win the SB go elsewhere for peanuts. There are always great rated players after the first FA period as well. In fact, alot of high rated players aren't even bid on. Sorry, but ootp handles this aspect so much better than FOF does.
I love the game, but stuff like this really un-immerses me from the game.

I also see way too many delay of game penalties.



Todd

[Peregrine]

Too many good players being signed for league mins.

Yes, it's been discussed endlessly, but it is still very true. The best QB available in my league recently (by scout estimates) didn't sign to any contract while 8 other QBs did, he ended up winning the MVP while doing a one year contract for minimum wage. No team even offered him a contract, that's obviously broken.

[mckerney]

In the past the problem I've seen is the some players just demand contracts that are too large.

I knew it was a bad idea for Jim to include the Postons in the game.

[stevew]

Some players will not budge off of their rediculous signing bonus demands at all. In my current career every year a bunch of "very good" players do not sign in either FA period cause of this.

[Peregrine]

Some players will not budge off of their rediculous signing bonus demands at all. In my current career every year a bunch of "very good" players do not sign in either FA period cause of this.

I've mentioned this before, but I still think there is an issue with the way teams handle free agent signings. If a player is offered a contract by a team, but it fails because of no cap room, no other team will ever attempt to sign them afterwards. The same seems to hold true for this, I've tracked players who initally have very high demands, but by rounds 10-15 their numbers have come down a lot, but still no team will try to sign them, even though there are several with lots of cap room.

[yabanci]

good rant. After playing multiplayer, this weakness is so glaring that I can't even play the solo game anymore. You'll never get the AI to act truly human, of course, but there's a lot of room for improvement here.

[QuikSand]

What I'd like to see to remedy this is a system where AI teams sort of "switch gears" at some point, and instead of offering long term deals to players they initially decided to target (however that got decoded) then they reassess, see how much cap space they still have for the coming year, and start making one-year offers to the best players out there at positions of relative need.

[Peregrine]

I agree Quik, I think that's the problem, they don't reassess at all, that's how top players get left behind, once they're passed by at the start of FA signing, they just sit there because the AI never tries to reassess the situation in later rounds.

[perez24]

Is there any chance that this will ever get fixed? I get the impression (though I do not read all of the posts) that there will be no more patches, and that no one is really sure if a new version of the game is coming out and/or when.

[MizzouRah]

I agree as well QS. I'm in year 2012, Seattle wins the SB and bye bye league MVP QB who now makes $830,000 for another team. St. Louis had 30 players and no cap room to spare. Really delving into this game this week and I'm noticing alot of AI problems. Maybe Madden will handle the cap better?

perez24, no more patches, at least I would be very shocked if there was. I think Jim mentioned awhile back the game needs recoding to get rid of the AI problems. Sigh.. maybe multiplayer is the way to go, but I am a solo player at heart.

Oh well, my Chargers have one heck of a team this year, so trudge along I must.


Todd

[albionmoonlight]

Jim mentioned once that there is a speed problem to making the AI too complex. If he designs a "chess like" AI that operates very well but takes 10 minutes for each FA stage, is it really a workable feature.

Note--I am not saying that there is not a middle ground (I really don't know), but I wanted to throw out one thing that may be keeping the game from progressing to the level that we would like.

[chinaski]

Free Agency worked pretty well before this most recent patch. Jim said he made changes that could cause things too act weird... then he disappeared and hasnt said one thing about an upcoming patch or what he plans to do to fix the D patch. Its been 6 months since the D patch came out.

I dont know what else needs to be said, i spent 10 hours collecting data on this subject... it would be appropriate if Solecismic would at least acknowledge the problem and let its customers know they are working to fix it.

http://dynamic2.gamespy.com/~fof/for...9&postcount=21

[amdaily]

The root problem is with the way the AI structures and handles contracts. The contracts offered are back loaded and include to much bonus money. Thus, they have to renegotiate many of the contracts 2 or 3 years into it. This creates massive amounts of dead cap space for AI teams and has two results: 1. May hurt their ability to extend the contracts of young backups prior to free agency, and 2. Hurts their ability to pursue free agents in the off season.

Number 1 is a whole issue in itself, as I still think to many teams cut their roster down to 17-18 players prior to free agency. This leaves many 50-60 rated players asking for minimal three year contracts that the human players can grab while the AI fights for who gets to give a QB a $200 million contract with 50% in in signing bonus money. This is additon to killing the AI's cohesion rating every season.

The ever-escalating number of $10 million players (or the equivalent to based on salary cap expansion) appears not to be a result of increased player salary demands, but of the dead cap space accumulating for these players. However, I personally feel that the demands of the upper echelon QB's are to high as 2-3 will contribute to the problem each season by ask for Peyton Manning type money every season.

There is also an issue with the number of quality centers available in free agency every season. A majoirty of these then make it into the second step of free agency because they are for far to much.

I've never looked at the "If a player is offered a contract by a team, but it fails because of no cap room, no other team will ever attempt to sign them afterwards," theory, but if true it is definitely something that needs addressed.

There have been a few good threads on free agency and salaries since 5.0d came out, we should try and combine all the detailed information of them in one place or at least track down links to all of those threads.

And while we are ranting, I still wish the injuries would play out a bit different. While this was moderated a bit in the last patch, there are still to many players that will play every down, every season without injury and to many players that will play a handful of games and then go down with a season ending injury every season.

It seems as though once a players tears and ACL he is now susceptible to every injury in the book: eye problems, elbow issues, quadriceps muscle tears, etc. There are injury prone players in the NFL that will miss 1-5 games per season, but very few that have a severe injury every season.

The human player gets a significant advantage over the AI due to this as well. I rarely, if ever, give a contract to a guy who played in less than 10 games the preceeding season. If the player has played less than 10 games twice in his career, I will never give him money because I know he'll end up on the injured reserve list out for the season.

The AI, however, will throw millions of dollars (with large chunks of it as a signing bonus) at these players. When they do get injured - and they will - the AI won't have a backup due to the salary cap issues discussed earlier.

[MizzouRah]

Well said amdaily!

Jim's been kind of 'missing' for quite some time.


Todd

[Dutch]

FOF threads have been missing too.

I remember just trying to think of a better way for the AI to work and it boggled my mind....I hadn't even thought of Jim being able to fix it with a patch.....

The easiest solution is probably somewhere along the lines of the QS suggestion of AI teams hitting the "recommend" button every few rounds of FA to reassess the situation.

[T-Storm]

I think the best and easiest way to resolve this, would be to lower the players demands. Also change the structure of the demands to a less backloaded one with less signing bonus and a more even yearly salary.

And then former draft picks, that started every game the last season because of ability , that make just close to minimum salary (example: former 7th round picks in final year of rookie contract) shouldn't be cut.
This almost takes comical turns, if a team drafts a RB in the bottom half of the first round every year. Then has him start for 3 years and only to cut him. This only to take another RB with similar (or worse) skills with their 1st round pick of that years draft. Happened with NewEngland in one career for about a decade.