EBF
Footballguy
...is that for all the time and energy people spend on analysis, a lot of what determines a team's success is how well they exploit the bad owners in the league. I get loads of brainless lopsided offers in my leagues during the busy FF seasons. As annoying as they can be, I don't hold it against the proposers since the strategy is effective. If you send out 100 lopsided offers, one or two of them will be accepted. I've been on both sides as both the perpetrator and the victim.
The problem I see in my leagues is where you get a small group of weak owners who are like FF sieves. When they manage to get their hands on a great player, it's only a matter of time until they make a dumb trade and pawn the asset off for a bunch of scrap metal. Other owners exploit them repeatedly and it becomes like a race to see who can hoodwink the donator before he can spew his latest gem. Over time a small minority of teams become stacked by repeatedly swindling the perennial losers, who function like a charity for the rest of the league.
As an owner, you have no choice but to participate in the predation because if you don't do it then someone else will. I'm sure some people get a thrill out of it, but for me it also feels a little dirty when you know you're just robbing another owner blind because he doesn't know what he's doing. You can't take trades out of the game because that would just make things too rigid and boring, so how do you deal with this problem? The rookie pick system is designed to provide a crutch for losing owners, but it doesn't really work because they'll just waste whatever new value they acquire. You can try to limit your leagues to only contain good owners who won't make horrendous trades, but I play in some tough leagues and every one of them has soft spots. It's inevitable.
I don't know if this is a legitimate "problem" or more of just a "feature." Thinking about it did just give me an interesting idea though. In European soccer, teams who finish at the bottom of the standings are usually relegated to a minor league. So if the Devil Rays had the worst record in MLB this season, they would be sent down to AAA. And they could only get back into the major leagues if they finished near the top in AAA the next year. In this way incompetent teams are punished.
It might be fun to implement a relegation system in FF, either within an individual league (i.e. have enough low finishes and you're out) or within a pyramid of leagues (i.e. there's a "Pro" league, an AAA league, a AA league, and so on).
The problem I see in my leagues is where you get a small group of weak owners who are like FF sieves. When they manage to get their hands on a great player, it's only a matter of time until they make a dumb trade and pawn the asset off for a bunch of scrap metal. Other owners exploit them repeatedly and it becomes like a race to see who can hoodwink the donator before he can spew his latest gem. Over time a small minority of teams become stacked by repeatedly swindling the perennial losers, who function like a charity for the rest of the league.
As an owner, you have no choice but to participate in the predation because if you don't do it then someone else will. I'm sure some people get a thrill out of it, but for me it also feels a little dirty when you know you're just robbing another owner blind because he doesn't know what he's doing. You can't take trades out of the game because that would just make things too rigid and boring, so how do you deal with this problem? The rookie pick system is designed to provide a crutch for losing owners, but it doesn't really work because they'll just waste whatever new value they acquire. You can try to limit your leagues to only contain good owners who won't make horrendous trades, but I play in some tough leagues and every one of them has soft spots. It's inevitable.
I don't know if this is a legitimate "problem" or more of just a "feature." Thinking about it did just give me an interesting idea though. In European soccer, teams who finish at the bottom of the standings are usually relegated to a minor league. So if the Devil Rays had the worst record in MLB this season, they would be sent down to AAA. And they could only get back into the major leagues if they finished near the top in AAA the next year. In this way incompetent teams are punished.
It might be fun to implement a relegation system in FF, either within an individual league (i.e. have enough low finishes and you're out) or within a pyramid of leagues (i.e. there's a "Pro" league, an AAA league, a AA league, and so on).
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