Contracts should be set in stone. When you go to resign a player you should have a few options. You could front load a deal or have a bigger bonus type of deal or whatever else. The thing is you just can't change it yourself. It's completely up too the player! Your just picking between the 3 deals.

So if someone puts in the effort to construct a winning roster you're suggesting they what, don't re-sign any of their star players to maintain a competitive balance? There is no 'magic' work around that only a select few have discovered. The system currently uses a market based system to determine contract requests. So unless owners go out of their way to offer players MORE than what they request, there isn't really any fault you can lay at the feet of the other users.

I think the biggest issue right now is that in the allocation draft the AI puts way too little emphasis on young undeveloped players, resulting in a strict competition between human controlled teams for all the best young talent, which in several seasons of play after said players develop results in a handful of teams who deployed this strategy completely dominating their respective divisions. This is true of every one of the three allocation draft leagues I've partaken in.

That said, it is challenging but not impossible to pull a 'dregs' team into competitive shape in any of those leagues. It just takes some work and a little strategy. I can say this confidently because I've done this exact thing, despite a lot of mistakes along the way.

For my own $0.02 I don't think holdouts are a good idea. Players should increase their demands if their league-wide performance is significantly higher than their overall rating might indicate. Otherwise it should continue to be market based, but with a marked appreciation in value. That is, when the #2 WR in the league is coming up for a payday, he shouldn't look to the #1 WR and decide his contract should be a little less than that, he should expect to be the new highest paid WR in the league. This may be how it is now, in which case starting contracts in new leagues need to be commensurately higher to up the initial market 'cost' for players.

btw, does our Salary Cap go up each season? Never really noticed.

Yes, salary cap increases every season.

The systems have a problem with determining contract request in my own opinion... player always sing long term deals with little base salary given that you gave him the guaranteed money they ask. This is an extreme exemple but the system works now such that a player will reject a 50M 1year 20% guaranteed deal and accept 3M/y 6years 75% guaranteed deal.

By not taking into account yearly income and even base salary, the task to retain your talents in your teams is simply too easy and your toughest cap hits come from your rookie contracts (!!!) and mega deals you hand out to mediocre free agent.

My suggestion is that players should require more and in place than just evaluating the guaranteed money, check something like:

((Gua/Y)+0.5BS)(2Y/(Y+3))

with
Gua = total guaranteed money
Y = number of year of the deal
BS = non guaranteed yearly base salary

Here you will have options to manage your cap room and have harsh choice to make with shorter deals and less % of guaranteed money that will trend up the market and give competitive chance to teams who lost ground to recover.

Ok, that's it!
Now you've crossed the line...........

outside the far reaches of my brain!

Thanks for that buzz!

Talking about new players taking over teams with extreme salaries and caps that are spent.

Give these new owners the ability to re-do the contracts of their players for the going rate.

The problem with this is that you can destroy a team and then just create a new account to get your team reset

Yeah, I guess that would be a problem.

Math! Yay!

The formula right now is:

Bonus + (sum(Base * 0.5 ^ Year))

so the base salary is applied exponentially decreasing through the contract.

Your formula is interesting, and you are all probably right in that the bonus is currently weighted too high and is too easy to work around. I'm going to play with that formula a little bit.