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Suggestion: Contract TPE
#1

Hey everyone,

This is an idea regarding contracts that I have actually had for quite a while, years actually. I have only now started hammering out the specifics but I think it is one that could actually help make our league more fun while also being a potential piece of the parity puzzle.

What’s the issue?

Contract negotiations have been one of the more boring aspects of the league for years now. Basically everyone just takes the minimum salary in order to allow their GMs to build the best team possible and so that they can play with as many of their friends as possible. We have changed things around a bit over the years, changing the contract tiers or adjusting the salary cap, but nothing has really changed about that very basic fact.

As a result of that, we are essentially losing out on an interesting gameplay aspect for our members (both players and GMs) while at the same time having a structural problem at our hands: There simply is not enough player movement between teams which contributes to our current parity problems while also making the leagues trade and free agent market as a whole feel very stale.

Why are we in that situation?

Now of course things are as they are for a reason and not all those reasons are bad. By far the most important one is that we want people to be able to play with their friends, it is one of the main things that makes this league fun for a lot of our members. It’s awesome that actual friendships are being formed in a lot of those locker rooms and we don’t want to forcibly break those groups up, parity problems or not. That’s why my suggestion is not aimed at implementing more rules that force players to act a certain way, but to give them more agency and interesting choices while still allowing them to keep playing for the minimum if they so choose.

So what's my suggestion?

My idea would essentially be the implementation of contract-based TPE payouts. I have considered different variations of this idea while working my way towards the proposal I ended up with, including a player store specifically for contract money, but ultimately I ended up with this one because I think it’s the simplest one. So how does it work?

Essentially, we directly give out TPE to players based on their contract. The higher their salary, the more TPE they get. For example, someone with a 3M contract would get 3 TPE at the start of a season while someone with a 5 TPE contract would get 9 TPE and so on.

The general idea behind this from a player perspective is that it still allows you to take the minimum (let’s say it’s 3M in this example), but it gives you an incentive to actively seek out a higher salary. And even more importantly, it creates an interesting decision for you to make: Do you take a Discount to stay with your team but you sacrifice a little bit of extra development for it, or do you go out there seeking the opportunity to become a teams go-to guy while making the big money and getting some extra TPE for it.

From a GM perspective it would also make things a lot more interesting. The money that you have or don’t have at your disposal will finally make an actual difference. FA negotiations would become a lot more interesting because now you are in possession of a resource that is a lot more valuable than it used to be and you can use it to specifically target certain players. On the other hand, it will make roster building as a whole a lot more interesting. Will you go all in on a few highly paid superstars but sacrifice some of your supporting cast in the process or will you try to build a super balanced roster? Will you pay bigger money for some positions or others? Those are not just interesting questions for the GMs but something that will spice up the league as a whole.

The tricky part of course is to find a specific system with numbers that work well and are balanced. The TPE-differences between the various contract levels need to be somewhat significant so that they are actually worth pursuing, but they can’t be so high that some players are able to just pull away from everyone through them or to cause us new inflation problems.

As a first draft, these are the numbers I came up with:

3M - 3 TPE
4M - 6 TPE
5M - 9 TPE
6M - 11 TPE
7M - 13 TPE
8M - 15 TPE
9M - 17 TPE
10M - 20 TPE
11M - 22 TPE
12M - 25 TPE

So basically at the start of the season the entire league gets their Contract TPE. If you are on a 3M contract you get 3 TPE, if you are on a 7M contract you earn 13 TPE and if you are on a 12M contract (which would be the league max in my example), you would make 25 TPE.

Now I acknowledge that some of these numbers look quite big, so let me run through some possible concerns and problems and what I think about them in my next segment…

What are the challenges?


25 TPE for someone on the biggest contract compared to 3 TPE for someone on the lowest is a very significant number. Over a 10 year period that sums up to over 200 TPE which is just massive. So wouldn’t this just be a system that means that the rich get richer? A system where the people who already have a lot of TPE get even more while people on ELCs barely benefit? I think that’s a valid concern and something that we have to be very careful about when drafting such a system, but I don’t think this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.

For starters, nobody will spend their entire career on the same “tier”. Maybe you start at 3M but everyone will move into a higher tier eventually as long as they are active. Players in their prime will be worth more than those who aren’t there yet or who are already regressing, but they likely won’t be able to stay there for long. So ideally, the system would be very fluid and allow for a lot of movement.

However there are other possible issues regarding the “the rich get richer” point. For example, what happens if a rebuilding team with barely anyone on their roster decides to just pay their freshly drafted future superstar 12M right away for the next ten seasons with the goal to turn him into a Supersoldier, giving him a chance at TPE-levels that nobody else can get? Obviously we would want to avoid that and there are some easy rules that could prevent that. There are two that come to mind off the top of my head: 1) A career earnings cap, for example nobody can ever earn more than 200 TPE through this system. Or 2) we work with a set of minimum tiers, so you are only eligible for the 15+ TPE tiers once you hit at least 1500 TPE for example. You could still sign a contract for more than that, but are capped at a certain TPE tier until you break that threshold.

This specific example directly leads me into the next two big issues however:

Won’t people just be looking for exploits and metas here as they have been doing for everything else?
A more general re-work of our contract and financial system would likely be needed.

Regarding the first point: Yes, that is a potential problem and a risk that I definitely see. I don’t think that we should let the fear that people find new metas paralyze us and prevent us from trying new things, but we would have to be very thorough in setting up the rules for this to not make it exploitable. But it remains a risk for sure.

Regarding the second point, I think some accompanying rule changes would probably be needed in regards to our contract system. But I actually see that as a good thing that would contribute to things becoming more lively and exciting. Overall, the new system would be aimed at both giving GMs and players more options and more freedom so we might be able to relax some of the rules that we currently have that make contract very restrictive and of course we’d likely also need a higher salary cap so that GMs even have the necessary funds to actually use the new system.

And lastly, there is the issue of TPE-inflation. Depending on the exact set-up of the new system, people could be making an extra 200 TPE or more over the course of a career. I think this is manageable given that we have just seen a cut in available TPE and that this is also something that would be paid out over time, so a significant chunk of those 200 TPE would be paid out during a players regression years and not count towards their TPE-peak. We could also free up some of those TPE by taking them out of CW for example if we decided offsetting was necessary.

What do you think?

Alright this is my idea for now, what do you think about it? Do you have additional or alternative suggestions for some of the issues I spoke about or do you foresee problems with my suggestion that might have missed? Just let me know in this thread!

Evan Winter
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#2

This is a super creative idea. I'd love to see some people with more experience chime in, but I feel like this is something absolutely doable, if researched and implemented carefully.

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#3

I'd do it. My only concern, beyond the obvious TPE inflation and all that, is that the current cap for teams is pretty low for this kind of thing. Most people are still going to go for minimum because otherwise they cant fit the roster. Maybe thats's more of a symptom of lack of parity (needing to field a mega team to compete) but I dont really think parity is solvable.

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#4

I hadn't really thought of the tiers but Ive thought of something like this where everyone just gets a set amount of TPE for being under contract.  IAs and FAs wouldnt get it. Paying money for better "equipment" actually made sense (to a certain extent) but pro hockey players having to pay for "training" and "coaching"? That seems silly.  Like maybe the weekly training TPE could be tied in with the AC? You still have to show up, but if you do, you get it.

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#5

Counter argument: TPE goals as being part of contract negotiations.

Set expectations of participation? If player x meets y's goal then x gets bonus bucks or something?
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#6

12-20-2021, 10:57 AMGeekusoid Wrote: Counter argument:  TPE goals as being part of contract negotiations.

Set expectations of participation?  If player x meets y's goal then x gets bonus bucks or something?

dont we have these already? conditional contracts?

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#7

12-20-2021, 11:15 AMPremierBromanov Wrote:
12-20-2021, 10:57 AMGeekusoid Wrote: Counter argument:  TPE goals as being part of contract negotiations.

Set expectations of participation?  If player x meets y's goal then x gets bonus bucks or something?

dont we have these already? conditional contracts?


Do we?  Maybe just not as regular as I thought then.
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#8

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

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#9

The main problem I'd see with something like this is that you'd maybe unknowingly set up farm teams, where everyone goes to (sorry for this) WPG for a year or 2 to get a big TPE bump, then gets traded off to HAM/BUF for a handful of draft picks and a lower contract, since they've already got their bonus TPE in. It's an interesting idea, but I can see it getting broken pretty fast.

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#10

12-20-2021, 11:32 AMGeekusoid Wrote:
12-20-2021, 11:15 AMPremierBromanov Wrote: dont we have these already? conditional contracts?


Do we?  Maybe just not as regular as I thought then.

there was an issue a few seasons ago where we updated the rules to clarify in which season conditionals are paid.

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#11

12-20-2021, 01:12 PMPremierBromanov Wrote:
12-20-2021, 11:32 AMGeekusoid Wrote: Do we?  Maybe just not as regular as I thought then.

there was an issue a few seasons ago where we updated the rules to clarify in which season conditionals are paid.

I think that situation is exactly why people don't use conditional pay on contracts, because of how fucked TOR got

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#12

12-20-2021, 01:40 PMACapitalChicago Wrote:
12-20-2021, 01:12 PMPremierBromanov Wrote: there was an issue a few seasons ago where we updated the rules to clarify in which season conditionals are paid.

I think that situation is exactly why people don't use conditional pay on contracts, because of how fucked TOR got

when you play the most dangerous game, you either win or you lose

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#13

I like this idea, but I think the oppposite could help prevent exploits: have a minimum salary for TPE levels, preventing elite players from being underpaid, but still allowing room for salart negotiations.

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#14
(This post was last modified: 12-20-2021, 04:12 PM by Mook.)

12-20-2021, 03:39 PMBenpachi Wrote: I like this idea, but I think the oppposite could help prevent exploits: have a minimum salary for TPE levels, preventing elite players from being underpaid, but still allowing room for salart negotiations.

I think we already have that? but still get paid peanuts for being 2k TPE if you take minimum

EDIT: there is the scale. Make the minimum contracts higher

Tier 1 (<300 TPE) - $500,000
Tier 2 (300+ TPE) - $1,000,000
Tier 3 (500+ TPE) - $2,000,000
Tier 4 (700+ TPE) - $3,000,000
Tier 5 (1000+ TPE) - $4,000,000
Tier 6 (1300+ TPE) - $5,000,000
Tier 7 (1600+ TPE) - $6,000,000

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#15

Excellent and creative idea, of course would need more refining but would love to see this implemented with more rules/regulations to help stop exploiting as much as possible and maybe look at more numbers



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