I'm wondering if we could flip the default column sort, I know its a little thing but you have to hit it twice to bring up what u want?

Can you give me an example?

If you hit the button to sort by time remaining, it has all the guys who have never been bid on at the top, and all the guys who have been bid on at the bottom. Hit the button a second time, and the guys you'd actually be interested in come to the top.

Oh. Yeah. I've kind of tuned that out by now. It's probably a lower priority at the moment, but if you throw it into the sandgestion box I think it's a good suggestion.

So I'm confused now. Are teams allowed to bid even if they're over their roster limit?
The reason this sucks is if you prepared for FA based on the bolded part (like I did), then you are at a distinct disadvantage compared to teams that did not follow the cutdown rule.
Now I'm bidding against people with 65+ players already on their roster?
I'm trying to win a starter's services while other people can decide if they want a player for depth, then cut someone later?
That's just plain shitty.

No, they're not allowed to bid unless they're at 53 or below. Right now, they can be over 53 if they're not bidding on anybody, which is primarily just the few people who for some reason aren't managing their rosters yet. We need to fix that, but it's an outlier because it's only a problem for people who take over a team and then stop playing or otherwise disappear.

That's what I thought, I just wanted to make sure I didn't screw myself by following the rules.
This process will probably last weeks. There is no urgency to bid on a player until the countdown timer puts you in danger of losing him.
I have a predetermined number of players targeted between the two leagues. I've had to bid on exactly one so far.
There needs to be a random or multiplier FA signing effect.
That is, to say, there would be more urgency to sign players if there was a 7% chance that a FA would accept it's current bid.
The multiplier effect could be something like after a bid reaches the average number for a player at that position, a bid of 30% or higher automatically wins the player. Sort of the whole "they rolled out the red carpet and I couldn't say no" thing.
I understand wanting to avoid bid sniping, but I'll keep bumping in $1 increments and waiting three days to get a player without overpaying.
Now,if I knew that I could go offer Richard Sherman 30% over his current bid and automatically win his services?
That would have been done, and just like in real life, everyone would say after the fact how much higher than that they would have gone.
Since it's not like that, I'll just bid up $1 if he gets to less than 3 hours left.

Input taken.

It sounds like people don't mind a randomness and a little mystery in the signing process. Anyone want to make a counterargument against that?

I won't argue against it, but it will change my current approach a lot.

I think we're down the road this year enough that we really can't change it mid-stream.

Agreed.

I think you'd be better off avoiding anything that's actually random. I wouldn't be opposed to some algorithm that speeds up the process though, like the "buy now" for X% over the current price idea.

Or have the remaining bid time be dependent on how much the last bid exceeded the previous bid (or on how high the last bid was, without regard to what the previous bid was).

Or have the "buy now" price be set based on a current bid but then drop as the "time remaining" clock counts down.

I'm afraid that if it's random, people who end up getting poor random draws will get pissed off. If it's an understandable algorithm, they'll at least understand why they lost out on someone.

I think this should be the least realistic thing about the whole game. I would think a silent FA bidding, where you put what you would bid on the guy and submit it, then it signs the players based on this. This would take out the bidding up guys one dollar, and it would make you really think hard about what that guy would do for your team. It wouldn't be where you sign all your guys really cheap and then explode in free agency taking all the good guys so your team is stacked 2 and 3 deep.

Yeah, that thought process occurred with me, too.
Ultimately, I came down on the side of " If you know the % probability, it's understandable.".
I wouldn't want the probability so high that people were anticipating getting the random draw, just enough to know there is a small chance that your bid could be accepted, so don't just sit back and wait.

This gives me some ideas for the future that I think would be interesting. Have something of a "set the market" period, where people could do a secret process of showing interest in players, and giving an amount of what they would pay for said players. After that, you could take a gross average of the market value for a player, and then set a starting market range, with some sort of an option that is higher (a rather significant % above the market price) than that for people to fight for them in an overpay option. People that try to lowball in setting the market to lower the average with the plan to try to then jump to the buy now option later could offend the player and he won't even accept bids on them, and people that put in a really high price to try to drive the market way up could find themselves somehow forced out of other players because they had heard that their money was already tied up elsewhere...something like that.


After that, for players that no one wants to pay the premium for and get fast, people could bid on the player as we do now, with people haggling over the price over a long term, even $1 outbids, but already above the initial market price that their agent set for them in the secret dealings before.