The reason for this approach is that it's completely transparent, and also prevents bid sniping. If we have a blind close date and we've got 100 leagues active (or 1,000...), we'll constantly be getting complaints from conspiracy theorists. So our goal was to design a system where if you want a guy, you have every chance to go get him, and it's not subject to who can squeeze in the last bid before a deadline. (I wonder why e-bay doesn't go with this type of system. I bet it would produce higher bids.)

If you want a guy, you can't let him sit there with an offer in front of him. You have to bid. But if you bid, you're investing precious dollars that can't be used elsewhere so you'd better want the guy. You can try to bluff and drive someone's price up, but it would be a very risky and inefficient move for the most part.

Free Agency bidding should be private. We should be able to see everything that is shown now, but not who has the highest bid in, IMO.

+1

Why?

I'm not necessarily against it, I'm just wondering why that would be better.

Because people will intentionally target players specific owners are.

zeke is right.

The real NFL doesn't work that way, though.

Players will go to one team, get an offer, and then another team will outbid that offer.

the offer amount yes, but it doesn't necessarily know who the offer is coming from.

Clay's concerns about sniping were also warranted.

I've seen too many people fly under the radar for a day, only to have multiple bids rocket them up to believe otherwise.

I still think getting rid of the damn clock takes care of this. You can just sort by the clock time and know everyone that's rec'd a bid. You can even wait until there's an hour or so left and then toss another bid in.

Nobody knows when/how a FA is going to make up their minds, it makes no sense to me at all to have a running clock that tells everyone exactly who's getting offers and when.

I know the goal was 'complete transparency', but there's entirely too much of it. There's really no incentive at all to have done your homework here.

EDIT: Even if CD wants to make sure that there's 3 days after each bid before it closes (which is way way too much time, IMO), there's still no reason at all to make it obvious when that three days expires. You can have your consistent time periods without also having a running clock alongside for everyone to sit there and stare at.

I think, at the very least, the timer should be reduced to 24 hours.

This rewards the more active teams who are monitoring everything.

I agree 100% with this as well.

3 days is just way too long. 48 hours at the most.

I had Andre Brown as one of my first bids and sat there and watched everyone ignore him for two and a half days. Was sure I was going to land him cheap.

Gets bid up about an hour ago. :mad:

Get used to it.

It's going to get much much worse over the next few days.

All of this.

I feel like the hours I spent researching were a pretty big waste of time. I'm not bitter, I knew the rules going in. But I don't think the system as it stands today is optimum.

I think every player (or at least MOST players) should have an immediate signing threshold. If you bid over $300 for Sherman he's yours. The actual number shouldn't be public knowledge.

Or perhaps an algorithm that assigns a percentage chance for an immediate signing that increases in probability as the bids get higher (a guy has a .0001% chance of immediately signing for $1, but a 75% chance of signing immediately for $250).

There needs to be an incentive to bid early and often. Otherwise the snipers have all the leverage.

I also think the whole system is a bit too transparent. To best illustrate what really happens in the NFL, the waters need to be muddied a bit, IMO. An NFL GM has an agent and other GMs for sources, neither of which may be telling them the whole story. I'm not sure how you implement that into the game, but I think it would be an improvement.