Posts tagged "Rookie Contracts"
New settings allow you to disable the salary cap and have more control over rookie contracts
Previously you could choose between a soft cap and a hard cap. Now you have an additional options: no salary cap.
Previously rookie contracts were based on whether you used a soft or hard cap. For a soft cap, there was a predefined rookie scale. For a hard cap, there was no predefined salary, drafted players got signed like any other players (except in ZenGM Hockey where there was a predefined rookie scale here too). Now you get some options to control this. You can set if you want a predefined rookie salary scale or not, and you get some control over what exactly that scale is.
That's the big picture summary. More details follow. First, about the salary cap:
Improved identification of rookie contracts in real players leagues
The new player mood system introduced last year is working pretty well overall, but there are some small issues with it. One is related to a mood bonus given to players on rookie contracts, where it says "Eager to sign first non-rookie contract" and gives a big +8 bonus. This gives BBGM something like the NBA's restricted free agency, because it results in your drafted players being less likely to refuse to re-sign. (For FBGM and ZGMH, it only applies if you diasble the hard cap setting.)
Some people have noticed that the bonus was not correctly applied for some real players in historical leagues. Why? Because it was kind of hacky code. It identified "rookie contract" by comparing a player's draft year, the expiration year of their contract, and the length of a default rookie contract for their draft round.
This works fine for random players, since their rookie contracts all are generated by the game and all follow that same formula for length. But it's a bit tricky for real players leagues, or for custom league files, because they may have different length rookie contracts.
Today I have changed how rookie contracts are stored in the game. There is now an explicit rookie flag in the contract, so a player contract looks like this internally if it is a rookie contract: