Promotion/Delegation League Question
 

I posted this on reddit but only got a few responses so I thought I repost here and hopefully get more input. Alright so I’ve never made a league with promotion and I have a question. How should I handle the draft? I’ve seen posts where the draft can mess up the league. I was wondering if I could turn off the draft and have the players enter the league as free agents. If any of you have ever set up a league like this how did you do the draft and did it work well for you? Also feel free if you’ve set up a league like this before to comment other things that you think I should know about setting it up. Thanks!!

You can either have a shared draft or have each league use their own draft.

What you want to do depends a lot on how you setup your leagues and what you want to achieve. The main thing to consider is the talent difference between your leagues. You can do anything from all leagues being MLB equivalent to MLB > AAA > AA> etc. or whatever else you want. You can literally set the talent level (player creation modifiers) to whatever you want.

The draft isn’t going to “mess up” your league. You just need to set things up to your expectations/goals.

If you’ve got questions fire away…

Thanks for responding! I am pretty new to ootp so I don't know all of the in and outs of the game yet. Where do I go in the game to be able to adjust the talent level in the drafts?

The options are under "League Settings"- "Rules" - "Amateur Draft".

I like to set the drafts on different days, with the top tier league going first and then going every few days thereafter. Like Ktulu said, be sure to fix the player creation modifiers so they correspond to the league for which the players are created. Some people have the PCMs the same for all levels I think, but I make them different at each level.

In league setup go to the Players tab. Go down to the bottom and adjust the Sabermetric modifiers. They work like percentages, so you can do something like your top league at 1.000, the second league 0.900, the third 0.800 etc. (* If you have a shared draft this only applies to the initial player creation)

I'd suggest creating test leagues to figure out the balance you want. It's also important to set the financials up to achieve the balance you want. You probably don't want the best free agents signing in the lowest league, but at the same time promoted teams should be competitive. Media contracts are one way to kind of regulate things. You can also manually adjust things by giving promoted teams a cash bonus.

After you initially create the game with the leagues you want go to Game > Create Association. This is where you can decide whether you want a shared draft and how you want the order to go. Changing any of the roster rules will also sync them up across all leagues, basically overwriting the original individual league settings.

To enable Promotion/Relegation you have to go into each individual league settings and on the Options tab Enable pro/rel and select how many teams and where you want them to go. Make sure enable automatic promotion & relegation is checked (it should be by default), it works well.

* In general I would recommend using a shared draft because it gives the lower league teams a chance to be on a more even playing field.