lower limits on reserve rosters can work

[ra7c7er]

I've been fiddling with limits on reserve rosters for a while and I've finally found something that not only eliminates a lot of the sign and release but also has teams using the reserve rosters decently.

Currently I have reserve rosters set to 15.

My league settings

No amateur draft
Default FA creation

Just eliminating the amateur draft does a lot to help. It seems the teams sign from FA more for need then the draft. So you don't have teams with all pitchers or hitters in the reserve roster.

Nearly all of the teams carry 10-15 reserve roster guys. And most have a pretty even split between hitters and pitchers. The few that don't I believe are because they have coaches/scouts that prefer one more then the other. My league still has a couple teams that struggle with the reserve roster but that is more due to having extremely low budgets because of curmudgeon owners.

All in all the league works out great.

[Rain King]

One thing that bothers me about "default FA creation" is that I don't really know much about the talent coming into the league. Do you feel like it is creating similar players to what a draft would be creating (i.e. age & talent)? Something I have messed around with is similar to your setup but instead of the default free agents creating an independent "feeder" (i.e. college or high school) league that houses young players for a year and then sends them into the free agent pool (using roster age maxes).

[ra7c7er]

Originally Posted by Rain King

One thing that bothers me about "default FA creation" is that I don't really know much about the talent coming into the league. Do you feel like it is creating similar players to what a draft would be creating (i.e. age & talent)? Something I have messed around with is similar to your setup but instead of the default free agents creating an independent "feeder" (i.e. college or high school) league that houses young players for a year and then sends them into the free agent pool (using roster age maxes).

I think it's actually pretty good. It's just a lot less players, only two per team. I'm using indy leagues so the overall talent is lower for me then what you'll see if you're using ML leagues. Also the talent change seems to be a bit more with indy leagues then ML leagues but maybe I'm just seeing things.

The only problem I'm having with the leagues right now is that default FA creation is 2 players per team and retirement has been much higher then that. Even after 12 seasons my save is still averaging more then 100 retirements a year (I only have 44 teams in my save so that 88 created players). It's mostly because of the mass retirement you get between the 2-4th seasons but the FA pool never is able to recover. Even the 12th season in my save had 91 retirements to only 88 incoming players. Matt has told me he's going to work on it though. So while I might be out this league (which sucks because this is the best I've ever done with a team in 3 years of owning OOTP) overall it's going to help make the game better.

I'm going to start my next save with a max age limit for player creation set to 32 (instead of the defaut which creates up to 41) to see how that changes things. I'm thinking if I can spread out the first few years of retirement. The retiring to incoming player disparity might drop significantly if not be reversed.