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I sincerely can't see whats the big problem with auction sales, if it's working good for players it can also work good for picks in my opinion. But anyways, adding a buyout option might eliminate a case in which picks are being sold for "too much"- the highest price for a pick will be lets say 1M, the moment someone offers 1M (or any other price chosen by the devs) the pick will be sold to him immediately.

A friend of mine also offered a system in which every pick will have it's own (chosen by the devs) price and the selling team will only get to choose wheather or not to sell the pick and not the price, and the first team which is willing to buy it and has enough money win the pick, I personally think this option is way worse than an auction and will open up much more cheating possibilities.

Last edited by Yotamnor at 10/4/2012 10:47:22 AM

I sincerely can't see whats the big problem with auction sales

It opens a possibility to transfer money between teams.

if it's working good for players it can also work good for picks in my opinion.

It can, if it follows the same rules and receives as much attention from the users. As I wrote (in not so many words), the chances of controlling the fairness of the system depend greatly on selecting between an open market and a closed one. If the market were closed (own league only), the only eyes on the sales would basically be the league mates. All other control would need to be automatic.

What you need in order to put more eyes on the transactions is an open market. Even then, it is pretty difficult to judge what a fair price for the first pick or the Nth pick would be. I guess the market could in some sense decide it by itself, although what we are seeing with staff bidding (see level 5+ coaches) is not very promising. So, it would perhaps make sense to introduce a level of blinding into the system. You would then not know whose pick you are bidding on, only that it is e.g. the first pick overall. That removes any motivation to bid higher than necessary. Obviously, any system where you could draft outside your own league would be problematic with the current scouting system. Should be doable one way or another.

But anyways, adding a buyout option might eliminate a case in which picks are being sold for "too much"- the highest price for a pick will be lets say 1M, the moment someone offers 1M (or any other price chosen by the devs) the pick will be sold to him immediately.

A maximum does not keep anyone from cheating if the money is good. If it isn't, why would anyone sell for the maximum or for even less? I'm not saying this is completely impossible, just that I don't see how it would really work in a reasonable way.

A friend of mine also offered a system in which every pick will have it's own (chosen by the devs) price and the selling team will only get to choose wheather or not to sell the pick and not the price, and the first team which is willing to buy it and has enough money win the pick, I personally think this option is way worse than an auction and will open up much more cheating possibilities.

Something like this might actually work better in terms of preventing cheating. You could perhaps structure it such that the 16th pick overall has the chance to buy (or trade picks for a price) the first pick (if available) first. If they are not interested, then the 15th pick and so on. And next, you consider the second pick and so on. The problem is that building such a structure gets complicated. And perhaps more importantly it's just not so trivial to actually set good prices.


While sales or trades of draft picks is realistic, I'm not sure what purpose it would serve in this game. The positive thing is that it would allow a little more chances of rebuilding for teams that do well every season. Now they have little to gain in the draft in any active league, which makes the draft rather uninteresting. And perhaps it offers a steadier income for those teams that get good bids but are not interested in the draft (although why wouldn't they be?). So, there would at least be a bit more strategic freedom (usually a good thing). But the sales issue is not without problems, as seen above.

As you already saw by yourself, the auction option is the most simple and do able system to make, and although there are less "witnesses" to watch over the market there are also less potential cheaters and a lot less probability of having 2 teams with some sort of connection that will lead them into cheating for one another.

Also, the best witnesses for cheating in the players market are the league members of the cheater- as they get a notice for every transfer going on inside the league, if the league members will get a notice for "pick sales" aswell I believe the picks market will be "cleaner" then the players market.

there are also less potential cheaters and a lot less probability of having 2 teams with some sort of connection that will lead them into cheating for one another.

This is generally not true, although in a randomly chosen league there would probably be no problem. Then again, there are probably no cheaters anyway in a randomly chosen league. The problem remains that pricing could not be free.

Missed part of the discussion, still I want to come back to one of your earlier points:

"... always be cheating ... no reason not to develop the game ..."

I wholeheartedly agree BUT - the benefit of a development has to outweigh the gain for possible cheating.

You can buy any player AFTER the draft if a team is willing to part with him. There´s a HUGE market with an enormous variety of players in all price ranges. Therefore the gain for the "buying" team is probably close to non-existent if we consider the huge gambling factor in acquiring ANY player based on a scouting report. The chance to fail is huge (different from the TL, where the chance to fail is inside the buying manager´s head only).

The great benefit would be on the sellers side, who can make money without risking anything, they don´t have to spend any scouting points, they simply can generate money out of virtually nothing.

In addition, the option for cheating is obvious. It´s there and hard to deny. It´s a money transfer tool, which is VERY hard to overview or to check for the GM staff. You either make fixed prices, if there´s no buyer, there´s no sale, first one to bid wins. Or you make acutions, which is a bad idea as mentioned before.

So although your suggestion is one of the best concerning selling draft picks, it opens more bad ways of using it than it does good from my point of view.

Another part to take in account- pick sales can only occur at the end of the season, which makes it a very uncomfortable way to transfer money between teams because there is only one chance every season to to do that- This, and everything else I mentioned in the previous post I believe can show that cheating with picks sales is a lot harder than cheating with players.

As mentioned before - cheating with players happens in public, with plenty possible watchers taking care and intervening via Cheating Ticket.

There´s an activity low at the end of each season concerning users who are currently not involved in the playoffs, so the amount of "real" monitoring of what goes on with draft picks comes down to maybe a handful coaches at best per league. That´s VERY few people to realize shady moves.

But those people are the most reliable cheater reporters and probably the ones who normally report about cheating in players transfers- The active managers who take part in the playoffs and get notifications for how much every player in their league is sold/bought for.

If you'll read my first post you'll understand that just being able to sell your darfty is not enough.

Anyways, you keep saying that this feature will open up a lot of new ways to cheat but that's it, you don't give any reason why or how.
You don't even criticize the actual feature and what it can bring to the game, all you do is just invalidating it simply because of the unbased assumption that the new market might lead to new cheating possibilities.