Steve

I think what you are asking is "Can I use my next Season Salary Cap to sign players in the current season before they become Free Agents?"  
 
If so, then no.  It's a tricky angle for promotion teams.  What I did was let players linger at less than happy during my final weeks before the potential promotion knowing I would hopefully have a bit of extra pocket money to give them when the Season clock changed, but that only works for multi-year contracts.  
 
For those with expiring contracts, sometimes the best strategy (although it is quite risky) is to let them go and go back to them as Free Agents when you have the cash.  I've tried this and have sometimes been able to get them at a proportionally better salary and other times, they were drawn away by other teams. 
 
Another option is to start cutting/trading those players you know you won't need in the next tier to free up lower level cash and resign them with the extra proceeds before the end of the season.  Just don't wait too long; I had one guy take more than 5 days to decide and by then, the clock reset and he became a FA before he made a decision.  Also, this strategy requires a multi-season plan to have your contracts lined up correctly and your players aren't always that cooperative, haha!  

The rights expire at the end of season X, but you can only sign them to a contract during the silly season in the beginning of the year. This is going to be changed some time into the future.

If you hold a player's rights until Season X, do they expire at the beginning or end of Season X?

In my opinion that seems sort of broken, unless when training a specific skill, it improves 1/2-1/3 the speed of the non-specific training then I think it should stay as offense/general/defense. Another option could be to do it by player type. Ex. Training could be split into sniper/playmaker/two way/power forward/grinder/enforcer (for forwards and two way/offensive/defensive for defensemen) and sniper could specifically train shooting and skating, playmaker is passing and puck handling etc. Then to train face offs it could be two way type that trains in defense and faceoffs. Idk just an idea

Players taking faceoffs during games will develop their faceoff skill. Centers will also improve during training. But it improves slower than most other skills.
 
In a release not far from now (I hope) I'm going to add the possibility to train a specific skill of the managers choice for each player.

Yeah the Hattrick Gamemasters was what I was thinking about as well. Actually got in touch with Anders and he's taking a look into this matter and will know when he has something to say on the matter, how we move forward

I find that one of the issues with trading with human players is the lack of communication by most. If a trade is rejected, a counter offer or a message saying why they are not interested would be awesome.
 
Often I get a trade rejected and don't receive a counter offer or a reason why they are not interested. IF you don't want to move that player, make him unavailable or tell me what it would take or simply tell me I don't have anything you want for said player. This is something I miss from H-D, where there was some sort of negotiation and a active chat for this purpose. Here the game world chat is barely used and could help negotiate and keep in touch with other managers.
 
Also I had decent players available all season and had to trade them to CPU teams since no one  made offers or counter offers on them even though they were available almost form the start of the season.

If you don't want to jump up for that reason than you may be "waiting" for 3 or more seasons. Can't say I blame you either. So far as I know there isn't a game world that has gone on long enough to see it the most recent update has leveled the competition somewhat at the GHL level. Also pretty much no matter what there will, and should, be a gap between the best SHL teams and better GHL teams. However the gap as of current, thanks to some managers exploiting the AI, is rather excessive. A very good SHL team should only need a few high end players to be able to keep up when promoting in theory. Thanks to the AI trade abuse that happened in the past you currently need to completely redo your roster. I am really looking forward to several seasons down the road where the advantages from the trade abusing has gone away.
 
As for the user on holiday trades I would be behind a suggestion from the past of not letting the AI decide on trades for your team. Just have the trades sit and wait until the user gets back or is tossed from the team due to inactivity.

First point - I understand that, but in that case he should have played the way to demote to SHL, if his team was not good for GHL. About exploiting "user on holiday" - yes, that has to be stopped. But on the other hand, the time for becoming "On Holiday" is long enough so the player should be able to avoid that if he is active enough. After 10 or 15 games not logging in the game, and without possibility of setting lineup for many matches in future and without any control how backup players replace injured ones, it is impossible to succeed in any league. I said active managers...
 
Second point - yes, having some moderators/regulators would be fine. But for that Anders have to trust them, verify them (so they do not want to use this for their own benefit - for example agree to each other not to reject trades between themselves). And in game worlds with ~60 managers, I think it would be hard to find 4 that would like to do it and would have time to do that for a long time - because you might went into situation that all of them are not logging in anymore and it is again more work for Anders to solve it. For having some good game-masters (GM) or moderators, you would have to join all the worlds together or let such GM operating in all worlds.
I can imagine maybe a better way - have a button to report suspicious trade by anyone and then Anders and few GM enrolled from enthusiastic players, like rainsilent, to have access on all worlds and solve these issues by simply reverting trades where they agree on cheating or exploiting the CPU/Trade meter. If user has 3 suspicious trades, he can be banned from the game for some time or completely etc.

Maybe toss in some mods to check on CPU trades and accept/reject them as per 'League's decision'.
 
Anyway it's not easy to trade with human managers as well. Not many managers are up for it or ask the impossible. What I did notice is managers not wanting to trade for players they need and if they got traded with the CPU, they suddenly start trading with the CPU to get those players... And that's usually arranged within the first days. Coincidence? I don't think so.
 
I mean that's kinda frustrating in many ways. I had that a couple of times in the past now; without calling any names.

Well, that's three picks, all likely top-5, gone to the same team. All from trades with computers, and all with the same pattern - a bunch of bench warmers for a great pick. I guess it's not cheating as it's within the game mechanics, but one could never pull off any of those trades with a human manager. It's quite blatant abuse of being able to trade with computers, personally I don't think such trades should be possible.

I would love to have the Roster screen sortable.  For instance, being able to have all the centers, forwards, and defensemen sort by overall ability, age, ratings, contract length, cost, etc. 
 
Thanks,
Steve

I would love to have the Roster screen sortable.  For instance, being able to have all the centers, forwards, and defensemen sort by overall ability, age, ratings, contract length, cost, etc. 
 
Thanks,
Steve

I think the greed trait could and really should stay as there are players in real life that are willing to take noticeably less than other equivalent players and the "home team discount" is a real observable thing but the difference between loyalist and mercenary needs to be smaller for sure.
 
I don't know the current mathematical spread difference between Loyalist and Mercenary but for argument sake let us assume it is 50% meaning a Loyalist demands 50% of what a Mercenary would. I think it would be a lot more realistic at about 15%. I could do the rough math of the difference of what the current difference might be with the example I am about to provide but there is no actual way to show I am right however it is obviously a significantly higher percentage. So example time. One of the best shooters and overall players in the Biscuit GHL is a mercenary and demands close to 9 million. Using him as the basis of best players overall I can show the difference between what Loyalist would look like with the differences of 10 and 15% off.
 
10% of 9,000,000= 8,100,000
15% of 9,000,000= 7,650,000
For the heck of it I will add 3 more percentages: 12.5%, 17.5% and 20%.
12.5% of 9,000,000= 7,875,000
17.5% of 9,000,000= 7,425,000
20% of 9,000,000= 7,200,000
 
Personally I see 20% as a bit of an extreme but not so unrealistic that it isn't acceptable and should still be considered. However I do see 10% as too extreme the other way as in too small of a difference. That is just me though. How would this work with the 5 sets of the greed trait? Simple. With Loyalist at 10% and mercenary always at 0 the other three (Team player, professional and Individualist) would have to be 2.5%, 5% and 7.5% respectfully. With Loyalist at 12.5% the other three would have to be 3.125%, 6.25% and 9.375%. At 15%; 3.75%, 7.5% and 11.25%. At 17.5%; 4.375%, 8.75% and 13.125%. Finally at 20%; 5%, 10% and 15%.
 
Now this obviously will prevent too unrealistically low salary demands however how does this prevent very high offers from skewing the market causing things to go out of control? This acts as a grounding basis where the player demands are. The human managers can still offer higher than market value without distorting the market all together.

Foreign Affiliate Teams
 
I like the World structure of foreign leagues in GPHM now.  USA has AMHL and AMHL2 (similar to AHL and ECHL in real life); Sweden has SEHL, SEHL2, SEHL3 (similar to Elitserien, Allsvensken, and HockeyEttan in real life), so on and so forth.  Let's use the foreign teams as affiliates.
 
 
CPU manages minor league teams
 
A parent team in GHL/SHL/IHL/LIHL could have "control" over 1 or 2 minor league teams, for example in AMHL and/or AMHL2.  The human GM of the parent team can call up/send down players, and the CPU will be in charge of playing, coaching, developing the minor league teams.  That way you don't have to rely on another human to develop your players.

Currently though, it's kinda hard enough to try and get some trades done with actual managers...it'd be very hard to find someone to send our players to. Sorry if I've misunderstood what you guys were talking about in terms of the football type thing...haven't played that.
 
Also, we'd have to sorta trust that manager with our players right...training them correctly, playing them correct minutes, etc.
 
I'd rather have a system where we're in total control of our minor team...we could possibly even set our training, lineups, etc just like in our major league team, but it just won't have any real competition(game results just matter in terms of player development, not really about winning the Cup or anything). So that way, we're accepting full responsibility for our players.

I think it should be more dependent on individual player skill. One idea I think could be fun is you being able to choose between 2 or 3 league levels. And I like the idea of dumping our players into European leagues.

Exactly my concern. I don't necessarily trust other GMs with my players unless I know that they're experienced(at my level or more), which we obviously can't guarantee. I'd rather have my prospects in non-playable leagues, where I can send down/bring up players. I would obviously like to see how they're doing in terms of development/stats, etc.
 
What we could do is have sort of a parallel World(non-playable) where each of our minor teams would exist. If our teams promote/demote, our minor teams would do the same. One problem there is that we want that parallel World to sorta run like a real world, where teams will win/lose games...but then the promotion/demotion of the minor teams in accordance with our normal teams' promotion/demotion will not line up most of the time.
 
Just something I came up with on the spot, anyone got any ideas? The more we discuss and come up with solid propositions, the easier it'll be for Anders to implement them as he won't have to do as much in terms of the planning aspect of it.

That's why they're left behind most of the time. But the players know (especially the high overall ones) that free agency will get emptied sooner or later, so they will eventually get the money. And it's not quaranteed they will get long injuries every season, they might just be unlucky for few seasons and then be in game shape for 100% of the time some other season. That's why I think it's realistic they ask for the same money as others, that's what they would do IRL as well.

Just wondering, why would you do that as a player?

That's because we are in a transition phase towards an implemented Draft System. The draft system will increase the pool of available players and the foreign teams are used to keep the available player pool in check. Before the last update free agent list was way too big and basically ment you never had to trade. So try to look at the bigger picture and wait for the draft system to shake things up

The point of the trade deadline is so that you take care of such needed trades before it. This is what happens in RL as well.
 
One thing that can be done is to make players talk contract extensions a while before playoffs, so that there's more room to maneuver even without trades in playoffs.

I have 202 regulation and 13 OT wins 

This is a great idea and this feature actually already is in the backlog. Like your ideas!

So, we've been having this following idea with my friends for a while. Being able to easy and quick compare players to each other (without all the hazzle and math it requires now) so I threw together a few scetches for a "compare players" suggestion".
 
First up is the compare screen itself:
 


 
So in the compare screen you can have 2 or more players, with their ratings or basic info, contract etc. laid out next to each other. Stronger stats / better contract are being highlighted in green and worse in red with the differense shown in numbers in between. If more players are added that 2, then the color will cut halfway through the player block.
 
When you click the add player button, it takes you to the following screen:
 
 
There you first select the League, then the team and finally the player you want to add to the compare. (Could also have a hotkey for your own team.)
 
Also second option for the compare screen could be their stats laid out horizontally, where you could then sort them stat by stat by clicking the stat name at the top. (A bit like you see now in your roster screen, but with only the players you've selected, and being able to sort).
 
So, what you think about the idea? How would you implement it? (I know the pictures aren't the best, just something I threw together in 20 mins.)