I've decided, as I go through a season with one of my teams, to catalog and post in this forum all the things I think can/should be done to make HBD a better game. Suggestions will come as I reach each step in the season; for example, the next post will be about ballpark selection. Some will be simple, others nearly impossible to execute. Many of you will disagree with some or all of my suggestions, and that's fine; please register those here if you think it's worth it, I'm open to debate.

To be clear, I love HBD as it is; just trying to make it more perfect.

Thanks for any input you want to provide.

-- Choosing a ballpark

1. The rationale for nerfing the ballparks didn't resonate with me. The game is fundamentally unrealistic, and that's OK-- I mean, we have a hard cap in HBD. The ballparks should go back to their original extremes, in my opinion.
2. Very tiny thing-- to allow those worlds that use an MLB theme to maintain the AL/NL split properly, Arizona should be made playable in the South. This allows MLB-themes leagues to keep AL and NL as they should be, instead of having to move one of the 5 NL West teams to the AL.

--Budgeting

1. New owners should be able to push training to 20. A wide enough majority of owners run 20 training so that it's an unfair barrier to new owners to have to play with 15 for a season.
2. Your departing free agents demands should be accurate at the budgeting phase. Currently the dollars are accurate but the signability is not; you should know whom you can sign before you commit your budget.
3. Radical idea that many will disagree with-- there should be no penalty for transferring among player, prospect and coach pools. In my opinion the only reason to keep those separate at all is to ensure the $6M floors for coaching and prospect. This allows greater player flexibility and decision making through the regular season.

-- Free agent re-signing

1. Free agent demands are ridiculously low. If you're keeping a superstar for 15 seasons you should have to pay something close to open market value. It's not terrible that Jhonny Guerrero was always willing to re-sign with San Diego; it's terrible that he did so at half his market value. This is a hard re-program but an important one.
2. Trivial annoyance-- there is no reason why you should only be able to re-sign 5 minor league free agents at a time.

-- Coach re-hiring (and coach hiring)

1. Coaches should have monetary demands only (MikeT23 wrote about this idea years ago). The option to re-hire and even hire a major league coach at a major league salary to coach in AA would make coach hiring far more strategic than it is now. Similarly, being able to promote a minor league bench coach with a good fielding rating to Fielding Coach, impossible now, would open the strategy of developing your own Fielding Coaches through the system.

Here are some UI/UX thoughts at this point in the game. I'm bad at forum'ing, but I'll try to keep coming back throughout our season:
-- Arbitration: Why do I have to go back out to the main arbitration page after each offer. I'm going to offer each of my guys who are up for Arb who I haven't already cut. There should be a way to arrow down to the next guy without having to click back and forth.
-- Coach Hiring: Same sort of idea, there needs to be a "withdraw offer and return to main page" button.
-- More Coach Hiring: How about being able to filter out coaches who've already signed on your negotiations page so you can focus on the levels/roles you're still trying to fill?

I've thought for a veeeery long time, the current system of Coach Hiring is a massive waste of time. Feels like a make work project. I have no idea what the original programming idea was, but it seems like something to do to occupy any owners who aren't busy at the same time pursuing free agent players.

The ONLY functional aspect of it would seem to be that if you cultivate an excellent coaching staff, it can help attract max level free agents. Neat idea. How many times in real life does a free agent say "I came here because I like the coach?"

Similarly, how many times a year does a coach at any level of ball leave a position just to see if he can get a better one elsewhere? Probably in the minors but I'm guessing it rarely and only happens in the majors if a guy gets fired.

We should have the option to auto-rehire all our coaches, full stop. Like in real life. Fire the ones we hope we can get better at. Only drawback might be that some could end up with 99 rating coaches that way, but has that been proved to have any tangible benefit on gameplay anyway?

--Free Agency

1. Minor league free agent signing is excruciating. The retirement rules for minor leaguers should be gently tweaked so that there are more minor league free agents available (ie, fewer retirements).
2. Communications around minor league free agency are terrible. It seems to tell you you're being outbid if someone else gets to the same offer as you before you do; simple mod to make sure that you always get the "quick notice, I'm headed to a thinner organization" email when that's the case.
3. With all the damn minor league free agents you need to sign, you sometimes get to more than 50 "targets" and they don't get seen on the "Free Agent Targets" page. No reason that page should have a limited size; if concerned about loading time, increasing the limit to 100 would help.
4. Small thing which might require more programming than it's worth-- a communicated list of ALL type A and type B free agents, not just your own, would help a little.

--Coach Hiring

1. See coach re-hiring above for my concerns.
2. We need clarity about what the major league coaches actually do. Does anyone think they know what the base coaches do? Or the bullpen coach? Does the major league bench coach do anything if your "argumentative" is set to zero and you don't have any developing players in the majors?
   • The above is a HUGE ask. It involves querying and carefully reading the code and determining what the coaches actually do, not what the dev team thought they did 20 years ago as we got conflicting information back then.
3. I respectfully disagree with the coach hiring nihilists-- there is a choice between spending money on minor league player development and major league player acquisition that coach hiring enables.