With the start of a new year comes the start of the coach poaching season. This is a new thing for new players and an easily-forgotten thing for easily-forgotten players, so I'm going to take this opportunity while I'm mildly intoxicated and pretending to pay attention to my Shadowrun session to recap what coaches are and what this whole poaching business is.
1: Wait, what do coaches do again? Coaches are a small hierarchy of non-player characters on your team who collectively provide a bonus to the rate at which your players progress towards their future ratings; the head coach counts for 50% of this, the offensive and defensive coordinators count for 30% on their half of the roster, and your position coaches count for 20% of the position group that they manage. Your head coach also has two traits, their Offensive and Defensive Style, strategic vibes that drive how your team auto-plans and supply about 10% of your playbook's plays.
2: Dang, Beans, that sounds kinda important? It does, doesn't it? But is it? Obviously, it's not nothing, but in all the seasons we've had of MFN, the impact on player progression has never been substantial enough to be noticed. But it's surely there. Maybe. As far as offensive and defensive playstyles, the importance of that depends on how often you use autoplanning; if you don't, then it's fairly inconsequential, you can play any style you want even without that 10%.
3: So if it's not important, then why care? Because it basically costs you nothing. You pay your coaches out of a seperate pot of money, they sit off to the side, and occasionally you mind them for part of the offseason. It's a maintenance task, pure and simple. You only need to ever replace them if they retire, if you want to push them out, or...
4: Beans, stop rambling. What's poaching? During the Early Free Agency server sims, you are able to offer contracts to coaches on other teams to come join yours instead. They won't do this for just anyone, however, as they're all career-minded individuals. You must offer them both a higher salary than they're being paid right now and the new job must be further up the hierarchy. Position coaches can become coordinators or head coach, coordinators can become head coach, head coaches cannot be poached.
5: Are there any limits to this? Yes. As mentioned, there's no poaching head coaches. Also, coaches are only able to sign one contract per season from anyone. If a coach has been newly hired or given an extension by their team, they can't be poached by anyone else; if they got poached, they can't be poached again until next year. Also, once we get through
Early Free Agency, poaching ends for the year and whatever openings you have left need to be filled from the general pool.
6: Beans, this sounds pretty inconvenient and needlessly antagonistic. Yeah, it is. But it's the nature of the game, unfortunately, and we're stuck with it. Different people have different opinions on the system. Some people suggest giving opposing owners a heads-up before poaching their coaches, but that's too messy to be a requirement. If you notice someone's getting poached heavily or seems stressed about it, or if someone joins the league and is figuring out their team's situation, maybe don't swamp them with poach claims.
Basically, be reasonable about it, don't be a jerk, and remember that it's part of a game and not a personal attack. You won't win or lose because of your coaches.
