Digital Sportspage Blog

I’ve spent a decent part of the afternoon playing the WWSM manager. There are a lot of positive improvements to the game, which I’ll post on later. However, if the demo reflects the final release regarding the MLS, at this point it is almost unplayable.

This is because of the problems with player salaries and the waiver draft. They’ve implemented a hard MLS salary cap (with designated players) of 1.99 million dollars, even though the salary cap increased this year to 2.1 million dollars. This affects clubs such as DC and LA, which have salary cap figures of about 2.05 million in the game. (This doesn’t help New York Red Bulls, which has what is likely an erroneous cap figure of about 2.3 million in the game, forcing them to cut an important player or two to start the season.)

To get under the salary cap, these teams have to cut players to get under. And the AI has a tendency to cut some of their best players to get under the cap number. I’ve played twice, once with DC United and once with the LA Galaxy, and here are the players that I’ve seen cut (* means they were cut during both games):

Juan Pablo Angel *
Chris Armas
Brian Ching
Jim Curtin
Dwayne DeRosario
Danny Dichio *
Maurice Edu *
Facundo Erpen
Fred
Cobi Jones
Luciano Emilio
Quavas Kirk
Pablo Mastroeni
Clint Mathis*
Ronnie O’Brien*
Dominic Oduro*
Ben Olsen
Daniel Osorno
Eddie Robinson
Carlos Ruiz*
Peter Vagenas
Marvell Wynne
Abel Xavier

If you’re not familiar with MLS, these are all all-stars or former all-stars. To see them waived before the start of the season is absurd.

After the waiver draft, things can get worse. Playing with LA, I selected Ben Olsen and Ronnie O’Brien from the draft. I neglected to change squad numbers (which is what adds them to the MLS roster). Ben Olsen, for some strange reason, was making 6,000,000 a year. Looking at other MLS clubs, the following players were also making six million (and were NOT designated players):

Shalrie Joseph
Jim Curtin
Kerry Zavagnin

These three are above-average players. But worth six million a year? Never.

They’ve also got the majority of the teams in the 2007 CONCACAF Champions Cup wrong, omitting Pachuca and DC United, as well as all of Central American and Caribbean squads.

I hope that this is an early demo and that this will be fixed for the final release. However, the demo is usually very close to the final release, especially with regards to data issues. If you’re looking to play with an MLS team, you may want to stay away from WWSM 08 until these issues get fixed.