[Westheim]

Yeah, if you had a system, in which AI agents would show actually believable reactions in a scenario like OOTP with as many environmental variables as that game can have collide - ...

Let's just take the "soft skills" like greed, leadership, desire to win, etc. There's six of them in 16, and they have like what? Five different states? So there's already 15,625 different "character" combos for a *single* player. There's 25 players on the roster... you do the math. I'm not a programmer, I can make Excel calculate a sum, that's it. But the possibilities are virtually infinite, and I guess that current-era computers are not able to handle the interactions of 25 players on a team (or 750 players in an MLB-size league!), and there is an awful lot that goes into relations between actual human beings, including but not limited to what aftershave they're using, what music they're listening to, and whether they're dragging their stupid kid into the clubhouse every day.

If there was any system which could generate believable, human reactions in these circumstances, and you would have realistic, believable means to influence these players and staff, and that starts with things like

* pat your rookie shortstop on the back for having a 3-for-4 day
* yell at your leftfielder for forgetting how many outs there were
* explain to that lefty specialist why exactly he's not a closer

then I'd be for it, because then there's actually a point to it. You could work with the system. You can tell a guy to change this, and explain a guy why this is and this is not a thing.

But instead you're watching your 11 little blue-clad men take a 2-0 lead over Örebro SK ten minutes into the game, and then blow it in overtime because your central defender chose to have a bout of selective temporary blindness and let some goon slip though and he scored to make it 2-2, and on a whim everybody's pissed and everybody's morale is *literally* "abysmal". And there's no other thing to it. You can't yell at the guy, and you can't say "Well, that was bad luck, we're better than that", because the system is for the very most part going in only one way, and you get slapped in the face with stuff you have no control over.

I haven't played OOTP 17, I'm just reading along and waiting for the patch cycle to end (partly since I only play this one league and after 5,000 hours you don't want it to end on some random stupid error that releases all players and replaces them with dancing broomsticks), but OOTP 16 gives you literally ZERO opportunity to talk to a player. They come after you to bitch and tell you that you suck and don't cherish their existence, but you can't even tell them that they suck too and that's why they're not playing.

FM (Touch) will give you some options to respond when some guy is complaining about not playing, but I find that one sensible option is missing. I can't tell somebody that he's not playing because there's a guy on the team that plays his position better and that he needs to work harder and I need to see results of that even in training. I can either make a promise to play him (and then don't, ramping up the level of bitching) or different variations of telling him to bugger off. And everybody's pissed, all the time, including me, because it's a stupid uphill battle that you can't win. You're just bombarded with complaints, everybody's morale is abysmal, and then the death spiral is in motion, and seven losses later you're fired - again.

These systems have to work in two ways, but even if they do, it will degrade into the same conversations, the same response options, always. Even now FM Touch will always give the five same response options for that interview question where a former player of your team says this and that about the current incarnation of your team, or a player on that team. Always the same. Reflexively click option #2 and move on. It doesn't matter, and it's still tedious.

We can't have a meaningful system right now, because current-era PC's assumingly can't handle it, and the systems that are available are unrealistic or annoying or tedious, or any combo of these, or even worse than that.