Originally Posted by Pelican (Post 5056851)

Not to belabor this, but my preference is for trade discussions to be just that - a conversation that takes place, back and forth, until a deal is reached, or not reached. Maybe it’s my short attention span, but to make a legit proposal, and then wait a couple days for any response, and then my reply shifting the terms, and then - a few days later - their reply again making changes. What a waste of time, for those of us who play out games. It’s as if you are dealing by snail mail with a GM who won’t pick up the phone or meet you in person. And then the player you want gets dealt to another team in the meantime. I don’t see any of that as realistic. It’s “hard” only because of the delays in the back-and-forth. I don’t think the terms of the deals are materially different. But then I do have “house rules” about not unduly “cheesing” conventional negotiations, to take advantage of the AI in ways that are unrealistic.

Originally Posted by Thegman0492 (Post 5052118)

Dear OOTP,

I have almost every OOTP since 17. I see that since then, you have put a lot of effort towards the graphics. This is a huge mistake. The coaching staff and players should be the main focus. You see, I use to play this game with overall ratings. But those would change just by logging out and logging back in. This is a huge bug that you have never fixed. So now I play with no ratings shown at all. I look at player stats and scouting. However, when one day, a my scout tells me that this guy is a starter and a day later, tells me that he is on the bubble for a bench spot, I get extremely annoyed. Also, you have ratings for coaches but those do not seem to matter either, which is also extremely annoying. To add to that, the Guardians, who never spend money, go out and get Xander Bogaerts! What?!?!

I do not want you to turn into MLB the Show. They have great graphics and animations, but is not realistic at all. They also focus so much on presentation that they have so many bugs that they just ignore.

The most realistic game that I have played is Madden 11 and NCAA Football 11 and on that game, Mark Sanchez was a NFL MVP. It has gotten worse since.

Why can we not get realistic games. We have the AI so what is the problem? Stop focusing on making MLB the Show and make a realistic, statistical game. PLEASE!

Thank you for your time!
Nathan

Originally Posted by pauwoo (Post 5057159)

Ignore everything above this post. I have it on good authority that the game will be fixed next week. Likely by Tuesday. Definitely by Wednesday.

Thursday at the latest.

Originally Posted by Pelican (Post 5056851)

Not to belabor this, but my preference is for trade discussions to be just that - a conversation that takes place, back and forth, until a deal is reached, or not reached.

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough (Post 5057578)

To be honest, if people want realism, then this needs to be the basis of the trading model. This is largely how it works in real life, and the "easy" mode in OOTP is closer to this than the "hard mode," which is unrealistic and doesn't truly model how things work in real life.

In real life, not every trade is worked out in a single discussion, but general managers typically talk and communicate directly with each other, and it's often live, nearly in real time, or with multiple touch points in a single day. Generally speaking, they don't submit a trade offer in a "suggestion box" and then blindly wait around for answers. It's an often immediate or ongoing conversation where all sorts of options are discussed, and it's not perceived as a "bait-and-switch" when those different options are offered or changed. GMs also don't suffer a reputation hit because they initiated a preliminary offer but then discussed more options. GMs talk about different players and discuss potentially adding or changing players in the deal all the time. That's not considered bad. It's just part of the negotiations.

The "easy" mode in OOTP is unrealistic in its own ways too, but if you combine it with a higher trade difficulty and the right AI talent evaluation settings, then you get something closer to real life. If we could build on this "real-time" and more conversational approach, and improve it by making it more closely mirror how things work in real life, and eliminate the loopholes and exploitable weaknesses, then that would seem to be the best solution.

Creating something artificial that isn't really representative of real life, just for the sake of trying to make things harder, doesn't make much sense to me. OOTP Developments should work on creating the realistic back-and-forth and the realistic difficulty.

Originally Posted by PSUColonel (Post 5052840)

Here are some great ideas that InjuryLog had about scouting at one time. I still believe they hold true today even more so now that the international leagues are NOT included in OOTP. As far as I am concerned this was a "masterpiece".


Pathways

Scouting and player acquisition are inextricably linked. In real life, players join MLB organizations for the first time through a few conduits:

* Amateur Draft
* as international amateur free agents (big bonus)
* as international "discoveries" (small bonus)
* as established international free agents (Japan/Mexico/Taiwan/Korea)
* through the posting system (Japan/Korea)
* as Cuban defectors
* from Independent leagues

The more comprehensively we model these, the more strategy options we offer a GM. And by correctly modeling the important features of each pathway, the more interesting team-building strategy becomes.


Countries

Real life countries funnel talent to MLB organizations in different ways. A few examples:

* USA+ Canada: Amateur Draft; independent leagues
* Japan+Korea: established international FAs, posting system
* Mexico: established FAs, international teenage FAs and 'discoveries'
* Cuba: defectors
* DR+Venezuela: international teenage FAs and 'discoveries'

A team scouting Venezuela is doing so for different reasons than a team scouting Japan - they will acquire different types of players. Players from Japan might help immediately, while players from Venezuela will not. One feature of an improved scouting model should be choice: a choice of which countries to scout. A rebuilding team would naturally make different choices from a win-now team.


Strategy

It is obvious looking at the behaviour of real life teams that MLB teams use very different team-building strategies. These decisions are Scouting decisions:

* International teenage FAs: in 2014, NYY spent $17.8m, while OAK and BAL spent $827k and $980k respectively.

* Independent League signings: in 2014, ARI signed 21 guys out of indie ball, and ATL signed 14. Five teams signed 0 players.

* Cuba: LAD has invested a total of $163m in five Cuban defectors since 2012, and BOS has spent north of $100m on Cubans in the same time period. Most teams have spent $0.

* Japan: several teams have never signed a player directly from Japan (CIN, MIA, etc), while some have signed several, eg SEA has signed five.

The choice about where to acquire new talent is one of the major decisions real life GMs make. Modeling these choices properly is, I think, the biggest thing left for OOTP to do in order to make GM strategy more interesting.



Outline of a Model

Instead of making Scouting about spending (how much to spend on different areas), which is not very interesting since you can't really notice a difference, we should make it about choices - deciding what strategy you want to use to build your team.

So in outline, I think Scouting should work as follows:

* teams automatically get complete scouting of the Majors and minors, and of (most of) the Amateur Draft pool.

* when spending the default, teams could choose, from a list of options (see next post), what types of 'assignment scouting' to perform. GMs should make that choice once a year only, just as we do with budgets now. Teams should probably be able to choose ~4 scouting assignments when spending the default.

* teams could choose to add a fifth option (or more) by spending additional money. But that should be very expensive - it's not a choice at all if you can reasonably afford to do everything. Of course teams could save money by cutting options too.

If a default scout budget is $10m, I think adding an additional assignment should probably cost $5m (on the theory that $5m = 1 win), and cutting an assignment should save $2.5m.

* the options would not all be "equal", nor should they be. Some strategies will be better for rebuilding teams, others for contending teams. And if we want to implement things in a sophisticated way, we could make the value of certain strategies change in different situations. And these strategies will be most interesting if there's a lot of variety, so GMs can, by changing scouting strategies, feel they're playing the game in a whole new way.


The Options

The below is just a tentative list of the kinds of 'assignment scouting' options we could offer the GM. Most require further explanation, which I'll do a bit later. We don't need to implement all of these to make a working model (some could be saved for later versions, and others might be bad ideas) and the world can be divided up in a blocky way or a granular way, so it's easy to change the below to reduce or extend the number of options if we want to.

Assignment Scouting Options

* Amateur Draft: Area Scouting
* Amateur Draft: signability scouting
* Advance scouting (on upcoming opponents)
* MLB scouting: intensive
* Minor league scouting: intensive
* US/Canada Independent Leagues
* Japan
* Korea
* Taiwan
* Cuba
* Mexico
* DR
* Venezuela
* rest of South America
* rest of Central America
* Europe
* Africa
* Middle East and South Asia
* rest of Southeast Asia and Australiasia


Amateur Draft: Area Scouting

I've read the occasional scouting report on a draft pick who fell in the draft because he wasn't heavily scouted, and one team 'discovered' him and liked him. I think it would make the draft more interesting if there were about one round worth of players, maybe a bit less, in a standard 25 round draft who would go unscouted except by teams that specifically chose to do Area Scouting for the draft. These guys could just be chosen randomly, so there'd normally only be one first round talent, one second round talent and so on. Since it's likely a few teams would scout these guys, if you found one you liked, you'd have an interesting decision to make about how long to let them slide in the draft. Naturally these guys shouldn't have OSA reports, and we'd need to work out what to do about their HS/COL stats so their talent isn't obvious to teams who didn't bother to scout them.


Amateur Draft: Signability Scouting

I'm not sure this is a great idea, especially not if we leave the signing bonus model unchanged, but part of real life draft scouting is assessing signability. Some OOTP draftees now have 'Impossible' signability, with no info at all about what kind of bonus would be needed to sign them. If Signability Scouting were a scouting option, teams electing to scout signability could learn fairly precise bonus estimates for a good fraction (maybe 1/2) of those players, while other teams would be in the dark about their demands.

Advance Scouting

I could see Advance Scouting working as an option in several different ways, some easy to implement, some not. Teams could get up-to-the-minute scouting reports on upcoming opponents' 40-man rosters. And as a simple advantage, teams could get minuscule (1 point, probably) BABIP improvements in game, because advance scouting presumably allows them to use better defensive positioning or pitch selection. In a more complicated model, an advance scout could provide a Manager in-game advice about how to shift a defense against each batter, for example, but that's probably too complicated to be worth doing.

MLB Scouting: Intensive

I think OOTP scouts too frequently now. It's clear observing real life teams that they behave with more uncertainty than do OOTP teams - for example, real life teams call prospects up to the Majors without having a completely clear picture of whether those prospects are ready. That doesn't happen in OOTP now if you scout every 2 months, but it would happen if you got just one scouting report in January, and had to guess in June if your prospect's current ratings had improved enough to make him a viable big leaguer.

So I think we should reduce the frequency of reports - on default, teams should either scout MLB once or twice each year (I think once is best). But by choosing to scout intensively, we could provide teams an additional complete scouting report during the year, in early July (just before the Trade Deadline). So contending teams intent on trading for help at the deadline might want this option to make better decisions for the stretch run.

Minor League Scouting: Intensive

Similarly teams could get an extra scouting report on minor leaguers at midseason if they choose to scout the minors - so teams intent on trading for prospects at the deadline could have more info to work with.

The remaining options all have to do with player acquisition from different sources. For these options to work well, we need to model each player funnel properly. We'd also need to extend the World DB a bit to accommodate the various player pipelines - that seems easy to do to me, but it's a bit technical.

The Special Countries

US/Canada: Independent Leagues

Indie ball players share certain characteristics in real life - usually in their 20s, position players are rarely toolsy but sometimes skilled, and the pitchers with any shot are almost always relievers. Teams would scout indie ball if they were hoping to find some very inexpensive ready-now big league bench pieces, and some relievers. Only very rarely should teams find truly good players outside of the occasional John Axford closer type.

This could work much as it does now (scout signs indie ball guys on the GM's behalf, always to minor league deals) though it should happen at a fixed time of year (end of season).

Japan: Established FAs, Posted Players

The current Posting system only works if you operate a league in Japan. It would be great to extend that to one-nation leagues (just generate posted players from scratch, as the established FAs are now).

Teams that do not scout Japan should not receive scouting reports on posted players or on established FAs from Japan. They should have only OSA to work with. Teams that do scout Japan should receive complete scouting reports on these players. So that scouting Japan is truly useful, we'd need to do two other things:

- disguise player value better when determining a player's contract demands. Right now I don't need to scout to know if I should sign a guy to a contract;

- make it so a decent proportion of players will only sign with teams that have scouted them. This seems to be true in real life (even more so for teenagers) - players develop relationships with certain organizations, and become much more likely to sign with those orgs. If we make it so that 1/2 of all players from Japan will only sign with you if you've scouted them, scouting becomes more relevant. As an elegant solution, players with above average Loyalty could be those who only sign if scouted.

We also need to overhaul the Player Creation system for established international FAs, because it's not right at the moment - ages are wrong, and player ability is wrong.

Korea: Established FAs, Posted Players

South Korea is similar to Japan except it provides a lot fewer players. At first that might make it seem stupid to scout Korea instead of Japan. But if we model scouting choices (not the actual scouting reports, just the decisions) for AI teams as well, then there could still be a reason to scout South Korea: if no one else does, you'd have a huge advantage whenever a Korean player is posted, or becomes an FA.

Taiwan

We might want to group Taiwan and Korea together, even if that makes no geographical sense.

Cuba

Cuba is unique in the world in that players defect to MLB. So they can join MLB at any time of year, and they can be absolutely any age. The only way to get a Yasiel Puig is to sign him out of Cuba.

I think we should model defections. They should be a bit of a lottery - some years should be very good, and some years should be fallow. But it should be the only international pipeline that might let you sign a superstar near-ready prospect age player.

Again, Cuban players should often only sign with teams that have scouted them. I think there's also an argument for not providing OSA reports on defectors, since it wasn't always the easiest place to scout (though obviously things are changing).

Mexico

Mexico is unique in that it provides MLB with some established veteran FAs, but also with some teenage prospects, though not a big supply of either. The established FAs should work just as those from Japan do. The teenagers should work as do those from the countries in the next post.


Hidden Players, International Amateur FAs

The rest of the world only provides talent to MLB organizations as teenage international players. We have two separate teenage pipelines:

* 'hidden players'
* international amateur free agents, the big-bonus guys available July 2 each year



Hidden Players

There are quite a few issues with hidden players now - there are way too many of them for one thing (my FA pools are insanely huge on defaults after five years) and there are way too many bad ones for another. I know our MLB percentages of international/domestic players look good right now, but those really bad hidden players aren't having any meaningful effect on those numbers. They almost never make MLB - the pitchers in particular very possibly never make it.

So:

* there is a rule in MLB we should borrow: when signing international teenagers, teams get six "exemptions" for players signed for under $75k (those bonuses don't count against the 'cap'). We should use that: teams should be able to sign six 'hidden players' for free. After that, if they want to sign more, it should count eat into their spending cap (and cost money).

* so teams should be making choices of which 'hidden players' will actually join their org. The scout should provide a list of 'discovered' players, and the GM should choose up to six, or more if he wants to pay.

* there are two ways this could work. Either things could work as now, with the scout 'discovering' players throughout the year, forcing the GM to decide 'sign this guy or wait to see if someone better pops up later'. Then any bonus penalties would apply to the upcoming July 2 pool. Preferable I think is a system where the scout contacts you on July 2 with a complete list of players he has found, and the GM decides then which players to add.

* we'd have to do a bit of math to work out how players should be distributed; this is where things could get complicated. Obviously on defaults, DR provides way more players than anyone else. But if lots of teams scout the DR, that competition over players should make players commensurately harder to find. We could permit players to be discovered by more than one team, or we could reduce the number of discoveries according to the number of teams scouting a country. That way there might be some reason to scout Australasia or Europe, rather than the DR, if they were not saturated with teams. Of course Africa or Middle East/South Asia would rarely be worth scouting, except in a custom setup.

* if the number of teams scouting a region affects the number of players available, that could make the 'Explore World' option more interesting to look at. It could report how many teams were active in each region in the previous year, and if AI teams don't radically adjust their strategies too often, the human GM could use that as a basis for his own strategizing.

* I'd also love to see international origin %s subject to League Evolution, as an option. If sometimes new countries instituted baseball programs and the number of players from each place could change, then it might make sense to one day scout a country you wouldn't contemplate on modern-day defaults.

I can specify the mathematical details of this kind of system - how to use the international origin %s - a bit later, I think it's a bit tricky but very possible.


International Amateur FAs

* As with other FAs, teams should not get scouting reports unless they scout an FA's country.

* and again, many players should only sign if they've actually been scouted by a team

* OSA should not scout these players either. GMs get way too much info right now with human scouting reports, OSA reports, and bonus demands. I don't even need my human scout to know which players are good.

* we really need to redo the bonus demand system, and the contract negotiation system, for these prospects:

-- the bonus demand reveals way too much information about ability.

-- the players all use idiotic negotiation tactics. Because of scouting error, there's always a chance a 16 year old will be viewed as a potential 5-star guy by one team. That team might pay $2m for him, but not if he demands $40k.

-- when a player is 'in demand', he obviously should not raise his demands incrementally by tiny amounts. He then guarantees himself the minimum possible bonus. If teams will meet his demand, he probably should shoot for a lot more, then come down if he overshoots.

-- it can be really annoying for the user when you 'meet demand' eleven times over three game weeks, adding $200k to your offer each time, and still don't sign a guy. It can take far too many offers.

* just as importantly, the distribution of bonus amounts is completely off from real life. If you look at the top 30 bonuses in real life, they'll all exceed $500k. In OOTP, the majority of the top 30 bonuses are less than $200k, and lots of them are less than $100k. If we're modeling the top 30 international teenage FAs, they all need to sign for way more, and they only will if they change their demands, and if we let scouting error govern what teams will pay. Teams will only overpay if they can't reference OSA or bonus demands for additional ability info.

* player creation is a bit weird, when you compare with real life. In real life, there's almost no such thing as a superstar SP prospect among international teenagers, with very few exceptions. Most of the big bonuses go to hitters. There are lots of successful pitchers eventually, but it's not very clear who they'll be when they're 16. OOTP creation seems the opposite - lots of amazing looking pitchers, few good looking bats. Really the pitchers shouldn't look as good, but more should benefit from talent boosts a bit later.

* we could very easily at least implement one of the provisions of the 'new' CBA: the spending cap teams observe when signing international amateur FAs is variable, based on a team's performance the previous year. Bad teams are allowed to spend more. So we could make the spending cap different for different teams, allowing rebuilding teams a bit more of an opportunity to sign these prospects.
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Originally Posted by Syd Thrift (Post 5056945)

I solve all the trade issues by trading with myself. :P

For the settings, I turn current and potential stats off entirely except for Draft Day (then they go right back off). I do leave fielding/other ratings on because frankly there isn't a good way to divine that information. I'd love for there to be some way of checking the relative Stuff of pitches without reading scouting reports but meh, it is what it is. I set AI evals to I think 0/50/33/17 right now (that's right, 0 on the ratings at all - don't worry, it'll still go off ratings if it doesn't have any stats to use) and Very Low scouting accuracy just in case scouted ratings do come into play somehow. I set the ratings that do show to 20-80 but that's only because that's what they use IRL; this would work just as well with a 1-5 or 2-8.

Oh yeah, and I have TCR I believe bumped all the way up to 150 now with aging and development smoothed waaay out - I don't have the game in front of me but I'm pretty sure aging is all the way down to 0.75 and I think development might be up at like 1.2 or so. The thing I like about this is that you still have "late bloomers"; they just happen basically by random chance instead of anything you can see coming. Also, I feel like players are too predictable without TCR bumped way up - like, on an individual level it was still tough to make determinations, especially with ratings off, but there's still that sense that if a guy hasn't basically built himself out by the time he's 25, he's never going to amount to much whereas with TCR bumped up you can have a 30 year old (or older!) have sudden jumps in ability that turns an average Joe into a star or a fringe 25-man roster guy into a starter (or of course you can have players completely fall off the table, which IMO is a thing that happens a lot more IRL than it does in OOTP, where the "standard" is a relatively slow ebbing away of talent).

I personally find playing with ratings mostly off to be a really challenging way to play. In the past you still had to put personal rules in place to not cheese the trade AI but it sounds like Hard Mode might solve a lot of that.

Originally Posted by Sweed (Post 5056904)

I play out every inning of every game for my team. Not seeing the hard trade mode as a waste of time. To be fair I do understand why some would see it that way. :)

I've had instant acceptances on some of my offers. Yes, very rare but it does happen. Otherwise I believe I've always received a response the next day on my submitted offers.

The house rules you bring up is a big part of the need for this trading model. We have had, for as many years as I've played (since 2002), complaints on the trading engine and how easy it is to fleece. These players won't accept or use house rules because "the game allows it, so why shouldn't I be able to do it?". The developer has saved them from themselves and the silence on the boards this year has been a joy to behold. :)

One can certainly argue about how it was implemented, and may have suggestions that would work as well. I don't think one can argue that the new model isn't effective in closing the old exploit. Win/win when the feature is optional.

What if they added an "instant reply" option to the hard mode? It would still force the user to build an offer and submit it. There could still be a back and forth, as there is now, only instantly. Your reputation is still put on the line if you don't complete a trade you offered and the AI accepted. What there couldn't be would be the old "bait and switch" trades that cheated the AI and it had no defense against. Not saying you fleece the AI, I fully understand you curb yourself with house rules. That's not true for many users that faulted the developer for not closing a way a human could exploit the AI.





I don't agree with this at all. It is hard because you have to submit a trade that you have to feel is fair from the start, knowing if the AI accepts it you either complete it or your rep suffers due to you reneging. Then if the AI doesn't accept it, it can counter and you are free to renegotiate the trade anyway you want without damaging your rep. This wouldn't change if the developer was able to add an "instant response" option to the hard trading model.

The old way was "I'll give you my CF for your SP" the AI accepts, but you now say "I'm pulling back the CF and offering my LF instead". The AI is not "offended" by this tactic and will either accept or not. If it refuses simply go back and remove the LF and put the CF back in and complete the deal. To me a GM in real life would never tolerate such a bait and switch.

The new way "I'll give you my CF for your SP" the AI accepts. Your only response will be accept or renege at a cost to your rep. If you renege you are free to now make a new offer with the LF in place of the CF and see what the AI says. If an instant response option were to be added the back and forth would still be there, but the negotiation would be harder than the old model. I think that would take care of the "What a waste of time, for those of us who play out games." issue?

As I said in my last post "I'm sure we could both write pages explaining our differing opinions on this mode without either of us changing". So I'll try to make this my last post on the issue, but no promises. Let's see where the discussion goes. ;)

Originally Posted by refgewr3 (Post 5057839)

The problem is that the old way of trading was a response to existing limitations about how what you can offer (1 or 2 players) and for what (1 prospect, 2-3 prospects, or a random assortment of players). In real life teams can create a more specific trade offer (ie willing to take on salary to get prospects, bigger prospect packages, whatever) from the start, whereas in OOTP swapping out players and being clever about shopping a certain player who's more valuable to get prospects then downgrading to a lesser player you actually want to trade and trying to recreate that gap in value in the trade menu is both the best existing approximation of that dynamic and has more skill involved than basically any other aspect of the game.

Hard mode destroys that. It's basically unplayable on harder AI difficulties (with lower or average AI difficulties still being unplayable because they'll regularly offer you straight up better players in deals) and takes away the best expressions of player skill and creativity in the game. Some of the best moments in the game for me have been trying to strike up multiple simultaneous deals and having to write down who can be had for whom to ensure that I don't have players in multiple deals so I can close every trade.

There are real problems with the current trading system being too easily gamed but the hard mode isn't sufficient at resolving them and takes away massive chunks of the game. It's not a viable game mode in my opinion.

The other problem of course is that fielding offers from other teams is an underdeveloped mechanic.

Originally Posted by Sweed (Post 5057884)

Curbing the fleecing of the AI and the posts complaining "I traded "X" for "Y" LOL, the trading in OOTP is broke". Sure you may very well be making fair offers and not intentionally fleecing the AI. That's cool, it's the way I've played for years along with probably the majority of users. Perhaps with the new AI advancements sports game AI can "learn" to make better evaluations and trades in real time? IDK. Probably more likely if AI becomes that good the computer will trade less than it does now on the hardest mode in OOTP ;)

Originally Posted by BaseballReplayJournal (Post 5057978)

That said, I would love to see a system in which trades and deals are built up over time rather than being a one-and-done deal. I think you could construct something like that using an AI model. I'd love to see that in Football Manager as well, where you've got the same problem (and where it is surprisingly easy to sign 200+ young players with great talent without spending much money)..

Originally Posted by BaseballReplayJournal (Post 5057978)

Apologies for coming into this discussion late, and I'm guessing that this point has already been made.


The thing is, though, that the "I traded X for Y lol" posts tend to miss the point that real life general managers also make lousy trades, and have done so historically.


That said, I would love to see a system in which trades and deals are built up over time rather than being a one-and-done deal. I think you could construct something like that using an AI model. I'd love to see that in Football Manager as well, where you've got the same problem (and where it is surprisingly easy to sign 200+ young players with great talent without spending much money).


It's not perfect, but OOTP's AI trading system and logic is far and beyond the best out of all baseball sims. We shouldn't forget that.

Originally Posted by Sweed (Post 5057884)

Which is why it is optional and you are free turn it off and continue on with how you've been playing. Hard mode in OOTP is not the "be all- end all" for trading AI that all sports games should copy. One can argue "realistic"/ "not realistic" but in the end it's code trying to close a loophole in trading that some users either wouldn't, couldn't, or maybe even shouldn't have to close on their own.

The new hard mode is not for everyone, and that is fine, but I don't think one can argue it hasn't accomplished it's objective. Curbing the fleecing of the AI and the posts complaining "I traded "X" for "Y" LOL, the trading in OOTP is broke". Sure you may very well be making fair offers and not intentionally fleecing the AI. That's cool, it's the way I've played for years along with probably the majority of users. Perhaps with the new AI advancements sports game AI can "learn" to make better evaluations and trades in real time? IDK. Probably more likely if AI becomes that good the computer will trade less than it does now on the hardest mode in OOTP ;)

The trouble in my eyes is, in the old system, the AI can't understand that the human is making an offer as an opener, so can't really respond accordingly. It doesn't see the CF as only opening a discussion that ends up with a LF taking his place. It just takes each offer "one at a time" and evaluates it as a new offer. While it's counter offers are set in stone. If you include any of the players on the list it provides the deal will be completed. The AI won't say "hey, instead of that 55/60 SP maybe you'll take this 45/50?". Hard mode along with "submit" sets the human's offer in stone, except you are at least allowed to renege.

As I said one can argue for a different trading module or suggest ways to make OOTP more realistic. I'm not holding my breath for actual "realism", ie no game has come up with a "true to life" trading module, at least none I know about. NBA games may come the closest because contract values have to match cutting down the ability to fleece the AI so easily. NFL probably second with the hard cap and a knowledge of how draft picks are valued. Even with that I don't think there is a NBA or NFL where the trading is much better than any other sports games.

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough (Post 5052203)

I can tell from some of what you're claiming that you probably don't have enough familiarity with the game to understand how it works, how scouting works, and how to use the right settings to get the results you want. You definitely don't know how the game's finances work and how the AI makes transaction decisions accordingly, otherwise you could have already made some adjustments to teams or settings to fix some of the issues you're having.

If you want to have a mature conversion and talk about specific issues you're having, so you can get advice on how to get the experience you want, then feel free to do that. Otherwise, you're wasting your time with rants.

The developers have focused almost entirely on the management aspects of the game for years. Very little has changed with the 3D graphics for several versions, and for most of this game's history, there were no 3D graphics at all. I have no idea where you're getting this notion that there is a focus on graphics at the expense of the rest of the game. That simply isn't true. So maybe try learning more about the sim and do something constructive before trying to blame your experiences on graphics.

Originally Posted by BaseballReplayJournal (Post 5057978)

Apologies for coming into this discussion late, and I'm guessing that this point has already been made.


The thing is, though, that the "I traded X for Y lol" posts tend to miss the point that real life general managers also make lousy trades, and have done so historically.


That said, I would love to see a system in which trades and deals are built up over time rather than being a one-and-done deal. I think you could construct something like that using an AI model. I'd love to see that in Football Manager as well, where you've got the same problem (and where it is surprisingly easy to sign 200+ young players with great talent without spending much money).


It's not perfect, but OOTP's AI trading system and logic is far and beyond the best out of all baseball sims. We shouldn't forget that.