Unsignable Free Agents
 

I've run into an issue with one of my universes and was not able to find a solution to it.

My problem is that many of the leagues in my universe have large quantities of unsignable players. These players do not show up under free agency and cannot be offered contracts. They show up on the "Show All Players" tab of the Transactions screen. They do not show any team or league and their player cards say "Free Agent" under their contract status. However, when I look at their SION player card, it shows them as having contracts (but still no team). Players with major league contracts have -1 years on the contract. Many of these players have been in this unsignable state for years. None of them have ever played in a single game in their entire career, and none of them have a note indicating they were drafted, so this appears to be an issue of free agents that are created to fill league needs.

It seems that all leagues are susceptible to this problem, though oddly it is the leagues with a draft that have more unsignable players than leagues without drafts.

Assigning fictional contracts to players in the league does not fix the problem. The players not on teams continue to have the negative season contracts.

I am using version 1.0.3.12270, but the universe was created with, I believe, version 1.0.1.

I was able to use the player editor to assign one of these players to a team, but he still kept his contract of -1 seasons, which presumably means he would play for the team forever (for free). I was able to sign him to an extension, at which point his current contract became the contract of a first-year player (1 year at league minimum, automatically renewable).

I used the player editor to assign another unsignable player to a team and then released him. This cleared his contract and made him eligible for signing.

I've attached several screens which I hope will illustrate the issue.

The show_all_players screen is a shot of the "Show All Players" tab for one of my leagues, which was created using the Major American League template. As you can see from the right-click menu, he is ineligible for a contract offer. This league alone has 7000+ players with these negative-year contracts, which, as you can imagine, is really draining my free agent pool. In this screen, the players have been filtered to show all players where league level is NOT major league, which has filtered out all the players on teams.

The second screen is a shot of one of these unfortunate players' player profile, showing the Contract & Status. As you can see, he's shown as a Free Agent with no team.

The third screen is a shot of the players SION page. He is listed with a major league contract of $0 for -1 years.

This looks to me like you are attempting to sign a player that is eligible for the next draft, thus technically not a free agent. The game creates these draft eligible prospects before the draft and they do show up in the all players view. To see if this player is eligible for the next draft, go to the rookie draft pool and see if he is on there. Please report back and let me know if this is the case. Thanks.

You're right in that they all show up in the rookie draft pool. However, 7000+ players seems like a lot, even for a 30 team league with a 15 round draft (30*15=450 players). Also, 250 pages of players (out of 383) are 26 years of age or older. Is it possible that many of these players were undrafted players who were not dumped into the free agent market after the draft? If so, is there any way to move them to free agency?

Wow, that is an excessive amount of players :confused: Would you be able to upload the league file so I can take a look and see if anything might be causing this? There are instructions posted here http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...06#post1875606
to upload a file. Please let me know whether or not you can do this. Thanks.

I've uploaded my .dat files in a zip (AdmiralACF.zip). Hopefully it has everything you need. If you need anything else, just let me know.

Thanks for the help! :)

Thanks for uploading the files. I'm downloading now and I will get back to you today with anything that I find.

I took a look at your league and it is enormous :) You have somewhere around 12 Major League type leagues with a number of minors associated to each league. That would explain why there are so many players created for the draft. I looked at a number of players that were around age 26 that showed up in the players list and they are in fact draft eligible players for the next draft. I don't believe there is any bug there and after your drafts are run then the undrafted players will become free agents. This is probably the largest league I have seen yet with 2006 :) This must make your head spin trying to keep everything straight :) Let me know if you have any other questions.

Admiral,

I'm downloading this monster too, to take a look, but it sounds as if there might be something corrupted in your league file. While not common, it's something we've seen almost exclusively with leagues that were created with earlier releases of the game.

Once I manage to download this, I'll try a few things and see if I can come up with some other suggestions.

Thanks,

Steve

Thanks for taking a look, guys. I appreciate any help you can offer. I still am not convinced there is nothing wrong. There are 41 year old players in the Major Baseball League of Salaria draft pool that have been waiting to be drafted since 1988 (it's now 2005). These guys gotta realize it ain't gonna happen! :P I'm concerned that this is still happening since the upgrade to 1.0.3 (i.e. new players are joining the ever-growing undrafted pool). If there's a way to at least stop it from continuing to happen, I can live with an ever-aging population of players desperate to be drafted.

As for keeping everything straight, I don't follow but a couple leagues. The game was designed to allow myself and several other players on a nation-building site (www.eshraval.com) to have our baseball leagues interact. There are some things that aren't working exactly right, but in all it's pretty cool.

Anyway, thanks again for the help!

Admiral,

Don't get me wrong...SOMETHING is definitely wrong. :( For us, at this point, it's more a question of which of these three scenarios is in operation:

a. the current release of the program does not have an issue, but your league is somehow corrupted

b. the current release of the program DOES have an issue, but your league is also somehow corrupted

c. the current release of the program DOES have an issue, which is causing this problem, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with your league

I spent some time tonight looking at your league, and unfortunately, I happen to thing that it's either a. or b. Without some corroborating evidence, such as other customers reporting the issue, or us being able to reproduce the issue with a different league, I'm leaning towards a.

I tried deleting the free agents in your league, to see if that would help clear things up, but unfortunately draft pool people aren't technically considered free agents, so there's not really any way to empty those draft pools out.

I guess I'm at a point where I'm not sure what else I can do. I'm not sure if Jeff is able to figure anything else out. I'm loathe to admit it, but I think this league might be done for. :(

Steve

Thanks for all the work, guys, even if it was for naught. Hopefully you're right, Steve, that it is a corrupted game and that there isn't a problem with OOTP (at least, not anymore). I can live with all the old wannabe draftees, and may just sign and release a few of the better ones so they'll reach free agency. There are lots of other imperfections I wish I could go back and fix, but at this point it would be way more work than I want to do. The game is still playable for my purposes, so that's all that really matters to me.

Thanks again for the effort, and I will certainly let you know if I run into this problem with any new games I create.