JeffR, you guys have to rethink this. The AI ignoring my choice to control roster moves is the single biggest gripe I have about the game right now. I'm in the pre-season (still Everblades) and have no roster limit. The higher teams have not started dumping players on me yet. I have a head coach, but have selected that I want full control of roster moves. I call up players that I want trying out during the pre-season. I click continue and the AI sends them right back down. I call them up, the AI sends them down. This is frustrating and defeats the whole point of me being GM and retaining control of roster moves. Additionally, sometimes my players just disappear and I'm not sure why. Example from memory, I have two goalies on my roster and a two depth goalies down in semi-pro. One of my goalies gets hurt, I go to pull up a backup. They aren't there. I have to go out and sign a crap goalie just to play the next game. After the game, suddenly my other two goalies are back in semi-pro. Were they injured... is that a thing? Or I will check my roster and tons of players are missing but there were no notifications of roster moves to/from higher levels. This happened when I was managing a WHL team, too, especially in the off-season. I would be building my roster for the upcoming season, July 1 would hit and in addition to the free agents I knew I was going to lose, bunches of other players were just missing. I would go to the contracts screen and some would be there saying their "tryout" had ended -- even though they weren't trying out, most were my core players from the previous season, guys like Trent Miner.
It seems like all of this is related to AI misbehavior while taking control of roster moves instead of asking ME to manually deal with situations as they arise. "Trent Miner's tryout is over. Would you like to renew his contract?" or something like that.
You said above that you were concerned that if you took away AI ability to override my roster control, there was a chance the AHL AI could break the game by dumping more players on me than my roster could handle. That doesn't make sense to me. That would be an error on the dumping AHL AI's part, not the receiving ECHL team's part. Whether the AI or I are in control of responding to that situation doesn't seem like it prevents the situation. Neither the AI nor I can send an AHL player down to the semi-pro farm club, so what difference does it make who is in control at that point?
Please... I have 185 hours in this game and this is making me want to go do something else (which I suppose might be healthy). Here are my suggestions for what they are worth:
- Make my option choices sacrosanct. No matter what it takes, find other workarounds to potential issues than revoking my control over the things I chose to retain control over.
- Have the higher leagues' AI do some checks before executing moves, such as:
* Has this player already been moved today or yesterday? No more up and down and up and down and up and down
* Does the receiving team have room on their roster for this move, to include age restrictions?
- Ask me with a popup box to make manual decisions when there are issues to resolve. If there is the potential for dead-end situations that will break my game, let's run into them and get them resolved rather than executing mystery "behind the scenes" solutions I have to figure out by, for example, searching for my players to find out where they disappeared to. The game certainly isn't shy about hitting me with pop-up boxes for far less important things (can we please get a "do not show this message again" check box for the alert that tells me why my simulation was interrupted by an email? I don't need an explanation requiring an "OK" click every single time...)
Thoughts?