ECHL - AI keeps sending my players down

hagakure · 07-20-2020, 10:35 PM

I'm in hardcore challenge mode, and I'm both GM and HC, and I have control over everything but scouting, but all season the AI has been quietly sending players from my roster down to the semi-pro farm team without even notifying me, much less asking me. For example, every time I check my roster lately, Peter Sivak is missing and I find him playing for Central U.S. Semi-Pro. Whatever reasons the AI has for sending him may or may not be valid, but regardless the AI does not have permission to be making roster moves. The ECHL is hard enough to manage with AHL and NHL teams taking my players or sending me more every couple of days without my AI creating more confusion by shipping people out of town without telling me.

I saved my save files in your ftp under the name AI Run Amok.lg.zip

While I'm here, another minor glitch regarding human anatomy, see photo below:

JeffR · 07-21-2020, 02:38 AM

If your roster is full and a parent team sends a player down, they'll move players on your roster further down to make room - the AI can't violate the roster size rules. .

The guys sent down can, in theory, be either their players or your own, but since you're in the ECHL, you're at the bottom end of Nashville's farm system, and there's nowhere for them to move their own players - but their is somewhere they can move yours, to your farm team.

If you don't want specific players moved, you can always swap them back into your roster and send someone else down. That, unfortunately, does result in the small hit to their fitness every time you do it; I think we'll take a look at removing that penalty for human-owned teams with parent clubs so you're not penalized for fixing the AI's decisions in that way.

You can also deliberately keep your roster under the size limit so there's a buffer to avoid the AI's interference - if you only have 19 players, when they send someone down they won't need to move anyone else.

hagakure · 07-21-2020, 05:05 PM

Thanks, Jeff, I assumed that might be the case -- the game did the same thing when I was temporarily over the salary cap as well.

Can I recommend a gameplay change, though? Instead of the AI making the move down without telling me, how about if the AI pops up a warning box that says, "You have too many players on your roster" and then I can't advance the game until I deal with it? That sort of thing happens when, for instance, I have a suspended or injured player dressed, or I have a healthy player on the injury list, so it seems like the algorithm is already there.

I would like that a lot better than having the AI choose who to send down and not even tell me it had done so.

JeffR · 07-22-2020, 12:44 AM

The problem that runs into is preventing the AI from putting you in an unrecoverable situation, like dumping so many of its own players on you that, when you get the warning box, sending down all of your own players still won't get you under the roster limit.

It's probably solvable, but it gets messy when you start to consider all the possible variables that might be affecting the current roster state - injuries, suspensions, etc., and (particularly) the possibility of a team having more than one parent. So for now just having the AI make its best effort at rearranging things is the safest option.

One thing you can do to limit the nuisance effects of having to recall your players is using the save feature (on the action button) on the lines screen - that way you can just restore the guys who were removed and then recalled with a couple of clicks rather than having to replace them everywhere.

hagakure · 07-22-2020, 01:29 AM

Copy, thanks. I do have two parents for Florida and they are really playing havoc with my roster, especially since they send me players worse than I already had, but I can't send their players down. I just play them to death and hope they get injured.

hagakure · 07-25-2020, 12:28 PM

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?

hagakure · 07-25-2020, 03:20 PM

Another perfect example. 1st game of the regular season I have a RD get injured (the frequency of injuries is a matter for a whole other thread). 2nd game of the regular season, I get a solitary news item that I need to assign a number to a guy I didn't make any moves for. I check the roster, he's a goalie -- one of two new ones I suddenly have. He didn't come from an AHL team -- he was one of the guys on my semi-pro farm club that just inexplicably got called up by an AI that shouldn't be making roster moves. I lose a defenseman, my AI decides I need four goalies in response. This has also suddenly put me over the salary cap... so clearly the AI isn't being careful or considering all the impacts -- and why the heck would I need four goalies on my active roster?

It's also frustrating to note that when I brought one of these two goalies up during pre-season in hopes of giving them a try-out, my AI immediately moved him back down.

I'm playing as a GM... this means the entire gameplay for me is making the roster moves, so when the AI does this stuff on an almost game-by-game basis, it makes the game unplayable for me. If this was reality, whoever this "AI" represents would be standing outside the office on the sidewalk with all the stuff from his desk in a cardboard box.

Please make it stop.
Thanks.

hagakure · 07-25-2020, 03:30 PM

After some more investigation, it seems like maybe the AI brought them up to get me enough players under 26 (required number of "prospects" in the ECHL). OK, but I had two 24-year-old defensemen down there it just ignored to bring up two goalies... also and perhaps more importantly, why am I suddenly at 14 prospects? I got one guy injured but seem to have lost three prospects -- it might have been two, it's hard to keep track because my players keep moving around without my knowledge so I don't even know who's on my team from day to day. Did two guys just get called up? I didn't get a NEWS flash if they did. If they didn't, where did they go? They aren't on my farm team. This sort of thing keeps happening, and the only solution is to stop the darn AI from moving people around without asking me, so that at least I know what's going on, even if I'm railroaded into making the same decision the AI would have.

hagakure · 07-25-2020, 04:09 PM

Side note: 3 regular season games, I already have two major injuries. The second guy, I decided to PLAY rather than SIM the game. He was injured early in the first period, but still managed to score a goal after that and finish the game as the ice time leader. Minor glitch but something for you to fix in your spare time.

07-20-2020, 10:35 PM	#1
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	ECHL - AI keeps sending my players down I'm in hardcore challenge mode, and I'm both GM and HC, and I have control over everything but scouting, but all season the AI has been quietly sending players from my roster down to the semi-pro farm team without even notifying me, much less asking me. For example, every time I check my roster lately, Peter Sivak is missing and I find him playing for Central U.S. Semi-Pro. Whatever reasons the AI has for sending him may or may not be valid, but regardless the AI does not have permission to be making roster moves. The ECHL is hard enough to manage with AHL and NHL teams taking my players or sending me more every couple of days without my AI creating more confusion by shipping people out of town without telling me. I saved my save files in your ftp under the name AI Run Amok.lg.zip While I'm here, another minor glitch regarding human anatomy, see photo below: Attached Images

07-25-2020, 12:28 PM	#6
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	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?

07-25-2020, 03:20 PM	#7
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	Another perfect example. 1st game of the regular season I have a RD get injured (the frequency of injuries is a matter for a whole other thread). 2nd game of the regular season, I get a solitary news item that I need to assign a number to a guy I didn't make any moves for. I check the roster, he's a goalie -- one of two new ones I suddenly have. He didn't come from an AHL team -- he was one of the guys on my semi-pro farm club that just inexplicably got called up by an AI that shouldn't be making roster moves. I lose a defenseman, my AI decides I need four goalies in response. This has also suddenly put me over the salary cap... so clearly the AI isn't being careful or considering all the impacts -- and why the heck would I need four goalies on my active roster? It's also frustrating to note that when I brought one of these two goalies up during pre-season in hopes of giving them a try-out, my AI immediately moved him back down. I'm playing as a GM... this means the entire gameplay for me is making the roster moves, so when the AI does this stuff on an almost game-by-game basis, it makes the game unplayable for me. If this was reality, whoever this "AI" represents would be standing outside the office on the sidewalk with all the stuff from his desk in a cardboard box. Please make it stop. Thanks. Last edited by hagakure; 07-25-2020 at 03:22 PM.

07-21-2020, 02:38 AM	#2
JeffR FHM Producer Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Kelowna, BC Posts: 17,257	If your roster is full and a parent team sends a player down, they'll move players on your roster further down to make room - the AI can't violate the roster size rules. . The guys sent down can, in theory, be either their players or your own, but since you're in the ECHL, you're at the bottom end of Nashville's farm system, and there's nowhere for them to move their own players - but their is somewhere they can move yours, to your farm team. If you don't want specific players moved, you can always swap them back into your roster and send someone else down. That, unfortunately, does result in the small hit to their fitness every time you do it; I think we'll take a look at removing that penalty for human-owned teams with parent clubs so you're not penalized for fixing the AI's decisions in that way. You can also deliberately keep your roster under the size limit so there's a buffer to avoid the AI's interference - if you only have 19 players, when they send someone down they won't need to move anyone else.

07-21-2020, 05:05 PM	#3
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	Thanks, Jeff, I assumed that might be the case -- the game did the same thing when I was temporarily over the salary cap as well. Can I recommend a gameplay change, though? Instead of the AI making the move down without telling me, how about if the AI pops up a warning box that says, "You have too many players on your roster" and then I can't advance the game until I deal with it? That sort of thing happens when, for instance, I have a suspended or injured player dressed, or I have a healthy player on the injury list, so it seems like the algorithm is already there. I would like that a lot better than having the AI choose who to send down and not even tell me it had done so.

07-22-2020, 12:44 AM	#4
JeffR FHM Producer Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Kelowna, BC Posts: 17,257	The problem that runs into is preventing the AI from putting you in an unrecoverable situation, like dumping so many of its own players on you that, when you get the warning box, sending down all of your own players still won't get you under the roster limit. It's probably solvable, but it gets messy when you start to consider all the possible variables that might be affecting the current roster state - injuries, suspensions, etc., and (particularly) the possibility of a team having more than one parent. So for now just having the AI make its best effort at rearranging things is the safest option. One thing you can do to limit the nuisance effects of having to recall your players is using the save feature (on the action button) on the lines screen - that way you can just restore the guys who were removed and then recalled with a couple of clicks rather than having to replace them everywhere.

07-22-2020, 01:29 AM	#5
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	Copy, thanks. I do have two parents for Florida and they are really playing havoc with my roster, especially since they send me players worse than I already had, but I can't send their players down. I just play them to death and hope they get injured.

07-25-2020, 03:30 PM	#8
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	After some more investigation, it seems like maybe the AI brought them up to get me enough players under 26 (required number of "prospects" in the ECHL). OK, but I had two 24-year-old defensemen down there it just ignored to bring up two goalies... also and perhaps more importantly, why am I suddenly at 14 prospects? I got one guy injured but seem to have lost three prospects -- it might have been two, it's hard to keep track because my players keep moving around without my knowledge so I don't even know who's on my team from day to day. Did two guys just get called up? I didn't get a NEWS flash if they did. If they didn't, where did they go? They aren't on my farm team. This sort of thing keeps happening, and the only solution is to stop the darn AI from moving people around without asking me, so that at least I know what's going on, even if I'm railroaded into making the same decision the AI would have.

07-25-2020, 04:09 PM	#9
hagakure Minors (Rookie Ball) Join Date: Jun 2020 Location: Maryland, USA Posts: 39	Side note: 3 regular season games, I already have two major injuries. The second guy, I decided to PLAY rather than SIM the game. He was injured early in the first period, but still managed to score a goal after that and finish the game as the ice time leader. Minor glitch but something for you to fix in your spare time.