Custom Leagues - Players all end up 2.5-stars

usa_hank · 07-03-2025, 04:43 PM

I've become tired of playing with the same starting cast of real players, so I've been trying to setup custom leagues with fictional players. I've started about 4 custom leagues with fictional players, trying to get a "realistic" league make-up, tweaking settings. Everything starts off great, I see a lot of different talent in the league. But 5 years into the league, every player starts to have the same scouting and talent, and the variation is just nonexistent. There's the rare 0.1% that have top tier talent and it shows in their scouting, but after that the talent pool just becomes a murky sea of the same types of players - contact and nothing else, power and no contact, or speed and defense. The leagues always end up losing that second tier of players (and sometimes third tier IMHO, everyone starts to get rated at 2.5 stars by scouts of both ability and tools). Even on the rare occasion I hit with the draft and get a good offensive player, about 4 years into his career he ends up regressing and I've got an overpaid moron on my team. So I'm stuck in this "why pay anyone" mentality

I can't figure out the right settings to tweak that'll fix this in my league make-up. It's become completely unplayable in my opinion. I can't field a good team because the AI won't let me trade for top tier players even if I offer everything I've got. So I'm stuck fielding a team of 2.5 star players, which gives me about 75-80 W in a season, and keeps my team mediocre at best. AI teams don't trade away vets at the end of their contracts. In fact, most teams re-sign everyone, and only like 3-4 good players end up in free agency each year, all demanding "top-player" money even though they're only going to hit .260 and 12 HR. The league make-up is just completely jacked, every time.

There's got to be something I'm missing here. Every league shouldn't devolve into this mediocrity, but that's what I'm seeing. I've tried tweaking talent change randomness, development speed, player creation modifiers, etc. I've tried turning off auto-calc of modifiers and unchecking the "automatically adjust league strategy" settings. Nothing is working to make these custom leagues playable for years.

usa_hank · 07-03-2025, 05:07 PM

Also, apologies here. I thought I was in the Fictional Simulations board, but I clicked away from it before I opened this topic.

07-03-2025, 04:43 PM	#1
usa_hank Minors (Single A) Join Date: Jun 2025 Posts: 66	Custom Leagues - Players all end up 2.5-stars I've become tired of playing with the same starting cast of real players, so I've been trying to setup custom leagues with fictional players. I've started about 4 custom leagues with fictional players, trying to get a "realistic" league make-up, tweaking settings. Everything starts off great, I see a lot of different talent in the league. But 5 years into the league, every player starts to have the same scouting and talent, and the variation is just nonexistent. There's the rare 0.1% that have top tier talent and it shows in their scouting, but after that the talent pool just becomes a murky sea of the same types of players - contact and nothing else, power and no contact, or speed and defense. The leagues always end up losing that second tier of players (and sometimes third tier IMHO, everyone starts to get rated at 2.5 stars by scouts of both ability and tools). Even on the rare occasion I hit with the draft and get a good offensive player, about 4 years into his career he ends up regressing and I've got an overpaid moron on my team. So I'm stuck in this "why pay anyone" mentality I can't figure out the right settings to tweak that'll fix this in my league make-up. It's become completely unplayable in my opinion. I can't field a good team because the AI won't let me trade for top tier players even if I offer everything I've got. So I'm stuck fielding a team of 2.5 star players, which gives me about 75-80 W in a season, and keeps my team mediocre at best. AI teams don't trade away vets at the end of their contracts. In fact, most teams re-sign everyone, and only like 3-4 good players end up in free agency each year, all demanding "top-player" money even though they're only going to hit .260 and 12 HR. The league make-up is just completely jacked, every time. There's got to be something I'm missing here. Every league shouldn't devolve into this mediocrity, but that's what I'm seeing. I've tried tweaking talent change randomness, development speed, player creation modifiers, etc. I've tried turning off auto-calc of modifiers and unchecking the "automatically adjust league strategy" settings. Nothing is working to make these custom leagues playable for years. Last edited by usa_hank; 07-03-2025 at 05:07 PM.

07-03-2025, 05:07 PM	#2
usa_hank Minors (Single A) Join Date: Jun 2025 Posts: 66	Also, apologies here. I thought I was in the Fictional Simulations board, but I clicked away from it before I opened this topic.