AI to AI trade logic is awful

[s1murc1]

Originally Posted by PepeSylvia

Currently in December 2025 of a save and the AI to AI trade logic is insane.

Challenge mode, trading hard mode, neutral (as far as favors prospects/vets).

A few examples:

Brewers traded all of their young prospects (Turang, Mitchell, Frelick, Wiemer) for older unproductive players in 2023.

Bobby Witt Jr (78/80, still in Arb, coming off a 5.1 WAR season) was traded to Cleveland for a 17 year old currently 20/70 and a 20/20 minor leaguer.

Andrew Vaughn was coming off a 43 HR season in 2024 and was traded to Seattle for JP Crawford (who became a bench player for White Sox)

Jordan Walker traded after the 2023 season for Blake Snell. Walker was in AA with a .991 OPS and had 80 potential.

Bo Naylor traded for Starlin Castro in 2024, Naylor has solid ratings in this save.

Zac Gallen was traded for two mediocre prospects in 2024 coming off a sub 4 era year.


Anyone else experiencing this? A lot of teams are unrecognizable because teams are trading like there's no tomorrow and they have to make trades or they will implode. The only two remaining players from 2023 the Toronto Blue Jays have in their lineup are Vlad and Kirk, all of the others have been traded including Bichette, Chapman, Springer (dealt to Yankees), and Varsho.

iv noticed the ai is not good at building prospect packages if the player is really good for Witt in real life you would see a large prospect package including multiple of the organizations top 5 but the AI doesn't seem to build farm clearing packages.

[Dave Stieb II]

Originally Posted by jcard

Hmm. I was actually supporting the concerns. The proposition that a trade from over 100 years ago (when baseball was different in both economics and the level of administrative expertise) that had (conveniently omitted) financial considerations somehow mitigates the dissatisfaction with the examples of bad trades reported in this thread is absurd.

I know you were and I agree with you. I'll leave it at that to avoid further confusion.

[s1murc1]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Right, because the Red Sox never traded Babe Ruth in his prime for a bunch of washed quad A players.

Real teams make bad trades when trading with each other. The AI should also make bad trades when trading with itself.

The idea that the AI should somehow be far, far better than real, live human GM's, with all the countless terrible trades they've made, and never do anything questionable is just kind of hard for me to get a grip on.

I don't say anyone's wrong to think that, but just speaking personally, it bothers me to see this happen in real-life far more than it does in a game, which is just mimicking real-life, for both better and worse.

i don't think its specific trades that frustrate us as players it's the volume of these terrible.a lot of the time with bad trades in real life you can look back at the trade and realize what the team was thinking in making their trade. maybe one team was trading a top player and the other team sent them two top prospects but the players got hurt and ended up being busts but when the trade was made the trade looked balanced, but time showed us how bad the trade was because hindsight is always 20/20. now with that said are their trades in real life that you instantly scratch your head at absolutel. I feel the issue with the Ai in games is you can see the players potential ratings so you can tell immediately how bad of a trade it was without seeing the players bust its not a hindsight 20/20 thing if you have your scouting high you know immediately that it was a bad trade vs having to wait for ten years to see if it was or not so it is more in your face when it happens.

[Thundercrack]

Originally Posted by jcard

Hmm. I was actually supporting the concerns. The proposition that a trade from over 100 years ago (when baseball was different in both economics and the level of administrative expertise) that had (conveniently omitted) financial considerations somehow mitigates the dissatisfaction with the examples of bad trades reported in this thread is absurd.

He was agreeing with you. Albeit, sarcastically

[CBLCardinals]

Originally Posted by wallewalls

I don't think that one is bad actually. Williams and Rocchio are very well-rated in the game and are more than fair for Ohtani without an extension.

If we are bringing up Ohtani though, I would love if it was possible for his contract demands after the first season to be a bit higher. He signed for less than his current IRL salary in my game (and with the Reds to boot).

At this point, I'm just debating going 100% fictional.

I agree with WW here - for pure value that is actually pretty good.

Per Baseball America-

RHP Gavin Williams 65 FV
SS/2B Brayan Rocchi 55 FV
IF Freeman 45 FV

That’s basically 2 top 50 prospects, plus a good contact hitting IF for a season of Ohtani.

In fact, even absent of any salary exchanging hands, Baseballtradevalues.com has this as an actual overpay by Cleveland in terms of surplus value.

[CBLCardinals]

Originally Posted by wallewalls

I don't think that one is bad actually. Williams and Rocchio are very well-rated in the game and are more than fair for Ohtani without an extension.

If we are bringing up Ohtani though, I would love if it was possible for his contract demands after the first season to be a bit higher. He signed for less than his current IRL salary in my game (and with the Reds to boot).

At this point, I'm just debating going 100% fictional.

If you check Ohtani’s personality traits under the hood, perhaps he needs to be higher in playing for a winning team, and greed to get a higher contract? Just spitballing as I don’t have OOTP open currently

[jcard]

Originally Posted by Dave Stieb II

I know you were and I agree with you. I'll leave it at that to avoid further confusion.

My sincere apologies. I actually considered that possibility, but was thrown off by a subsequent response that seemed to begin by agreeing with your post while attempting to refute mine. I guess either I misinterpreted this third post as well as yours, or the author was himself misjudging your meaning. Either way, I own my error and regret my misunderstanding.

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by shakturi101

Can you name a game in the strategy/management market that has been able to do this well? I'm not an expert on how to create good AI and don't know what is going on under the hood, but if all these companies, including some with lots of resources, are struggling to create a challenging AI, it would seem it's not really that easy to just "fix."

I never suggested that any of this is easy to "fix." It's a huge challenge for anyone and especially for a smaller development team. But comparisons to other simulations are not really relevant to what we're discussing here, which is how to improve OOTP's AI. That's a unique case involving a specific game and specific development team.

Ultimately, the point of my earlier post was to emphasize that it's crucial to think about the end goal of your AI programming and the fact that a baseball sim isn't just a matter of simulating or emulating what GMs do in the real world. That should certainly be a big part of it, but you're programming a game where most customers want the AI to compete against the human user on a fairly even level. And that has to happen in an environment where factors are significantly different from the real world. Getting the AI to behave like real-life GMs is an entirely different goal compared to making the AI highly competitive against the human user.

I believe it should be a priority to make the AI as competitive as possible with the human user within the baseball sim context. That's really what most users want. But it's a really tough task to achieve that, and there will always be limitations. That's why hardcore baseball sims have been struggling to do this for decades. I just wanted to voice my desire to see that competitiveness be a top priority. I think it always has been with OOTP Developments, and it sounds like this isn't a case where OOTP is deliberately trying to make the AI do randomly dumb things in an effort simulate the real world. If that's the case, then I'm glad. Now it's just a matter of figuring out how to keep making the AI better from here.

[eas9898]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

I believe it should be a priority to make the AI as competitive as possible with the human user within the baseball sim context. That's really what most users want. But it's a really tough task to achieve that, and there will always be limitations. That's why hardcore baseball sims have been struggling to do this for decades. I just wanted to voice my desire to see that competitiveness be a top priority. I think it always has been with OOTP Developments, and it sounds like this isn't a case where OOTP is deliberately trying to make the AI do randomly dumb things in an effort simulate the real world. If that's the case, then I'm glad. Now it's just a matter of figuring out how to keep making the AI better from here.

This. Developers always make excuses for bad AI, saying it's hard to do. Well yeah, but it's also IMPORTANT! We are not playing a pure sim like Diamond Mind. We are playing a game where the AI, in particular the GM AI, plays a huge part in the gameplay.



For a game like this, a good AI is orders of magnitude more important than improving 3D graphics (remember how hard that used to be?) and offering more Perfect Team features.

[MathBandit]

Originally Posted by eas9898

This. Developers always make excuses for bad AI, saying it's hard to do. Well yeah, but it's also IMPORTANT! We are not playing a pure sim like Diamond Mind. We are playing a game where the AI, in particular the GM AI, plays a huge part in the gameplay.



For a game like this, a good AI is orders of magnitude more important than improving 3D graphics (remember how hard that used to be?) and offering more Perfect Team features.

It can both be orders of magnitude more important to improve AI than to upgrade 3D graphics and also true that for the amount of labour it would take to improve the AI by 0.5% you could improve the 3D graphics by 400%.

[omg_pwnasaurus]

Would something similar to how baseballtradevalues.com assigns value work or is that already implemented into the model?

[Art Deco]

A problem specific to Ohtani (and other two-way players) in the game is that they don't seem to be valued for their position player and pitching abilities combined but rather one or the other (often depending on what you are viewing them as, hitter or pitcher).

For example, and this was in 23 so I don't know if it's changed in 24, but I was able to re-sign a 2-way guy in 2033 whom had been exclusively used as a hitter the previous few seasons (and put up multiple 40-HR seasons and earned about 4 WAR/year) much cheaper and for a shorter term when I went to his player page and chose "set as SP" where he still had decent pitching ratings than what he was willing to sign for as a 1B.

[Dave Stieb II]

Originally Posted by jcard

My sincere apologies. I actually considered that possibility, but was thrown off by a subsequent response that seemed to begin by agreeing with your post while attempting to refute mine. I guess either I misinterpreted this third post as well as yours, or the author was himself misjudging your meaning. Either way, I own my error and regret my misunderstanding.

No need to apologize. Simple misunderstanding largely due to my sarcasm.

[Dr Naysay]

Originally Posted by s1murc1

iv noticed the ai is not good at building prospect packages if the player is really good for Witt in real life you would see a large prospect package including multiple of the organizations top 5 but the AI doesn't seem to build farm clearing packages.

Really? What has Bobby Witt Jr done on a MLB baseball field for a team to give up multiple top 5 prospects? He's a very talented prospect but he's literally had one good season in the minor leagues and as of right now I don't see a any good GMs giving up multiple top 5 prospects to get him, especially when his fielding has been so average and his projections this season aren't exactly screaming elite just yet.

[HRBaker]

Having been a programmer part of my career, I have respect for the complexity of simulating human behavior. A byline we use to use; "What is illogical cannot be programmed".

I have faith in the OOTP team to look into this closely and adjust what they can to improve results. I also have faith in the community to test out the available variables and post their results so we can choose where we prefer our own settings.


I do, however, want to state an unsaid variable that never gets mentioned; "imagination". If we sometimes experience the illogical behavior of humans in real life and respond with disbelief and anger - we should also experience those same emotions in a game that's trying to simulate "reality". YOUR definition of reality and mine can be quite different and to expect an AI to make "perfect" trades all-the-time is simulating fantasy - not reality.

When those things happen in my replays, I go through the same emotions; "Are you f(*^%g kidding me?" ...and then I move on shaking my head.

PS: This is also why I play mostly fictional. I don't have to deal with what I think I know of real players.

[Shoeless' Socks]

It's 100% the worst part of the game. They just cannot get it fixed or improved.

[SirMichaelJordan]

[QUOTE=Shoeless' Socks;4993926]It's 100% the worst part of the game. They just cannot get it fixed or improved.[/QUOTE]

This assumes that this have always been a huge problem in the game, which in my experience has not been. The game has many variables and settings to get the results you want. Even with this version, someone posted that they got better results with the settings that they are using. Should default work better out of the box? That’s up for debate as what is realistic or fun is subjective.

With that said, there is a new feature for trade deadline day, I would assume that is what’s causing not only the amount of trade’s happening but also the quality. I am sure they will find a balance.

[R. Hansh]

Sweed,I am playing an historical season starting in 1970, development is off, trading is on hard and in the middle for prospects, I am the GM of one team,in the month of July I had 54 trades and it got worse during the off season so I turned trading off. My question is where do I find the trade frequency in the game?

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by R. Hansh

Sweed,I am playing an historical season starting in 1970, development is off, trading is on hard and in the middle for prospects, I am the GM of one team,in the month of July I had 54 trades and it got worse during the off season so I turned trading off. My question is where do I find the trade frequency in the game?

Rules Menu, right hand side, a little shy of half way down screen.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by R. Hansh

Sweed,I am playing an historical season starting in 1970, development is off, trading is on hard and in the middle for prospects, I am the GM of one team,in the month of July I had 54 trades and it got worse during the off season so I turned trading off. My question is where do I find the trade frequency in the game?

I did take another look at my game and just to correct what I posted, I set my trades to "very low" not "low". No idea on the effect, but I do manage every game (play slowly day to day), so I believe this will do nicely for me as I progress through ST. I'd like to think by the time I'm done with that we'll probably have heard back from the development team with some tweaks.

Originally Posted by David Watts

Rules Menu, right hand side, a little shy of half way down screen.

Thanks for answering. Saved me having to look through menus again. Even after playing for years I still can't just go right to many of the things I want to.