[Tony M]

Originally Posted by injury log

-when a league is created, each nation is linked to a string of player ids, corresponding to the hidden players to be found in that nation. Tuvalu presumably was linked to some string like 1841-1850 in my league (there should be ten hidden players in Tuvalu). For sake of argument, let's say the Dominican Republic uses player ids 2001-2050;

That is true. Each nation does indeed have a list of player ids that are used for the hidden players.

-players are generated with these ids. I assume that elsewhere the game stores a list of nations, and for each nation there is a list of player ids 'hidden' in that country. That is, the ids exist in two places; they are linked with a player in the player database, and with a nation in the nations database or elsewhere;

Again, this is true.

-I never 'discovered' an existing player when I left my scouts in the same country, so I assume that when a hidden player is found, say player 2001 in the Dominican, the link to player 2001 is removed from the DR's hidden player list. However, when player 2001 is signed, at some point the game generates a new player to replace him, to maintain the quota of 50 players who are supposed to be in the DR. Spots 2002-2050 are still being used for existing hidden players in the DR, so the game looks elsewhere for an unused player id to recycle. Now, the hidden players in Tuvalu would have been retiring frequently (they would have awful ratings, and hidden players do certainly retire), so it may be the case that the game created a new Dominican player in slot 1841, say, replacing a retired Tuvaluan, and added a link to id 1841 in the DR hidden player list. I signed 79 players from the Dominican alone in 16 years, so the game would have needed to find new ids all the time. I could then discover player 1841 while scouting the Dominican, but 1841 still exists as a link in the Tuvalu nation list, and the player could therefore also be discovered by scouting Tuvalu, even after he had played many years in the minors or Majors.

-When player 1841 is 'rediscovered' by scouting Tuvalu, the game, perhaps doing some kind of coherency check, may have determined that a newly discovered hidden player couldn't possibly have a contract, so erased the existing contract information of the 'rediscovered' player, making him a free agent.

I hope that makes some sense. Perhaps someone who understands the game's inner workings better than I can judge whether this explanation seems remotely plausible.

I can't verify from my experiments whether this is true or not, but it seems very plausible. The reason that the minor league stuff goes wrong is that the references to the deleted ID are not taken out of other places, so the logical path from that is that if a hidden player retires having never made the majors, the corresponding ID for that player in the world.dat is not removed, and as you have said you've found a narrow range of IDs in which this is happening.

This then begs the question are the hidden players being properly maintained, because if the players in Tuvalu have retired the game should have created new players at that point and updated the world.dat with the new hidden ids.