[MisterPleasant]

First off I'd like to say I absolutely love the game. It's a near-perfect version of OOTP on mobile and it's got everything you'd want in a baseball management game.

That being said, I'm beyond frustrated with having losing season after losing season.

I'm playing as the Padres with their 2015 roster. The first 2 years went pretty good, even if we did get knocked out of the playoffs early both years despite having a top record in the NL. But it's been downhill ever since then.

No matter what players I bring in, my teams consistently underperform. I've always been unsure about whether I should follow the player's ratings or their previous stat history in making personnel decisions. At first I was all about ratings but because I was sucking I started looking more at their stats and tried getting guys that performed well regardless of their ratings. Now I'm doing a combination of both, but I'm STILL not seeing results.

I'll acquire a hot young hitter who's had 30-100-over.300 hitting stats over the last year or two, then they'll join my team and hit .240 with 15 HRs. Or I'll have a guy (like Wil Myers) just mash for a few years, then I sign them to a nice extension, and then they hit .220 the next two years, in their age 27-28 seasons.

The culmination of my frustration happened with my latest season (2020). The first half of 2019 was just terrible (the offense was historically bad) cause I made some poor roster decisions, so I had a major roster turnaround and acquired a new RF, C, and 1B, all of whom were hitting very well at the time and had good ratings (60/80 or above). The rest of the season was a big improvement and we ended up finishing close to .500. I was convinced I had a near contender, so I spent the offseason getting even MORE offensive players (my pitching staff is usually top 5, it's just the offense that's been terrible), namely Machado (78/80) and Profar (70/80), without giving up any other starters. My lineup is now exclusively 55 and above, mostly 65 and above. The RF, C, and 1B I had acquired were all in the 20 HRs 80-100 RBI range, and now I'm adding Machado and Profar who had even better seasons. I'm set, right?

After almost 2 months, I'm 16-27, practically buried in the standings, and everyone in my lineup besides Myers and Profar and my 2B are hitting BELOW .240, 2 of them under .200! These are guys with good ratings, strong track records, and they all decide to take a dump at the plate at the same time. Our offense has scored 135 runs--the next best team has scored 156, with pretty much every other team around 200. My pitching is once again top 5, so no problems there. I'd chalk it up to bad luck, but this is EXACTLY what happened the year before that caused the whole roster turnaround in the first place, except now I have even BETTER players and they're STILL sucking it up.

I've heard that auto-simming will give you worse results than managing yourself, and I do auto-sim most of the time, but even when I manage the game it doesn't make a difference. I can't manage my players to hit over .200, so why would it make a difference to auto-sim?

Again, I love this game (obviously cause otherwise I wouldn't keep trying) but it's become a chore to watch my team underperform again and again despite extensive work made to acquire the right players.

It can't all be bad luck, right? Does anyone else have results like this?