[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, I too have a lot of fun with the base game and really don't play the "online" modes at all. I think the main key is to consider OOTP more of a toy than a game: it's not necessarily going to be all that competitive unless you handicap yourself or do other things to the league to make your job harder.

Making the AI better is and should be an issue going forward. I feel like a lot of the problem with "make the AI better" is that we all know it's not good but it's often hard to quantify exactly how it's not good. "It allows itself to get fleeced in trades" isn't really helpful; we need to figure out exactly how it allows itself to get fleeced.

One thing I'd like to see is for teams, players especially, to pick up reputations throughout the league a la "bad boy" points in EU4 (maybe that was EU3?). Every time you interact with another GM about a trade, you pick up points. Perhaps it's a small amount but I feel like the biggest reason why trades are so unbalanced is that you can start with the other GM saying "no, that's crazy!" and then slowly add more and more talent until you get the other side to the absolute lowest threshold to agree. When real life GMs do this, other GMs don't want to deal with them. There should be very little you can do to get rid of this reputation except allowing it to go down over time.

As for the effect... with every point of negative reputation, trade difficulty becomes incrementally harder. It's a small effect at first but imagine burning so many bridges that the only way other teams will deal with you is if they think they're making out like bandits. Like, say, if you get a bad enough rep, teams might overvalue their own players relative to yours by 100% or more. And probably if you reach a high enough rep, teams will not want to deal with you, period.

The other thing that could be done, either in addition to the above or instead of it, is to add an extra "send offer" button that gets the other GM's opinion. You get a fixed number of those - let's say 3 - and then the GM's not going to want to trade with you at all for, say, a month. I feel like that's just going to cause players to cheese the AI once a month instead of constantly so I feel like you still need "bad boy points" but it would also be a start.

Actually, even if you allowed the same unlimited trading thing but used "bad boy points" (or whatever you want to call them) in conjunction with the "ask the AI if this works" button, you could achieve the effect as well. I imagine, too, that once you put it in people will begin to complain to high heaven that nobody wants to trade with them after they tried to cheese the first AI GM they talked to too hard, but them's the breaks...