[Sweed]

Originally Posted by BarneyRubble

The idiotic trades was one of the reasons I quit watching MLB. In fact, the Erik Bedard trade was the last straw for me.

OOTP is a game that tries to please everyone. Well, it's not going to happen.

If you choose to use the beloved 'shop around' feature, you'll find lopsided trades. This is no mystery! It's also something the AI can't do. No one gets an e-mail saying GM XYZ is shopping player ABC, please respond NOW or SKIP?

Lopsided trades, which need to remain in the game, can be magnified by game settings. One example is setting 'ratings' as the overwhelming factor in player evaluation and then decreasing scout accuracy. Congratulations, you've just created incompetent AI GMs and managers. How about setting the veteran/prospect slider all the way one way or the other? That won't effect trades? Yep, I can't poach another teams prospects, but I can easily poach the other players. It also makes useless prospects so valuable they can be used as a trade piece in an already unfair trade. Even setting the trade difficulty can cause issues. I had a very good 3B (60) I wasn't going to need the next year and found a team that was playoff bound and in need of a 3B (and some offense). We never did get a deal because I refused to do it. They suffered, not me, so I'm not sure who the difficulty affects the most, me or him? I've since gone to defaults. Good trades should benefit both teams and it goes deeper than 10 is bigger than 9. Bad trades do happen, Frank Robinson says so.

People try to compare trades and don't show salaries, option years, service years, personality, trade/evaluation settings, GM tendencies, team finances, etc... It's what they think is right or wrong. Well, OOTP doesn't know names and the settings have everything to do with how the AI behaves. Personally, I use default trade settings, but I don't shop players either.

I'm not saying OOTP 23 doesn't need adjusted (I haven't played it enough yet to know), but if you want to 'evaluate' a trade, you better take EVERYTHING into account. Bad trades happen. GMs get fired. It's baseball.

Because OOTP has so many features/tools, house rules are a must. It's the beauty of OOTP and there is no right or wrong (assuming you know how the settings affect the AI). I have house rules. I don't look at personality and rely on scouting. I only use 'shop a player' during winter meetings and only once a day. I don't use 'relative to' (it's MLB and it stays there). LTMs are global.

I traded a pitcher that was out of options and he won a Cy Young award. I thought I ripped them off.

If team A rips off team B, please explain to me the issue if the AI is trading against itself. It's either the game settings or the GM tendencies. If a GM is horrible (tendencies), so be it. He'll get fired. It's baseball. The settings, however, you can control. The settings can create some of the dumbest GMs/managers in the history of the sport. Specifically, the trade settings, AI evaluation settings, the incorporate stats and scout accuracy settings.

The bottom line is lopsided trades exist in OOTP, just like they do in the MLB. The issue is 'shop a player'. That unrealistic feature, which the AI can't use, is the quickest way to find a lopsided trade. Throw in questionable settings and you can make it even worse. The GMs have tendencies, scouts have ratings, let them be by using the default settings. The only setting I change is AI evaluation. I try to keep it as balanced as possible (as close to 25/25/25/25 as possible). I'm trying 34/33/22/11 right now because I haven't monkeyed with it in a long time and am curious. If I don't like it, I'll go back to 25/25/25/25 because I really had no issues with it. When you change it, you must apply it to GM tendencies.

I could nitpick things I do differently than you but.... as you said,

It's the beauty of OOTP and there is no right or wrong (assuming you know how the settings affect the AI).

So, overall I agree with your post.

I play out my games and I look at the full transaction report every day. Any trades I go to the trade recap screen and click on every player involved in the trade. I may not agree with what the AI teams did but, I can normally see each getting some value. Like you, I'm not saying it can't be improved but I also don't see the disaster that is being portrayed in this thread. I'll add here that on the occasion I see something that looks dumb I think "that's baseball, those things happen". And sometimes when one goes back to take a look a year later, they find, the team that got screwed ends up being the team that actually won.

With regard to FM, I've said it many times. Go to their boards and read the complaints. There are plenty and folks that grew up watching the "beautiful game" are not shy about telling you where FM gets it wrong. Also like OOTP, there are FM users that are "happy" with where FM is.

I'd love to see some of the depth that FM has in regards to communicating with players and media. Other OOTP players have posted they'll quit playing OOTP if it goes down that road. We're all different.

I think though it is important to note FM probably has more coders doing just their player interaction module than OOTP has doing their whole game. You can probably expand that to include any module, FM vs OOTP.