[uruguru]

ok, my kids are in bed so I have some time for a post-mortem

This sim was sort of a failure which is why I invoked what I have come to call the "Hank Aaron Rule". This is a rule that suggests it's time to quit, i.e. you've won, when you've acquired a player of the caliber of Hank Aaron in a way that is just too unrealistic. It means that the sim has transitioned from immersive to farcical. And it doesn't have to be Aaron.. it could be Mays, Koufax or some other 5-star superstar at their peak. In addition, their acquisition has to be too easy. If Willie Mays were a free agent and I outbid every other team to get him, that wouldn't qualify.

In this instance, I literally did get Hammerin' Hank for a handful of prospects that I acquired pretty easily earlier in the sim. And I haven't even played a regular season game yet!

So what went wrong?

Several things (three, in my estimation) in differing degrees.

#1 - The AI doesn't offer minor-league contracts with signing bonuses. What this means is if you have the foresight to offer signing bonuses to minor-league prospects, your offers are going to be effectively unchallenged. I created a systematic method for offering minor-league bonuses for all reasonable prospects specifically to avoid a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth negotiation. I fully expected to get outbid on some prospects and was willing to accept those losses. But what happened was that I won all of the prospects... and I mean all of them. None of the other 23 MLB teams signed a prospect with at least 2.5 stars potential until my rosters filled up. That gave me a tremendous arsenal of trade bait.

One could avoid this exploit by never offering bonuses with milb contracts, but that's basically an admission that a feature is so bugged that it shouldn't be used. Plus, avoiding this feature exposes the player to the annoying infinite loop of negotiations that sound like this, "You offered me a minor-league contract. What I want is a minor-league contract". Nobody wants that, either.

#2 - I, as the player, was able to blanket the entire market of prospects with offers in one day. When the off-season started, I methodically listed all of the available free agents and came up with a plan that resulted in me sending out just over 150 contract offers on the first day. The goal of this was to keep the AI from sniping good prospects by simply offering a free milb contract that gets automatically accepted by the prospect (this happens a lot). If they wanted a prospect, they were going to have to compete with me.

But this problem has to do with the silliness of being able to send out 150 contract offers in a single game day. We don't allow more than 5 "Shop a Player" in one day, so it seems like contract offers should be gated as well -- at least any of those that have financial terms. If you want to send out a bunch of blanket milb contracts, that's one thing. But if you want to negotiate a signing bonus or a major-league contract, those should be gated. If, for example, the game restricted you to making no more than 1 (or 2) of those offers per day, then players would have to carefully consider the priority in which they make offers.

#3 - The Milwaukee Braves had prime Hank Aaron on the trading block. This made no sense. Extremely popular players make a lot of money for teams via ticket sales, and teams are businesses. But when those same players are also great at playing baseball, it seems like insanity that a team would actively attempt to trade them away. Of course, it's possible that these players could still be lured away with a sufficiently large bribe, but their popularity should make this much more difficult.

Envision a system where "Extremely Popular" players are effectively worth two more stars in a trade, "Very Popular" players are worth one more star, and "Popular" players are worth an additional half-star. This would suggest that Aaron (4.5 stars) would be treated as a 6.5 star player if anyone wanted to trade for him -- much more expensive than what I paid for. And any player who has a popularity-adjusted rating over 5 stars would never be on the Trading Block.

Anyway, those are the 3 things that sort of broke this sim in my view.