Dilapidated Roster Database

[TrapperJohn]

Very excited to begin a post-deadline live start today; bummed to discover that yesterday's flurry of transactions are not yet reflected. No big deal — it's been less than 24 hours, after all.

More concerning is that when I opened a new live start game this morning, I find Matt Dermody in the Red Sox rotation (out of the org as of 6/9, nearly two months ago) and Raimel Tapia in the starting lineup (he's been a Brewer for more than a month and a half).

I understand that the OOTP team relies on an external database of some sort for transactions, et al. But if that database is routinely failing to reflect months-old roster changes, it kills immersion and negates much of the value of the live start feature.

I'm curious: what is this roster database? Does it have other responsibilities beyond logging MLB roster news, such that it gets distracted and neglects to pay attention? Is it going through some personal things? No shade to the OOTP team — y'all do great work — but this resource you're counting on to maintain the integrity of real-life rosters is letting you down in a big way.

[Lukas Berger]

There's not really anything we can currently do about this this since as you mention we depend on the Chadwick data to update the transactions. But we can talk with the folks there and see what might be going on here and go from there.

[TrapperJohn]

Greatly appreciate the response, Lukas. And certainly understand that transactions are outside of your control.

I hope that the Chadwick folks are able to get this sorted out, though, as it really does kill immersion. I fired up a new live start this morning to check on the state of things — just on a cursory glance, Arizona has Madison Bumgarner on the bump tonight; the Cubs have Hosmer in the lineup; Dermody and Tapia are starting for the Red Sox (all pictured below). It seems bizarre to me that a resource that seems to be solely focused on maintaining accurate baseball roster data could be regularly months behind on major transactions like this. Easy for me to say — I'm not the one doing the work. Maybe I'm the only one, but when I open up a new game and see this sort of thing, it sours the experience I'm looking for. Thanks for checking it out.

http://imgur.com/eLfAgGD
http://imgur.com/IWLQywi
http://imgur.com/GzMxdCL

[Lukas Berger]

We looked into this a little more and it seems like this likely only affects players that are currently free agents.

It may be that we can adjust things on our end to deal with this better by recognizing when players are not listed at all in the roster dump that they're free agents, or can adjust the format of the output we get from Chadwick to include the needed data here.

Either way, we'll take a further look at how to fix this for the future.

[TrapperJohn]

That makes sense — really appreciate your looking into it!

[kmwarn]

Trapper John is very diplomatic. I however am very disappointed in this backward, not updated aspect of the game---and vague "we'll try to do something sometime" platitudes are not helpful. We pay a fair amount of $ to purchase this game and components like "Live Start" should work as represented. At present, "Live Start" is useless.