Ideal settings for a modern save?

[FullSnail]

Hi all, I played the game a ton when it first came out but, as others have experienced, the trade AI felt pretty off, especially for the first couple seasons. I put the difficulty on almost the hardest, yet there were multiple occasions where the AI would offer me a highly rated prospect for virtually no reason (even though my settings were set to favor prospects higher).

Has the trade AI been fixed yet, in regards to the frequency of trades and randomly uneven deals? Is there a consensus best settings to use to get the most realistic outcomes? I want to start a new save but not if I keep experiencing these issues.

[Pelican]

You are probably going to see a deluge of various approaches to this, all good. The consensus will likely be to keep trade difficulty set very high. This seems to prevent silly trades; but makes it harder to find a deal worth making. (You also have the new-to-24 “hard trading” option that “formalizes” the process and really makes you work through negotiations. Not for the hasty.) Scouting plays a part in this, both in terms of how you set accuracy, and how you hire and assign your team Scouting Director. The better the info, the better the trades.

I tend to use “Shop a Player” because I am lazy. In the past, it would tend to yield a bunch of lousy options, and maybe one plausible offer buried among them. In hard trade mode, I simply did not get any offers.

The AI is sensitive to the financial end. If you are trading or shopping a guy with a big contract, you are going to have to consider eating part of it. Playing with the % retained should yield some offers. And of course finding a guy with a big contract to trade for should enable you to unload your guy - problem for a problem, LOL.

I allow trading for draft picks in my saves; but it doesn’t happen very often. Not sure what others have experienced. Here, baseball IRL and OOTP is so different from the NFL or NBA. Football and basketball draftees play right away on the big stage. In baseball they are years away, and the success rate is less. It’s a crapshoot.

Can’t wait to see what other reactions you get.

[FullSnail]

Originally Posted by Pelican

You are probably going to see a deluge of various approaches to this, all good. The consensus will likely be to keep trade difficulty set very high. This seems to prevent silly trades; but makes it harder to find a deal worth making. (You also have the new-to-24 “hard trading” option that “formalizes” the process and really makes you work through negotiations. Not for the hasty.) Scouting plays a part in this, both in terms of how you set accuracy, and how you hire and assign your team Scouting Director. The better the info, the better the trades.

I tend to use “Shop a Player” because I am lazy. In the past, it would tend to yield a bunch of lousy options, and maybe one plausible offer buried among them. In hard trade mode, I simply did not get any offers.

The AI is sensitive to the financial end. If you are trading or shopping a guy with a big contract, you are going to have to consider eating part of it. Playing with the % retained should yield some offers. And of course finding a guy with a big contract to trade for should enable you to unload your guy - problem for a problem, LOL.

I allow trading for draft picks in my saves; but it doesn’t happen very often. Not sure what others have experienced. Here, baseball IRL and OOTP is so different from the NFL or NBA. Football and basketball draftees play right away on the big stage. In baseball they are years away, and the success rate is less. It’s a crapshoot.

Can’t wait to see what other reactions you get.

I appreciate the reply! I actually like the hard mode, makes it more realistic IMO. I'm hesitant to play on the hardest difficulty as it's my first OOTP, but maybe one click below would do the trick. Might also do me good to lower the frequency of trades. Thanks for responding!