Recycled player ids and release issue

[injury log]

Apologies in advance; this will take some explaining...

The issue is related to the 'Players randomly released' issue, described in a very recent thread:

ootpdevelopments.com/board/showthread.php?t=151773

I've been simming a league for 20 years, with hidden players on, and with 'delete players who do not reach Majors' on. I understand that player ids are recycled with this option on, and I also can accept that minor league leaderboards and the like will be incorrect after several years, and that this is intentional behaviour. However, I've discovered that this id recycling leads to serious gameplay issues, at least in my current league, and in particular seems to cause players to be randomly released. Background:

-For the first 16 years of the league, I sent scouts to the Excellent baseball nations, and signed all players found (a lot of players- 334 in total);

-At the start of year 17, I reassigned the scouts to six poor nations, including Tuvalu;

-The scout in Tuvalu has since found five players who already exist, and who are currently playing in the Majors or minors. Indeed, three of them are players from my own organization, who I had found in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic;

-This seemed, at first, some innocuous byproduct of player id recycling. However, when opening the player profiles, I noticed that all the players were, as soon as they were found by the Tuvalu scout, under contract to no team; their contracts had been spontaneously voided. So, my number 1 starter on my Major League team was suddenly a free agent because my scout in Tuvalu had 'discovered' him (rediscovered him?).

To diagnose further, I checked the player ids of the existing players my Tuvalu scout 'discovered', and they were in the same narrow range: 8143, 8144, 8145 and 8148. I successfully predicted the next player he would rediscover, a minor league reliever with Kansas City with player id 8147. I've yet to find a genuine undiscovered Tuvaluan, but will check if his id is in a similar range. In any event, player id recycling, in conjunction with international scouting, is producing a spontaneous player release problem, with, of course, no corresponding entry in the player history.

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I've tried to figure out what the game is doing, and my best guess follows (my speculations may not be worth reading, however):

-when a league is created, each nation is linked to a string of player ids, corresponding to the hidden players to be found in that nation. Tuvalu presumably was linked to some string like 1841-1850 in my league (there should be ten hidden players in Tuvalu). For sake of argument, let's say the Dominican Republic uses player ids 2001-2050;

-players are generated with these ids. I assume that elsewhere the game stores a list of nations, and for each nation there is a list of player ids 'hidden' in that country. That is, the ids exist in two places; they are linked with a player in the player database, and with a nation in the nations database or elsewhere;

-I never 'discovered' an existing player when I left my scouts in the same country, so I assume that when a hidden player is found, say player 2001 in the Dominican, the link to player 2001 is removed from the DR's hidden player list. However, when player 2001 is signed, at some point the game generates a new player to replace him, to maintain the quota of 50 players who are supposed to be in the DR. Spots 2002-2050 are still being used for existing hidden players in the DR, so the game looks elsewhere for an unused player id to recycle. Now, the hidden players in Tuvalu would have been retiring frequently (they would have awful ratings, and hidden players do certainly retire), so it may be the case that the game created a new Dominican player in slot 1841, say, replacing a retired Tuvaluan, and added a link to id 1841 in the DR hidden player list. I signed 79 players from the Dominican alone in 16 years, so the game would have needed to find new ids all the time. I could then discover player 1841 while scouting the Dominican, but 1841 still exists as a link in the Tuvalu nation list, and the player could therefore also be discovered by scouting Tuvalu, even after he had played many years in the minors or Majors.

-When player 1841 is 'rediscovered' by scouting Tuvalu, the game, perhaps doing some kind of coherency check, may have determined that a newly discovered hidden player couldn't possibly have a contract, so erased the existing contract information of the 'rediscovered' player, making him a free agent.

I hope that makes some sense. Perhaps someone who understands the game's inner workings better than I can judge whether this explanation seems remotely plausible.

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I'm not sure if the issue is league-specific, but it would be very time-consuming to check, since it requires simming almost two decades, while frequently signing hidden players.

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by injury log

-when a league is created, each nation is linked to a string of player ids, corresponding to the hidden players to be found in that nation. Tuvalu presumably was linked to some string like 1841-1850 in my league (there should be ten hidden players in Tuvalu). For sake of argument, let's say the Dominican Republic uses player ids 2001-2050;

That is true. Each nation does indeed have a list of player ids that are used for the hidden players.

-players are generated with these ids. I assume that elsewhere the game stores a list of nations, and for each nation there is a list of player ids 'hidden' in that country. That is, the ids exist in two places; they are linked with a player in the player database, and with a nation in the nations database or elsewhere;

Again, this is true.

-I never 'discovered' an existing player when I left my scouts in the same country, so I assume that when a hidden player is found, say player 2001 in the Dominican, the link to player 2001 is removed from the DR's hidden player list. However, when player 2001 is signed, at some point the game generates a new player to replace him, to maintain the quota of 50 players who are supposed to be in the DR. Spots 2002-2050 are still being used for existing hidden players in the DR, so the game looks elsewhere for an unused player id to recycle. Now, the hidden players in Tuvalu would have been retiring frequently (they would have awful ratings, and hidden players do certainly retire), so it may be the case that the game created a new Dominican player in slot 1841, say, replacing a retired Tuvaluan, and added a link to id 1841 in the DR hidden player list. I signed 79 players from the Dominican alone in 16 years, so the game would have needed to find new ids all the time. I could then discover player 1841 while scouting the Dominican, but 1841 still exists as a link in the Tuvalu nation list, and the player could therefore also be discovered by scouting Tuvalu, even after he had played many years in the minors or Majors.

-When player 1841 is 'rediscovered' by scouting Tuvalu, the game, perhaps doing some kind of coherency check, may have determined that a newly discovered hidden player couldn't possibly have a contract, so erased the existing contract information of the 'rediscovered' player, making him a free agent.

I hope that makes some sense. Perhaps someone who understands the game's inner workings better than I can judge whether this explanation seems remotely plausible.

I can't verify from my experiments whether this is true or not, but it seems very plausible. The reason that the minor league stuff goes wrong is that the references to the deleted ID are not taken out of other places, so the logical path from that is that if a hidden player retires having never made the majors, the corresponding ID for that player in the world.dat is not removed, and as you have said you've found a narrow range of IDs in which this is happening.

This then begs the question are the hidden players being properly maintained, because if the players in Tuvalu have retired the game should have created new players at that point and updated the world.dat with the new hidden ids.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by redsoxford

This then begs the question are the hidden players being properly maintained, because if the players in Tuvalu have retired the game should have created new players at that point and updated the world.dat with the new hidden ids.

Thanks, redsoxford- I was hoping you'd have a chance to look at this. My guess, just that, is:

-player 8140 retires in Tuvalu. The game thinks, 'great, I can use that id when it comes time to generate a replacement Tuvalu player and keep the Tuvaluan player ids together in sequence', and keeps the link active to the now empty player id;

-when it comes time during the season to replenish the hidden player supply, the Dominican players are made first, and slot 8140 is instead used for a DR player;

-when the game gets around to replacing the retired Tuvaluan player, Tuvalu is still linked to 10 active players, so it thinks Tuvalu has met its quota. I'm guessing this is true, because while scouting Tuvalu I found 5 active players, and only 1 genuine Tuvaluan, which makes me think most of Tuvalu's links were to players from other nations. I did just find one Tuvaluan, player id 13603, but he may have been generated as a replacement for one of the five 'rediscovered' players.

The game mistakenly labels Tuvaluans as Tuvaleans, incidentally.

[Nutlaw]

Tt 3813

[Nutlaw]

This was claimed fixed for the third, as yet unreleased, patch. If after applying the patch, you continue to have trouble with it, please post as such in Tech Support along with the TT number given above. Thanks.