OOTP 26 Patch Released: 26.7.77

[Paul Reuschel's Mustache]

Originally Posted by johndoe8865

Probably one of the most frustrating releases of the single player (meat and potatoes) portion of the game I can remember in at least 5 to 10 years...the apparent lack of long term single player testing is frustrating as an end user who buys the product and expects it to function well at some point before 7-8 months later.

I have to always remind myself that OOTP is a small company with limited financial and human resources, resulting in suboptimal QA protocols and inadequate community and in-house testing before releases.

What is OOTP?

OOTP is a probabilistic simulation engine. OOTP's "AI" isn't an AI in the modern sense. It's mostly rule-based decision trees (if X, then Y), weighted randomness, and legacy heuristics from earlier versions that are hard to cleanly replace. OOTP's AI doesn't adapt like modern machine learning. It just evaluates conditions through hard-coded logic trees. And those logic trees, many of which are probably very old, are likely intertwined with older simulation code, making clean rewrites hard.

Is OOTP's AI coding outdated? Yes, of course. In reality, it's more of a scripting engine than an AI engine. Built on a now outdated foundation, OOTP's AI makes decisions that many people consider unrealistic at best, or game-breaking at worst.

Can OOTP's AI be improved? Revamping OOTP's AI couldn't be done in a patch. Instead, it would be a full-on software engineering project, possibly on par with building a new game from scratch. The developers would have to untangle AI logic from the monolithic legacy code, separating AI decision modules (roster management, trades, contracts, valuation) from the core sim engine, replacing all of that with modern AI architecture.

How long would that take? That could take 6-12 months. It would mean skipping a release year. No revenue from sales of OOTP27, for example. A small company like OOTP can't afford to do that, unfortunately.

Has a sports game ever skipped a release year? Football Manager, the world's most popular football/soccer game costs about $60. The FM developers decided this spring to cancel the planned 2025 release because they were not satisfied with the game and felt that releasing something subpar would have long-term reputational damage to the brand name.

What can we do? I'd be willing to pay full price for a non-existent OOTP27 so that the developers can spend the time needed to redo the underlying and outdated code.

OOTP is a wonderful but imperfect game. The OOTP "AI" will probably never be a real AI. Young players will continue to be released or placed on waivers for no good reason. There will be illogical signings and strange trade offers, poor roster construction decisions, unrealistic minor league roster churn, and ignored fatigue and rest logic.

OOTP is like a classic old ballpark that we enjoy visiting. It's charming, historic, and has unique quirks. But the plumbing under the bleachers is ancient and leaking in some places. And yet, there's no other ballpark quite like it.

[noooooo4499]

The people saying that this problem doesn't exist in 25 are just wrong. If you do some basic searching you'll find that the sign and release loop was reported as early as 2007, it was also reported for 25 version but simply didn't get as much traction of people reporting it as they did for this version because this version did seem to regress in this area, although this issue ALWAYS existed.


OOTP is simply too complicated for there not to be an edge case that's difficult to handle. Theoretically, I do believe it's POSSIBLE to cover all these cases but clearly it's extraordinarily difficult given how many moving parts are involved. Often times one case is covered but it causes regression in another area because the assumptions made to fix one issue did not exist elsewhere. It's just the reality of software development

[Karl Pagel Blues]

Originally Posted by Paul Reuschel's Mustache

OOTP is a wonderful but imperfect game. The OOTP "AI" will probably never be a real AI. Young players will continue to be released or placed on waivers for no good reason. There will be illogical signings and strange trade offers, poor roster construction decisions, unrealistic minor league roster churn, and ignored fatigue and rest logic.

Yup, we should probably stop calling it "AI", unless we're talking about Artificial Incompetence, lol. Okay, sorry that's a bit harsh. But honestly, it's just a static decision engine. Never learns or adapts. Repeats the same mistakes over and over again. Calling the OOTP AI artificial intelligence is like calling Rob Manfred a baseball purist.

The constant minor league signing and releasing crap really annoys the hell out of me. Why can't this be fixed???

[jcard]

Originally Posted by Karl Pagel Blues

Yup, we should probably stop calling it "AI", unless we're talking about Artificial Incompetence, lol. Okay, sorry that's a bit harsh. But honestly, it's just a static decision engine. Never learns or adapts. Repeats the same mistakes over and over again. Calling the OOTP AI artificial intelligence is like calling Rob Manfred a baseball purist.

The constant minor league signing and releasing crap really annoys the hell out of me. Why can't this be fixed???

What do you mean? It’s been “fixed” numerous times this year… it’s right there in the change notes! Of course, then ungrateful customers then have to go ahead and actually, you know, play the game / test the “fix”. Then back on the treadmill. Next thing you know, it’s the final weekend / October. Maximum inefficiency.

[Irrelevant Dude]

Originally Posted by Paul Reuschel's Mustache

Has a sports game ever skipped a release year? Football Manager, the world's most popular football/soccer game costs about $60. The FM developers decided this spring to cancel the planned 2025 release because they were not satisfied with the game and felt that releasing something subpar would have long-term reputational damage to the brand name.

There is precedent for skipping a major release. Look no further than this very series, where OOTP 6.5 was essentially a minor update to bridge the gap between OOTP 6 and OOTP 2006. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, OOTP 6.5 is still one of the most well-regarded OOTP releases.

[Karl Pagel Blues]

Originally Posted by Irrelevant Dude

There is precedent for skipping a major release. Look no further than this very series, where OOTP 6.5 was essentially a minor update to bridge the gap between OOTP 6 and OOTP 2006. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, OOTP 6.5 is still one of the most well-regarded OOTP releases.

Interesting, I didn't know that. But then I would say it's time for OOTP 26.5!

Dear OOTP DEVS: Take a year off from putting a different coat of paint on the same old rickety barn and instead, please hit the reset button!

OOTP 26.5: The Rehab Edition

Stop duct-taping legacy code and instead overhaul the "AI" engine from the ground up. Kill the static logic tree approach (if x, then y) and bring in real machine learning principles. Make decisions contextual. Give us user-defined heuristics.

I want a game that's smarter than me (or at least feels that way) instead of me having to use house-rules to give the OOTP non-AI "AI" a fighting chance and keep me from winning 130 games every year.

[noooooo4499]

Originally Posted by Karl Pagel Blues

Interesting, I didn't know that. But then I would say it's time for OOTP 26.5!

Dear OOTP DEVS: Take a year off from putting a different coat of paint on the same old rickety barn and instead, please hit the reset button!

OOTP 26.5: The Rehab Edition

Stop duct-taping legacy code and instead overhaul the "AI" engine from the ground up. Kill the static logic tree approach (if x, then y) and bring in real machine learning principles. Make decisions contextual. Give us user-defined heuristics.

I want a game that's smarter than me (or at least feels that way) instead of me having to use house-rules to give the OOTP non-AI "AI" a fighting chance and keep me from winning 130 games every year.

Honestly if you want that just join a multiplayer league.

Machine learning would cost a huge amount of money and time to get set up. The equipment like GPUs for training and ML engineers and time to get familiar with the code and refactor everything completely. You're talking about years, possible decade long project and god knows how much money.

And the result would probably suck anyway. You want a believable, human like AI, not a min-maxer. Look at GT7's Sophy AI, it took them years to train the AI to not just do crazy things like slam into other cars to gain position and they have infinite funding of Sony backing them. Look at Chess engines, pros can often tell when someone is cheating using a chess engine because it simply doesn't behave like a human. It does things that make no sense to a human mind.

You want to train an ML AI to be believable in OOTP? Good luck lmao. You'd need to teach it baseball history and tradition, all of human psychology, group behavior and so on and so forth. It's just absurd to suggest they could skip a release and get this done

[Karl Pagel Blues]

Originally Posted by noooooo4499

Honestly if you take want that just join a multiplayer league.

Machine learning would cost a huge amount of money and time to get set up. The equipment like GPUs for training and ML engineers and time to get familiar with the code and refactor everything completely. You're talking about years, possible decade long project and god knows how much money.

And the result would probably suck anyway. You want a believable, human like AI, not a min-maxer. Look at GT7's Sophy AI, it took them years to train the AI to not just do crazy things like slam into other cars to gain position and they have infinite funding of Sony backing them. Look at Chess engines, pros can often tell when someone is cheating using a chess engine because it simply doesn't behave like a human. It does things that make no sense to a human mind.

You want to train an ML AI to be believable in OOTP? Good luck lmao. You'd need to teach it baseball history and tradition, all of human psychology, group behavior and so on and so forth. It's just absurd to suggest they could skip a release and get this done

Thanks for the response!

So, the answer to a bad AI is no AI?

And I'm only interested in single-player mode.

The Devs would not be building a fully autonomous AI from scratch. But the thing we call OOTP's "AI" is using 20+ year old if-x then-y logic trees.

I'm not expecting miracles. But something like THIS RIGHT HERE should have been fixed many years ago!

It would be great to have something approximating the term "artificial intelligence". Something that stops doing dumb and unrealistic things over and over and over again that forces me to use a dozen "house rules" and pity handicaps because the "AI" is a joke.

No idea how long it would take. It would be a hell of a challenge, sure. So find a few people who understand the tech, know baseball, and love a challenge.

I don't expect it to ever happen. Every spring, enough of us (me included) willingly pay for the rickety old barn with the shiny new coat of paint on it and things continue as before.

[eas9898]

I've always felt that the game could benefit from a "Polish" release one year, where they don't add new features but enhance the ones that already exist.

[noooooo4499]

Originally Posted by eas9898

I've always felt that the game could benefit from a "Polish" release one year, where they don't add new features but enhance the ones that already exist.

I would personally buy it twice of they did a release like that, just focusing on bugfixes and making everything work better under the hood.

The unfortunate reality is that doesn't garner sales, new features do. Most people would skip the release thinking there's no change. It's just a fact not just in game dev but software dev in general even at the biggest companies rhat writing elegant and well tested code doesn't get you recognition or promotions, but new features do

[crazyjoedavola]

Originally Posted by eas9898

I've always felt that the game could benefit from a "Polish" release one year, where they don't add new features but enhance the ones that already exist.

hear, hear!

[millhousebc]

Main reason I asked for "commish mode", where at least all trades would have to be approve and or edited by the commissioner (the user). Doesn't help with sign and release, but would help with bad trade logic

[sdw1000]

I'd be happy with improved AI but also improved 3-D graphics.

[Sweed]

I can't say for sure this is patch related but I'll put it here for them to hopefully see and check on before the next patch.

My alternate uniform selections were overwritten/changed in this last patch. My game had all city select unis disabled and only one alternate assigned for home and away for each club except the Yankees. Each team was done one at a time and there were no conflicts of having two unis selected for the same days.

Post patch almost every team had their city selects enabled. Almost every team had at least one day with two unis selected. I had teams where the name/number color file was changed. One example would be the Dodgers where I had manually put white numbers on their blue alternate. After the patch they had blue numbers on the blue jersey. They weren't the only team where this occurred.

Keep in mind I am on Steam so when a patch comes out only files that have changes will be copied into the game. This happened one other time with stadiums and the tell was all of my real ads were gone and the fictional game defaults were back. I posted and Matt apologized and said a file got in the patch that shouldn't have.

Thanks.

[LloydLungs]

Originally Posted by Sweed

I can't say for sure this is patch related but I'll put it here for them to hopefully see and check on before the next patch.

My alternate uniform selections were overwritten/changed in this last patch. My game had all city select unis disabled and only one alternate assigned for home and away for each club except the Yankees. Each team was done one at a time and there were no conflicts of having two unis selected for the same days.

Can't speak for anyone else but I know it does this to me every offseason. Before every new season (in the future) I have to go manually change the uniforms back to how I want them. Not sure if there's a setting somewhere that prevents this, but if so, I don't know about it.

[omg_pwnasaurus]

This isn't specifically patch related but the mention of having to manually change stuff made me think of it.

Is there any way to save my league settings so that if I create a new save it will automatically use those settings? It's kind of a pain to go through every settings screen when I create a new save when I want to just use the same settings I created previously.

It does seem to remember which era you want to start in when you create a new save so I'm curious if there's any way to not have to go through each screen when creating a new save. Does quickstart do this? I've never really used it before.

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by LloydLungs

Can't speak for anyone else but I know it does this to me every offseason. Before every new season (in the future) I have to go manually change the uniforms back to how I want them. Not sure if there's a setting somewhere that prevents this, but if so, I don't know about it.

Thanks for your post. I can't say I've seen this in versions before v26 other than on first import of my on-gong game. Not surprising as new unis are added along with things like socks. But once set they have always stuck for me. Not saying it hasn't happened to you, only that it hasn't been an issue for me.

Your question on settings made me curious and I opened OOTP to take a look. What I found under "players & team> colors xml file settings" is a check box for "automatically check for uniform updates every season". The box in my game is not checked. Perhaps yours is?

I appreciate your post and I will pay close attention when my next season rolls around to see if it happens again.

Thanks.

[snepp]

Originally Posted by omg_pwnasaurus

This isn't specifically patch related but the mention of having to manually change stuff made me think of it.

Is there any way to save my league settings so that if I create a new save it will automatically use those settings? It's kind of a pain to go through every settings screen when I create a new save when I want to just use the same settings I created previously.

It does seem to remember which era you want to start in when you create a new save so I'm curious if there's any way to not have to go through each screen when creating a new save. Does quickstart do this? I've never really used it before.

Use the save as a template option.

Next time you go to create a new save you can load that template, then tweak the settings if you want.

[ChrisG]

Originally Posted by snepp

Use the save as a template option.

Next time you go to create a new save you can load that template, then tweak the settings if you want.

Not a simple way to do this if you like to do live starts though. There's a workaround I've seen w creating a custom game but it only seems to work sometimes? I think you have to do some very specific things every time...

[snepp]

Originally Posted by ChrisG

Not a simple way to do this if you like to do live starts though. There's a workaround I've seen w creating a custom game but it only seems to work sometimes? I think you have to do some very specific things every time...

I've never tried a live start, pretty much every league I do is some form of fictional. Probably have a couple dozen different templates saved now with a variety of different league configurations. None of them are ever exactly what I want to do, but at least they'll get me close and dramatically cut down on the changes.