FLAW: Loophole in Trade AI

Mets Man · 04-08-2007, 04:10 PM

I've found that if you offer to take some of the CPU GM's crappy minor leaguers, they will accept deals that they wouldn't otherwise accept.

In other words, they give you some minor league players WITH minor league contracts and you get some leverage in the trade. So not only do you take away some of the CPUs players (however crappy they are), but they actually give you a "trade advantage" as well.

This shouldn't be working the way it is. I understand if I was taking in some crappy players with a major league contract (so the CPU could dump salary), but all these players that I took off of the CPU had minor league contracts, so I could easily dump them afterwards for no loss at all.

My biggest concern is not the fact that they give this players, but rather the fact that you actually get an advantage/leverage for doing so. Is this some sort of bug?

Claymore · 04-08-2007, 04:46 PM

What difficulty do you have trades set at?

RchW · 04-08-2007, 04:54 PM

Can you give a specific example of a lopsided trade favoring you that was completed only because you took crappy minor leaguers?

Scoman · 04-08-2007, 04:56 PM

I've also found that I can make trades in between the end of the regular season,and the end of the playoffs. I have the trading deadline set at default july 31. Is this correct? I figured I could not make any trades untill after the end of post season,maybe I'm wrong. Can anyone clarify?

RchW · 04-08-2007, 05:21 PM

Players must clear waivers. Also the AI will turn down trades for upcoming FA. I know this because I just tried to trade a pitcher during the playoff and couldn't.

Scoman · 04-08-2007, 05:27 PM

Are you playing fic or hist because im playing hist and Ive been making trades every year in that time period. By the shop player method.

plannine · 04-08-2007, 05:44 PM

My off the wall guess, is that you are playing in commissioner mode and you are using the 'act as' function to select a team. I guess there are a couple of ways in through the backdoor to make trades after the date. Just don't do them!!!!! You know what the deadlines are.

(Note:In my little test, i created a standard league to try this 'flaw'. Results may not be the same in other tests using different starting points.)

Scoman · 04-08-2007, 05:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by plannine

My off the wall guess, is that you are playing in commissioner mode and you are using the 'act as' function to select a team. There are a couple of ways that you can backdoor in to make trades after the date. Just don't do them!!!!!

Yeah,your right,I thought something was wrong,no wonder I've been so dominating in my league. Ive been trading guys at the end of the season that should have been going FA. Duh,I knew something wasnt right.

Mets Man · 04-08-2007, 05:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Claymore

What difficulty do you have trades set at?

Hard difficulty with favor prospects

plannine · 04-08-2007, 05:56 PM

Dumping dead weight is dumping dead weight even if the are minor leaguers....

.

red95vette · 04-08-2007, 06:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by plannine

Dumping dead weight is dumping dead weight even if the are minor leaguers....

Try adding dead weight to a even trade from your side. The AI will usually pass, until you drop the dead weight.

I noticed this as well when previewing the game. The thing is the players are not really "dead weight" if they have minor league contracts and you can release them without consequence. I think that's the point of the original poster. As a GM, I'll willing to take a teams whole flippin minor league system (or more accurately the players with MiL contracts) along with its star player if I'm giving up little else in return.

Mets Man · 04-08-2007, 06:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RchW

Can you give a specific example of a lopsided trade favoring you that was completed only because you took crappy minor leaguers?

Ok this is pretty long so here goes: (I'm playing as Montreal - and no it is not on "Act On" mode. I am the currently selected manager of Montreal - Historical import from Lahman Database 1994 - I just finished season 1995 and I'm in the offseason)

Friday, November 24th, 1995: Johnson and Swift Swapped
The rumor has been going on for a while now, but today it was made official. The Montreal Expos sent 31-year old catcher Rich Rowland, 26-year old minor league second baseman Cam Thompson, 28-year old second baseman Pat Listach, 22-year old minor league first baseman Paul Vincent, 23-year old minor league first baseman José Barrera, 32-year old center fielder Lance Johnson, a 4th round draft pick, a 3rd round draft pick and a 3rd round draft pick to the San Francisco Giants for 34-year old starting pitcher Bill Swift, 30-year old catcher Kirt Manwaring, 30-year old minor league reliever Brad Brink, 32-year old second baseman Bip Roberts, 20-year old minor league left fielder Karim Garcia, 23-year old minor league reliever Bill Simas, 25-year old minor league starting pitcher Reid Cornelius, 26-year old minor league reliever Tomás Cruz, 22-year old minor league starting pitcher LaTroy Hawkins, 22-year old minor league reliever Jorge Saucedo, a 1st round draft pick, a 2nd round draft pick, a 3rd round draft pick, a 5th round draft pick, a 4th round draft pick and $266,000 in cash.

I noticed it while I was fiddling around with this trade. Each minor league player above that I add, each time I was able to sway one extra draft pick. If I pull the crappy minor leaguer away from their side of the deal, then I can no longer get the draft pick. So for example, by adding LaTroy Hawkins to the deal on their side I was able to get an extra draft pick. If I pull LaTroy Hawkins out of the deal, then they no longer will give me the draft pick.

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with draft pick trading specifically, because I remember instances like this before where I was able to get leverage on a deal for a trade or increase the amount of cash I could take off the computer by adding a crappy minor leaguer on the CPU side.

Something seems to be flawed with the trade logic. The CPU GMs seem to see these minor leaguers as dead weight, and the CPU GMs are rewarding me handsomely to take them off their hands. The thing is, these crappy minor leaguers are under minor league contract, so it really does nothing for me to take them off their hands and just release them if they take up too much space on my minor league teams.

As you can see in the above example, I was able to take every single draft pick off the CPU's hands. Just imagine the impact it could have when trying to acquire certain players. All you need is that little bit of leverage to pull of the deal. Each crappy minor leaguer you add seems to lower the trade threshold. This method pretty much turns the "Hard" difficulty setting into something more like "Easy" or "Normal".

I recall several instances before where I thought I remembered a deal wouldn't go through, but subsequently I threw in a couple of minor leaguers on their side and for some reason I was able to make the deal go through afterwards.

Mets Man · 04-08-2007, 06:13 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by red95vette

I noticed this as well when previewing the game. The thing is the players are not really "dead weight" if they have minor league contracts and you can release them without consequence. I think that's the point of the original poster. As a GM, I'll willing to take a teams whole flippin minor league system (or more accurately the players with MiL contracts) along with its star player if I'm giving up little else in return.

Ya that's exactly my point.

I don't care so much that they want to dump dead weight onto me. But when they do, they shouldn't be giving me any extra leverage to do so. The only time that a slight leverage should exist is if I'm willing to take a dead weight player with a major league contract. Even in this case, I hope the leverage isn't too large if the contract is a very low salary, since for some reason I'm usually able to trade these low salary dead weight contracts for minor league players with minor league contracts and subsequently dump them later.

So here's what's happening in an example (this is not a specific example of what happened):

1) I ask the CPU GM to give me Frank Thomas for Ken Caminiti.
2) CPU GM refuses
3) I ask the CPU GM to give me Frank Thomas and a few of their dead weight minor leaguers with minor league contracts for Ken Caminiti.
4) CPU all of a sudden accepts
5) I take these dead weight minor leaguers and release them without adding any charge to my bottom line, since they are just "minor league contracts"
(if the CPU wanted to get rid of these dead weights, they should have just released them themselves, since it wouldn't have charged them anyways) - why give me extra leverage in a trade?

The CPU GM AI should only be dumping contracts to me and giving me leverage for them ONLY for contracts that I will have to accept full responsibility for.
In other words (any one of the following is acceptable and nothing else):
1) contracts where if I attempt to release the player, then I will have to pay his full contract
2) contracts where if I attempt to trade that player and his contract to another CPU GM, I should be giving leverage to the CPU GM in this case (losing leverage myself and upping the difficulty/threshold of completing the trade)

DCG12 · 04-08-2007, 07:26 PM

I would like to know how you are doing this because I went into my league and played around for 1/2 hour offering various deals to just about every team in the league and if the deal wouldn't work it didn't matter how much dead weight I tried to take the GM's never waivered.

I even tried changing trade settings to normal, hard, very hard and I couldn't reproduce what you descibe.

The only difference is I play a fictional league but that should not matter as OOTP doesn't know names.

battists · 04-08-2007, 07:36 PM

If you guys are reasonably sure there's an issue here, please post it in Tech Support...

volvox · 04-08-2007, 09:15 PM

I've noticed that if you shop a player and your coach says 'I'd ask for a prospect' when your about to finalize the deal, you can grab 4 & 5 star prospects pretty much at will as add ons to the deal.

PSUColonel · 04-08-2007, 09:50 PM

Yea, I don't like the manager feedback, it's almost like the Ai is giving you the answer to the question: how do I get this deal done? That is for the GM(you) to figure out.

Mets Man · 04-09-2007, 09:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DCG12

I would like to know how you are doing this because I went into my league and played around for 1/2 hour offering various deals to just about every team in the league and if the deal wouldn't work it didn't matter how much dead weight I tried to take the GM's never waivered.

I even tried changing trade settings to normal, hard, very hard and I couldn't reproduce what you descibe.

The only difference is I play a fictional league but that should not matter as OOTP doesn't know names.

When I have time, I'll try to reproduce this scenario again. The problem is, I already completed the trade and have advanced through the season a couple of months already, but I'm pretty sure I could reproduce this again.

When you are trading for "crappy" minor leaguers, I don't think you can just pick just "any" crappy minor leaguer. I think it has to be very specific. Perhaps I got lucky, but if you fiddle around and trade for these dead weights, eventually you'll find one that the CPU GM is more than happy to get rid of.

I stumbled upon this ONLY because I was trying to nip away a few more prospects from the CPU to make the trade more favorable towards me. I figured, he might not mind if I take a few of his other not super quality prospects away from him. So I searched around his AAA, AA, A for guys with good last year stats, but not necessarily great ratings. Most of the ratings of the guys I took were roughly around 4-5 across all their skill sets in a 2 to 8 scale. They weren't the worst prospects, but they weren't the best either. Also, they weren't restricted to fictionally generated players. Some were in fact real historic players such as LaTroy Hawkins.

Here's a tip, the easiest way to reproduce this scenario is to try a normal close to even trade. Add cash to the deal to make the trade acceptable. Once you've found the exact cash threshold, reduce the cash by the slightest bit so the trade is no longer accepted. Next, go around the CPU's minor league systems and look around for minor leaguers to add to the deal. Add only one at a time. So add one, see if the CPU accepts, if it doesn't, then remove it before you add another one. Keep going through these prospects until you find one that allows the deal to be accepted.

This will be confirmed a bug if at anytime the CPU accepts your deal only after adding a minor leaguer with a minor league contract. This should never happen.

I will try to reproduce this tonight.

Hi battists, if I'm able to reproduce this, is there somebody I could send the saved files to along with the instructions on how to reproduce this?

Ksyrup · 04-09-2007, 09:52 AM

This doesn't seem so much like a bug than an exploit you should just not take advantage of. This doesn't happen unless you are trying to make it happen.

red95vette · 04-09-2007, 10:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ksyrup

This doesn't seem so much like a bug than an exploit you should just not take advantage of. This doesn't happen unless you are trying to make it happen.

LOL. Sorry but it's semantics. It's a "bug" in the AI if you can do this plain and simple. The player always is and should be looking to play advantageously. That's the point of playing a game!

Ironically, I just posted about this very concept yesterday. See message 14 in this thread.
http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=145160

04-08-2007, 04:10 PM	#1
Mets Man Major Leagues Join Date: Jan 2002 Posts: 336	FLAW: Loophole in Trade AI I've found that if you offer to take some of the CPU GM's crappy minor leaguers, they will accept deals that they wouldn't otherwise accept. In other words, they give you some minor league players WITH minor league contracts and you get some leverage in the trade. So not only do you take away some of the CPUs players (however crappy they are), but they actually give you a "trade advantage" as well. This shouldn't be working the way it is. I understand if I was taking in some crappy players with a major league contract (so the CPU could dump salary), but all these players that I took off of the CPU had minor league contracts, so I could easily dump them afterwards for no loss at all. My biggest concern is not the fact that they give this players, but rather the fact that you actually get an advantage/leverage for doing so. Is this some sort of bug?

04-08-2007, 04:54 PM	#3
RchW Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Toronto ON by way of Glasgow UK Posts: 15,629	Can you give a specific example of a lopsided trade favoring you that was completed only because you took crappy minor leaguers? __________________ Cheers RichW If you’re looking for a good cause to donate money to please consider a Donation to Parkinson’s Canada. It may help me have a better future and if not me, someone else. Thanks. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Frank Wilhoit

04-08-2007, 04:56 PM	#4
Scoman All Star Starter Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: heath ohio Posts: 1,830	I've also found that I can make trades in between the end of the regular season,and the end of the playoffs. I have the trading deadline set at default july 31. Is this correct? I figured I could not make any trades untill after the end of post season,maybe I'm wrong. Can anyone clarify? Last edited by Scoman; 04-08-2007 at 04:59 PM.

04-08-2007, 05:21 PM	#5
RchW Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Toronto ON by way of Glasgow UK Posts: 15,629	Players must clear waivers. Also the AI will turn down trades for upcoming FA. I know this because I just tried to trade a pitcher during the playoff and couldn't. __________________ Cheers RichW If you’re looking for a good cause to donate money to please consider a Donation to Parkinson’s Canada. It may help me have a better future and if not me, someone else. Thanks. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” Frank Wilhoit

04-08-2007, 05:44 PM	#7
plannine All Star Reserve Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Michigan Posts: 572	My off the wall guess, is that you are playing in commissioner mode and you are using the 'act as' function to select a team. I guess there are a couple of ways in through the backdoor to make trades after the date. Just don't do them!!!!! You know what the deadlines are. (Note:In my little test, i created a standard league to try this 'flaw'. Results may not be the same in other tests using different starting points.) __________________ Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa - Casey Stengel Last edited by plannine; 04-08-2007 at 05:50 PM.

04-08-2007, 04:46 PM	#2
Claymore All Star Reserve Join Date: Jun 2005 Posts: 764	What difficulty do you have trades set at?

04-08-2007, 05:27 PM	#6
Scoman All Star Starter Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: heath ohio Posts: 1,830	Are you playing fic or hist because im playing hist and Ive been making trades every year in that time period. By the shop player method.

04-08-2007, 05:56 PM	#10
plannine All Star Reserve Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Michigan Posts: 572	Dumping dead weight is dumping dead weight even if the are minor leaguers.... . __________________ Good pitching will always stop good hitting and vice-versa - Casey Stengel Last edited by plannine; 04-08-2007 at 06:04 PM.

04-08-2007, 07:26 PM	#14
DCG12 All Star Starter Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Traveling through another dimension-not one of only sight and sound,but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundries are those of imagination. Posts: 1,161	I would like to know how you are doing this because I went into my league and played around for 1/2 hour offering various deals to just about every team in the league and if the deal wouldn't work it didn't matter how much dead weight I tried to take the GM's never waivered. I even tried changing trade settings to normal, hard, very hard and I couldn't reproduce what you descibe. The only difference is I play a fictional league but that should not matter as OOTP doesn't know names.

04-08-2007, 07:36 PM	#15
battists Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 18,506	If you guys are reasonably sure there's an issue here, please post it in Tech Support...

04-08-2007, 09:15 PM	#16
volvox Bat Boy Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 2	I've noticed that if you shop a player and your coach says 'I'd ask for a prospect' when your about to finalize the deal, you can grab 4 & 5 star prospects pretty much at will as add ons to the deal.

04-08-2007, 09:50 PM	#17
PSUColonel Hall Of Famer Join Date: Feb 2002 Posts: 13,107	Yea, I don't like the manager feedback, it's almost like the Ai is giving you the answer to the question: how do I get this deal done? That is for the GM(you) to figure out.

04-09-2007, 09:52 AM	#19
Ksyrup Major Leagues Join Date: Feb 2002 Posts: 413	This doesn't seem so much like a bug than an exploit you should just not take advantage of. This doesn't happen unless you are trying to make it happen.