Further Thoughts about Illegal Number of Players on Active Roster

[getheroff]

I have started two MLB seasons with OOTP 17, with all foreign leagues enabled. I have increased the standard roster sizes as follows:


AAA; 27 players
AA; 27 players
A; 28 players
Rookie; 45 players


I am currently playing with the most recent patch, although the issue that I am about to describe in more detail did happen in the old version as well. I do not have "ghost players allowed" ticked, as it seems artificial to me and I would rather play with "real" players.


Around June, when the full Rookie league schedule begins, I get several messages about such and such team having an "Illegal Number of Players" on their roster. In most cases it is GCL teams not having enough players and their corresponding parent system not having enough players to adequately stock all of the teams in their farm system.


I explored this issue a bit and there seems to be very few Free Agents available...usually around 400 players available for the entire universe of baseball. Most of the FA available are foreign, old, and quite a few are injured. So an AI team would struggle to sign more players to adequately fill their farm system's rosters.


After experiencing this issue in the prior version of the game (patch 2), I re-started a game (wanted to take advantage of the updated rosters anyway) and added more players to be generated for the draft. I changed the setting to create enough players for 38 draft rounds, even though I only have 35 rounds, thinking that these excess players would be added to the pool of FA and allow AI teams to properly stock there Rookie level teams. This did not solve the problem.


I continued to explore the baseball universe and discovered that most of the foreign teams have massive "reserve" rosters. One example, is that the Carmen Delfines have 30 players on their active roster and 37 on their reserve roster. This pattern is repeated again and again throughout the baseball universe. It appears that foreign teams are over-signing all available FAs and leaving none for the MLB teams to fill their farm systems. I do not know if foreign teams typically have such large reserves in real life, but this seems to be the root cause of the problem that I and others have been having.


Is there a way to put reasonable limitations on the number of players that unaffiliated teams can place on their reserve rosters? This might be an easy fix for a frustrating problem that many users are facing.

[Bluenoser]

League setup - select the appropriate league from the dropdown (top right), then set the reserve roster size of your choice.

[getheroff]

Thanks much...capped all foreign leagues at 30. Will see if that helps with this issue.

Cheers!

[getheroff]

Nope, I capped the reserve rosters as described above (30 players), but the issue is still occurring...not enough players to fully stock the Rookie Leagues.

[PSUColonel]

Does number of draft rounds happen to be an issue?

[getheroff]

Could be, but I have already increased the number of players created to be enough for 38 rounds, even though I am only using 35.

[PSUColonel]

i use 40 rounds and create enough players for 41

[r0nster]

Ghost players that should fill your rosters for minors

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by r0nster

Ghost players that should fill your rosters for minors

You shouldn't have to use them

[The Wolf]

Generate a metric ton of young, not-very-good players via Free Agent creation. That would fix it.