AI keeps signing and releasing players in quick succession or totally randomly

[jimz]

These might be separate bugs, or they might be the same bug showing up in different situations. The saved league file is on the ftp server as "crazy_ai_stuff.lg.zip".

I'd post a screenshot but it's probably more illustrative if I simply linked to one player history txt file that I've put on pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/hv7iedY8

Basically, a little under 2 calendar years in the game, this pitcher has been signed and released 123 times after his initial release by the drafting club. Although thanks to the rookie affiliates of a couple of big league teams keeping him for 3 months stretches each year, it actually represents something like 120 signings and releases over the course of 18 months in the game. The vast majority of the signing/releases happen either on the same day or within a day or two, and frequently it's the same team repeating the process over and over again. There's even a day where he was signed and released by two teams on the same day, as well as two instances where he is signed and released on the same day by the same team for 3 straight days in a row, amidst other teams also getting into the action. Over the course of all this, he pitched 0 innings and only 2 of the contracts were not minor league deals, although he wasn't injured or anything, earning $5760 for his troubles through this song and dance routine. In fact this seems to be the norm not the exception for players signing with minor league teams and indie ball. It makes getting through complete transaction logs impossible in game after a while.

Meanwhile, minor league managers controlled by AI has a habit of releasing players at random and replacing them with worse alternatives. This includes on occasion their top draft picks from a season ago, sometimes the player haven't played one inning of ball before getting cut. Checking the transaction logs of any February and you can see this phenomenon. Also, since some players, even with decent potential ratings, retire right away when this happens, the AI seems oblivious as to how ridiculous all this looks. This is one of the primary reasons why I turned off letting the AI handle transactions - because it's a total crapshoot if you'll keep your better prospects after they go through your system. It seems that anyone not in the BNN prospects list is fair game. I don't think this is the sort of thing that happens on this sort of scale and frequency IRL. I hope this isn't the intended behavior.

[Lukas Berger]

This definitely isn't supposed to happen, and with the default settings probably won't.

What's typically the most likely culprit when you're seeing this sort of behavior is if you set roster limits on the lower levels of the minor leagues. In some cases that can cause the AI to go a bit haywire. So it's best to leave the bottom levels of the minors with either no limits, or pretty generous limits, and you shouldn't see this happen.