Hardball is an extremely fun but complex game, and it's supportability is very similar. How many times have you logged in to see the warning message that a game failed to sim because of an invalid lineup (either you or opponent)? We are looking at ways to provide more useful feedback, and where and when useful (24+ hours), utilize a better UI for correcting them.

By far the toughest and most frustrating issue for us (and I am sure opponents) is when a lineup is so bad it requires intense manual intervention. I have personally adjusted hundreds of lineups the past 6 months of mainly minor league teams that were completely gutted. Users completely disregarding minor league teams and utilizing entire budget for AAA and ML. Some franchises had a handful of players combined between RL->AAA and no budget. This requires signing dozens of tryout players that set this team up for massive fatigue failure and probably in some cases 5-10 season behind being competitive again. I understand everyone's primary focus is on the majors, but unfortunately (as of now) the game isn't built to just worry and build a singular team but an entire franchise.

As this community, HBD is filled with a bunch of smart people, that know the insides and out of this game, I ask: How do we address this? My initial thoughts have bounced around from enforcing minor league budgets, to not having players fatigue as hard in minors, world options for no minors, etc. I just need some feedback and smart users to help me with a solution. I think fixing this issue saves our support team a bunch of headaches, but also sets these worlds up to be more competitive.

Thank you everyone for your help in advance!

-Chris
WhatIfSports

I agree with bripat on budgetary penalties, or some other type of penalty. I also think messages when team pitching staffs or lineups have stamina issues would be nice (ie. you have 5 pitchers with 0 stamina at the AA level, you should probably make some adjustments, etc. etc).

I know you can have AI run your minors, but it would also be nice to be able to make quick and easy adjustments to each level. I've always thought it would be really nice to have one page for minor league lineups, one page for pitching staffs etc. It's pretty time consuming to click through all 5 levels, I would love to knock it out on one screen. Or even just be able to view all the staffs on one page, and then manually go to another page to edit. Whatever is easiest to code.

Finally, Is there a way to setup automatic signings for teams without the proper amount of players? Ie. once you reach 8 hitters or whatever amount of pitchers, the system automatically populates a tryout level player. You could even enforce a penalty for every player signed this way, similar to bpats point.

Automate the system to fill minor league teams that are gutted/fatigued. And the players are added need to be paid for by borrowing money from next season's $185M total budget, with a 10% interest/transaction fee added.

Posted by bjschumacher on 6/16/2021 3:41:00 PM (view original):
Automate the system to fill minor league teams that are gutted/fatigued. And the players are added need to be paid for by borrowing money from next season's $185M total budget, with a 10% interest/transaction fee added.

Well, I guess if the current owner left, the money being taken out of next season's budget would penalize the new owner. So maybe borrowing the money from next season is not the best approach. But borrowing from somewhere.

But on the other hand, if the current owner left, the budget could revert back to the full $185M.

I don't have a specific suggestion, but here's what I see as the root cause: there is no significant immediate benefit to the franchise owner for maintaining well kept minor league teams.

I can say till I'm blue in the face that it helps develop your prospects, but that won't do anything to convince an owner who, for whatever specific reason, cares only about getting Ws for his major league team, and sees anything else as misdirection of limited resources.

SO: either you do something to have the health of the minor leagues directly improve the performance of the major league team (yep I know that sounds ridiculous)...

OR you do something to have poorly run minors directly diminish the major league team. Yep, that sounds like at first blush, budgetary penalties. And not to disagree with bripat42, but if you want to be serious about it, YES they have to be Punitive.

I would say minor leagues that have fatigue issues with players and pitchers are more prone to career ending injuries, prospects lose ratings rather then gain them if they are overplayed or if games have to be forfeited (a game not simmed aka a forfeit should make all the players on the team that caused that to have their makeup aka their work ethic go down) and the big one, we should see decent gains for players and pitchers in the minor league playoffs. Each round should give players and pitchers a 'bump' so if you make it into the playoffs and further into the playoffs your players get better faster and those borderline players may become serviceable. Right now, I honestly don't notice any gains for my minor league players that make the playoffs. There should be at least something.

I think the biggest motivator for owners would be to give prize money and/or credits for minor league teams who make the playoffs. Less than prizes for the ML team, but enough to make people care about it. Granted, this would cut into WIS's profit margin, so I don't know how well this idea would be received by management.

False warnings are also a problem. Just yesterday, owners in two of my worlds posted that they had lineup warnings despite saying they had full rosters and lineups at all levels. That has happened multiple times in the last few months. I know it was a glitch. Testing maybe? But it caused temporary turmoil.

How to resolve the dilemma of ignoring the minors?

1) Notifying owners and commissioners of issues after the first 24 hours of the minor-league season. Teams with less than 10 pitchers or 10 position players would receive an email (not a sitemail) notifying them of the roster situation at all (or various) levels. The commissioner would receive a summary of what teams in that world received this email and which levels are affected. If after another 24 or 48 hours have elapsed and the numbers have been improved, the AI signs tryout players to fill out the roster and/or meet minimums.

2) Set parameters about use of players in the red. For pitchers, it would have to be something like using a pitcher twice when he is in the red forces AI to deactivate the pitcher and sign a tryout camp pitcher. It would be up to the AI to prevent the deactivated pitcher from being activated until he was back at 100. Position players, maybe make it playing five games in the red before the AI deactivates and signs a replacement (same restrictions as pitchers).

3) Money for the AI signing the tryout camp players should come from the normal budget whenever possible. If not, it should come out of one of these categories (in order): prospect payroll, international scouting, college-high school scouting, advance scouting, medical, training. My experience is that owners who play heavily in the IFA market are more likely to ignore the minors than others.

4) This goes toward the overall health of the game: Create a greater pool of minor-league players, especially pitchers. Because some owners don't sign their draft picks, the minor-league free-agent pool is quite shallow of nonexistent. Signing tryout camp players to pitch at the AAA and AA levels for more than a couple games isn't a good solution.

I do like the idea, mentioned by bripat, about freezing certain transactions until roster issues are resolved.

First thing to do is up the minimums to 10 position players and 12 pitchers at each level.

If the owner's Rookie Ball squad doesn't have a certain amount of players by a certain time, the SIM signs draft picks or IFA players to fill the squad. Something similar can be done for other levels, but pull from tryout camp, minor league free agents and major League free agents that want minor league contracts (I.e. released players). Obviously, the SIM would only sign minor league players for each level that doesn't have the above referenced minimums. For lower levels like Loa and hiA, pull from tryout camp; for AA and AAA, try to pull $38,000 and $54,000 minor league players from the free agent pool so they're competitive players or at least fully developed players with higher durability than tryout camp guys. If there isn't any free agents out there that lineup money wise, sign tryout camp players for the higher levels as well.

Typically, the first major league game starts in the pm1 or pm2 cycle. The minor league play starts the next day during the AM cycle. If the owner doesn't have 10 position players and 12 pitchers at each level (excluding rookie ball), automatically start signing players in line with the above suggestions in the PM2 part 2 cycle before the minor league games begin . If this clears out the tryout camp players, they'll repopulate during the next cycle and the SIM can continue to sign players until all minimums on all teams are filled. If any teams run into budget discrepancies, simply have them run a negative cash balance for the entire season. If they stay for the next season, add a ten percent penalty to the negative cash balance and subtract it from the $185mm the next season. If they leave the World, the new owner starts fresh. At least this way, the current owner can zero out his negative cash balance by trading and getting some cash in the trade. If the owner leaves, the new owner should not be penalized.

Edit: not sure if it would be a thing, but I wonder if owners can just leave a world and immediately rejoin in order to work around the (next season) penalty for the negative cash balance. So logic might need to be used to where the SIM recognizes the user and keeps that penalty.

What about increasing the size of the active MiL rosters to 27 or 30?
There are times where I'm trying my best and I'm still forced to shuttle players back and forth with the Activate/Deactivate button. If I could have a big enough roster to go with tandems but still have 6+ in the bullpen, I could stop paying attention to my Low-A team for more than 2 days without everything burning to the ground.

What about tweaking player generation so the relatively useless Tryout Camp guys are generated with pretty high STA/DUR?
A guy with 20 control, 31 vR, etc. is still never going to be good enough to make a ML roster, but maybe if he had enough STA/DUR to stay available for more games it would help solve some of the problems you're seeing. I also think tweaking the ratings of players is a more elegant solution than artificially changing the way stamina/recovery works in the MiL levels. That sounds potentially confusing and like a significant change.

From a "carrot" vs. stick standpoint I like the idea of stronger bumps for players who make the MiL playoffs. ST annoys me, but I know if I get my players a decent amount of ABs the young prospects can gain 2 points of Contact/Power/vL/vR (or similar for pitchers). An extra improvement cycle for players based on how much they played in the playoffs that didn't require me to shuttle players up a level to get the ratings to hit their profile would be a better reason to try to win at the MiL levels than exists right now, but I realize this may require significant programming changes.

*Edited to say that ST has been slightly less annoying for me since minimum pitch counts were lowered from 40 to 20, so thanks for that change!

Posted by tlowster on 6/17/2021 8:58:00 AM (view original):
First thing to do is up the minimums to 10 position players and 12 pitchers at each level.

If the owner's Rookie Ball squad doesn't have a certain amount of players by a certain time, the SIM signs draft picks or IFA players to fill the squad. Something similar can be done for other levels, but pull from tryout camp, minor league free agents and major League free agents that want minor league contracts (I.e. released players). Obviously, the SIM would only sign minor league players for each level that doesn't have the above referenced minimums. For lower levels like Loa and hiA, pull from tryout camp; for AA and AAA, try to pull $38,000 and $54,000 minor league players from the free agent pool so they're competitive players or at least fully developed players with higher durability than tryout camp guys. If there isn't any free agents out there that lineup money wise, sign tryout camp players for the higher levels as well.

Typically, the first major league game starts in the pm1 or pm2 cycle. The minor league play starts the next day during the AM cycle. If the owner doesn't have 10 position players and 12 pitchers at each level (excluding rookie ball), automatically start signing players in line with the above suggestions in the PM2 part 2 cycle before the minor league games begin . If this clears out the tryout camp players, they'll repopulate during the next cycle and the SIM can continue to sign players until all minimums on all teams are filled. If any teams run into budget discrepancies, simply have them run a negative cash balance for the entire season. If they stay for the next season, add a ten percent penalty to the negative cash balance and subtract it from the $185mm the next season. If they leave the World, the new owner starts fresh. At least this way, the current owner can zero out his negative cash balance by trading and getting some cash in the trade. If the owner leaves, the new owner should not be penalized.

Edit: not sure if it would be a thing, but I wonder if owners can just leave a world and immediately rejoin in order to work around the (next season) penalty for the negative cash balance. So logic might need to be used to where the SIM recognizes the user and keeps that penalty.

tl--the sim already recognizes this. If you leave a team to change cities and rejoin, it knows you owned the team last season. The bigger problem here is aliasing; basically, "tlowster" screws up his minors, pays a penalty, but the penalty goes away when "tlowster" quits and "tlowster1" takes over.

Posted by dw172300 on 6/17/2021 2:42:00 PM (view original):
What about increasing the size of the active MiL rosters to 27 or 30?
There are times where I'm trying my best and I'm still forced to shuttle players back and forth with the Activate/Deactivate button. If I could have a big enough roster to go with tandems but still have 6+ in the bullpen, I could stop paying attention to my Low-A team for more than 2 days without everything burning to the ground.

What about tweaking player generation so the relatively useless Tryout Camp guys are generated with pretty high STA/DUR?
A guy with 20 control, 31 vR, etc. is still never going to be good enough to make a ML roster, but maybe if he had enough STA/DUR to stay available for more games it would help solve some of the problems you're seeing. I also think tweaking the ratings of players is a more elegant solution than artificially changing the way stamina/recovery works in the MiL levels. That sounds potentially confusing and like a significant change.

From a "carrot" vs. stick standpoint I like the idea of stronger bumps for players who make the MiL playoffs. ST annoys me, but I know if I get my players a decent amount of ABs the young prospects can gain 2 points of Contact/Power/vL/vR (or similar for pitchers). An extra improvement cycle for players based on how much they played in the playoffs that didn't require me to shuttle players up a level to get the ratings to hit their profile would be a better reason to try to win at the MiL levels than exists right now, but I realize this may require significant programming changes.

*Edited to say that ST has been slightly less annoying for me since minimum pitch counts were lowered from 40 to 20, so thanks for that change!

10.1.1

I spend maybe 5-10 minutes per world twice a day activating and deactivating pitchers at each of the minor-league levels twice a day. That maneuvering isn't that big of a deal. Roster size isn't a problem, especially with having at least 10 deactivation spots at every level except rookie. I usually have 1 or 2 extra pitchers at AAA and increase it by a pitcher or two for each level you go down.

As for tlowster's suggestion of making the minimum of 12 pitchers, does that include deactivated pitchers? What about the major-league level (I know we are talking minors here, but that coding could affect the majors)? I sometimes run 14-11 position player-to-pitcher splits because my major-league staff is strong enough where I don't need that 12th guy. I do that in the minors because I have extra (deactivated) pitchers.

Sorry, I should have been more clear.

When I suggest the 10 position players and 12 pitchers, I mean those to be roster minimums signed on the team. The minimum number of signed players on each roster should be 22 and at least ten of them should be position players and and least 12 of them should be pitchers. This should be a bare minimum. This helps avoid two things -- 1. pitchers getting gassed in the first week of minor league play and never coming back to full energy; 2. making sure teams have all nine positions are accounted for. A good example of this is one of the low A teams in one of my Worlds has a 22 man roster, but only seven position players. So, he doesn't have certain spots being manned. This same franchise has only 14 players in rookie ball.

I don't think they need to change the makeup of the minor league rosters as far as the 20 min. active players; 25 maximum active players at all, just the actual minimum players on the roster as a hole. I don't think there is a minimum is there? If you start off the season with only 10 total guys in low A due to retirements, does the sim allow you to run your ten guys out there or are there actually minimum roster requirements in LowA through AAA?

edit: To be absolutely clear, this is just minor league levels. Also, I am not suggesting that HBD tell us how to run the makeup of our minor league teams, but just employ the minimum amount of signed players. As long as there are 10 position players signed and 12 pitchers signed, do it however you want to do it from a activate and deactivate perspective. I just think that the 10/12 minimum signed players (22 total) would be a good start.

Posted by dedelman on 6/17/2021 3:23:00 PM (view original):

Posted by tlowster on 6/17/2021 8:58:00 AM (view original):
First thing to do is up the minimums to 10 position players and 12 pitchers at each level.

If the owner's Rookie Ball squad doesn't have a certain amount of players by a certain time, the SIM signs draft picks or IFA players to fill the squad. Something similar can be done for other levels, but pull from tryout camp, minor league free agents and major League free agents that want minor league contracts (I.e. released players). Obviously, the SIM would only sign minor league players for each level that doesn't have the above referenced minimums. For lower levels like Loa and hiA, pull from tryout camp; for AA and AAA, try to pull $38,000 and $54,000 minor league players from the free agent pool so they're competitive players or at least fully developed players with higher durability than tryout camp guys. If there isn't any free agents out there that lineup money wise, sign tryout camp players for the higher levels as well.

Typically, the first major league game starts in the pm1 or pm2 cycle. The minor league play starts the next day during the AM cycle. If the owner doesn't have 10 position players and 12 pitchers at each level (excluding rookie ball), automatically start signing players in line with the above suggestions in the PM2 part 2 cycle before the minor league games begin . If this clears out the tryout camp players, they'll repopulate during the next cycle and the SIM can continue to sign players until all minimums on all teams are filled. If any teams run into budget discrepancies, simply have them run a negative cash balance for the entire season. If they stay for the next season, add a ten percent penalty to the negative cash balance and subtract it from the $185mm the next season. If they leave the World, the new owner starts fresh. At least this way, the current owner can zero out his negative cash balance by trading and getting some cash in the trade. If the owner leaves, the new owner should not be penalized.

Edit: not sure if it would be a thing, but I wonder if owners can just leave a world and immediately rejoin in order to work around the (next season) penalty for the negative cash balance. So logic might need to be used to where the SIM recognizes the user and keeps that penalty.

tl--the sim already recognizes this. If you leave a team to change cities and rejoin, it knows you owned the team last season. The bigger problem here is aliasing; basically, "tlowster" screws up his minors, pays a penalty, but the penalty goes away when "tlowster" quits and "tlowster1" takes over.

Nice! I see what you did there. Nonetheless, the sim is smart enough to recognize the same user on city changes and keeps your 5 year credit going and user record. Hopefully it would use the same logic for any type of year to year cash penalty if it were implemented.

Also, there already is a bump for minor league players making the playoffs. 1. the FAQ reads they get one extra bump to the makeup rating (assuming this is accurate, it must come during the rollover like it always does); 2. Any player playing the playoffs and actually getting game time has an opportunity for more development as long as the owner promotes the player to the next level before the World rolls over.

Are the suggestions above in reference to adding more than the what they already get? Like an immediate playoff bump or something?