Delayed Games, Player Transactions and Your Help

Games were delayed for about half of the Baseballczar teams Thursday. This affected R.II to R.XVI.  Friday a manager alerted me to the delay. But what I found as the problem, has lead to a good discussion about improving how managers can develop a team. For that I started a discussion on Facebook. The rest of the blog concerns the game delay.

NOTE: Fielder/Hitters Game Roster must have 15 players (9 Man Lineup/6 on the Bench).
Pitching Game Roster 10 players. (5 starters/5 Bullpen).

The Event:
When the Sim starts to play a game it gathers all the resources, ie team lineups, rotations. One of the first things it parses is the data showing "Who" the starting pitchers are for a specific game. The Sim's very next step is to update that data to indicate the NEXT starting pitcher for the next game.

If some of the resources are missing the Sim goes into a loop waiting for the resources: In this case one player missing from a game roster. So every time the Sim would pull the starting pitcher it would update the next game's starting pitcher, and try to load the fielder/hitter game roster. When it saw a hitter was missing the Sim would go back into the loop and try to restart the game, repeatedly loading and updating the starting pitcher for the next game.

In the browser this would appear as the "Next" star jumping around from one pitcher to the next. As a manager would be looking at the pitching roster the Sim is literally trying to run the game and resetting the starting pitcher over and over again.

What happened?
The bug here is the game lineups and rosters, this includes the bench and bullpen. If a manager releases or trades a player on the game roster and does not replace that player on the roster the Sim will go into a loop as described above. This will happen whether there is a missing pitcher or batter. I will admit I knew this could be a problem as I knew of the bug. Overall it hasn't been a problem but with more managers playing I'm making this the priority for further development.

The Fix:
Initially I will change the "release" and "trade" functions to prevent players from being put in a position to vacate a game roster spot. When a manager releases a player the Sim will check the given game roster to check if it is affected by the player move.  Trades are trickier because a player can be on the trade wire, but possibly not traded. Moving the player off a game roster until the trade is done doesn't make sense. The Sim will message managers before allowing roster moves that affect the game. To kill 2 birds with one stone my idea was to require teams to have +1 player to make roster moves.

+ 1 Concept:
 Require Fielder/Hitters Game Rosters to have 15 + 1 to make a roster move, Pitching Game Rosters 10 + 1. This would only be required if the team wanted to make at least 1 player roster move. Managers would then just need to swap the player out, or have the Sim put the player in the game roster spot automatically.

On Facebook:
A manager I discussed this with pointed out the limitations of 2 UFA's per season in trying to keep the roster legal. So I'm asking managers to comment either on this blog or at facebook. FB Discussion

How can we better balance UFA, RFA Trades and player development to give managers more team development options?

Anyone can comment on this blog, no membership required.

Thanks,

RG