Removing players from an association?

[Rainbow7]

I started an association, seeded with 1980 players, but I wanted to import Nolan Ryan from earlier in his career during the initial pre-draft phase. However, I can't do it because he already exists as an older player in the association. Is there no way to remove him? I would rather not resort to affixing years to their names and having two Ryans meet up on the field.

[Rainbow7]

Okay, I thought I found a way of doing just this.  Force retiring the 1980 Ryan.  And then importing the 1973 Ryan, but it still came back with an exception.  And to boot, when I tried importing directly to my team, PS2007 crashed with some call-function errors.

[Cantankerous]

I don't know this will work, but have you tried renaming the 1980 Nolan Ryan?

Possibly the game will not allow two players with the same exact name.

Like I said, I don't know if this will work, but perhaps it's worth a shot.

[Rainbow7]

Problem is, now that I've forced retired him, he no longer appears in my player lists.  So no one can draft him and I still can't import a younger Ryan into the association.

[CrashDavis]

Just guessing, but wouldn't the problem most likely be that all the Nolan Ryan's would have the same PlayerID number from the source database your importing from? And likely the game will not allow multiple PlayerID's to be imported into an association at the same time?
Like I said, just guessing, as I haven't tried to intentionally do this to see what would happen.

[Rainbow7]

Interesting.  I guess that makes sense.  Though it would be nice to be able to do something like this.  At any rate, I seem to have identified a crash bug.  I guess something came out of it.

[33sherman]

This seems to be a new bug. I'm also having trouble importing newer historical versions of players after retiring old versions.

[motnahp]

Here's how you work around this problem.. It's not a perfect solution, but will get your "prematurely retired" players back in action:

(1) Create a 4-team Quick Association (35 players per team to get it created quickly).

(2) Under the "Players" section, import all the players you want to bring back (you can pick which year; I always use the year AFTER their early retirement.

(3) Open up the player card(s) and write down all of the player(s)' ratings.

(4) Go back into your original association and create a player or pitcher, as needed.

(5) Re-name these players/pitchers to the name(s) of the players you are un-retiring and enter the ratings you have written down for them. Resist the urge to jack up their ratings just to make them better.[;)]

(6) Make sure to change their photo also, if desired.

(7) Have fun.

[Rainbow7]

Thanks, motnahp.  I'll do just that, but it doesn't feel right.  This is something that would be great if Shaun could address. 
 
O, and to be clear, the crash bug appears in both 1.1 and 1.19.  Just try and import directly into a team in the initial pre-draft.

[Rainbow7]

Well, unfortunately, the create hitter and pitcher buttons aren't there in the players screen.  I loaded up a previous association, and they're there, but not in this association.  Weird.  This must be another bug.  Any other suggestions for getting the younger Ryan into play? 

[RandyChase]

I've been trying to figure out a graceful way to do this as well.
 
I wanted to start a new association in 1950, but take J. Dimaggio and about 20 other players who were a ways into their career and end up with rookie versions of them.  So far, I haven't had any luck figuring out an easy way to do this either.
 
It would be nice if there was a "remove from player pool" option instead of just forcing them into retirement.  That would get around the problem we're having, I think.

[Rainbow7]

I agree that that would be the perfect option.  But now I'm wondering if my game is corrupt.  Are there times that the Create Player buttons aren't supposed to be there?  I just re-created another Puresim Classic association (this time entirely from 1.19beta), seeded with 1985 players, and those buttons are again missing.

[motnahp]

Create that 4-team Quick Assn. and import the Ryan of your choice. Write down all his ratings.

Go to your other assn. and import some pitcher you would never use in your assn.

Using "Edit Player", change this new guy's name & ratings to match Ryan's.

[Rainbow7]

Nice one.  Of course, the downside to this method is that now I have an all-star pitcher wanting a five year contract of 800$.  Hmmm ... maybe that isn't a downside.

[motnahp]

Oops....sorry 'bout that. I don't use finances in my assn. It sounds like AI considers him a scrub because he was imported as a scrub? Maybe this will even out after he posts some good numbers the next season?

Maybe you'd consider changing his salary level under "Edit Player" to match what the "retired Ryan" was making.

[Rainbow7]

For some reason I thought I couldn't do that -- I had tried to change the asking salary during the pre-draft but that doesn't seem possible, so I got it in my head that I just couldn't edit that value.  Thanks for pointing me back to that possibility.  All is as I would want it now, except in the future this whole process should be made a lot easier (hint hint to Shaun).

[puresimmer]

Yea this can be a bit of a pain I realize.

Deleting a player would be a pretty huge undertaking code-wise, because there is data stored in so many places, but maybe I could look into allowing it only for players that have never played.

The reason you can't re-import a player even after retiring a previous version of him is because the Lahman ID is the same, I know I show a checkbox to "allow duplicates" when in sandbox mode, maybe I could look into something similar when doing imports.

The whole process could use some stramlining, I agree and will look into it.

[RandyChase]

How about this for a compromise?  When you are first starting an association and you have that initial list of players in the draft pool, have a "remove" player option.  This doesn't retire or delete them - it just takes them out of the active list of players.  That should then free them up to allow us to import/add a version of that player based on a different starting year in their collection of seasons within the master data base.

[33sherman]

Is there any way to change the player ID in the Lahman database?

[Rainbow7]

So I just finished my first season with my faux-"Nolan Ryan" (lost in the finals of the World Series), but the players' ratings have all been adjusted and I'm about to start the amateur draft.  I take a look at Ryan and every one of his stellar ratings has dropped to around 7 or 8.  I guess this happened because of the effects of hidden ratings, or no?  He's pretty useless now.  I guess I could re-edit him, but he never did perform as well in this association as he did when he was imported naturally in the previous one, even after editing all the attributes I have available to me.