Players Not improving

[Murburto]

I'm in my 5th year and not one of my draft picks has improved. I mean the 2 star players are still 2 stars and riding the bench. I can't believe 5 straight seasons of drafting the best players available and they all turned out to be bust. Also, why the CPU don't initiate trades and why are all trade offers so one sided for the CPU GM. This game needs a difficulty level slider, I even let the CPU take over this off-season and it doesn't look like it faired any better with improving my roster.

[Gary Gorski]

The CPU will initiate trades with you if you have players on the trading block (and if they want those players). If you do not know how to put players on the trade block go to the trade screen and click the block icon in the row of your player and that will add him to the block. Again though it has to be players that teams would actually want - if you put a bad player or an average player with some ridiculous contract no team is going to want that. As to why the CPU would make trade offers in its favor....why wouldn't it? Why would the AI offer you a trade that would be terrible for its team to make?

In regards to your comment on 2 star players...you have to kind of recalibrate things for this game if you are used to something like 2K where everyone is rated over the top. In this game a 2 star player is a rotation player, not some bum who does not deserve to be on a team. A 2.5 star player is a possible starter. That also means that 5 star players are truly elite players and not common.

If players are not improving at all you need to look at your ratings and the ratings of your coaches as well as the players themselves. Are you drafting players with low work ethic? Are these guys getting any minutes to develop with? Maybe your ratings and your coaches ratings are poor at scouting players and you are seeing bad scouting ratings in the draft and therefore drafting players that are really don't have much more room to grow.

[Murburto]

I know how to trade; I should say it seems each gm is the same person. As you can see this week in the real NBA, all general managers are not good at their job. Each trade seems to involve me including 1st round draft picks to get maybe 1 3-star player in return. I don't think each team should give away their best player or all their picks, but it seems like CPU trading with another CPU gm seems to be more realistic whereas CPU offers to human gm appears to be very favorable for the CPU gm. I have offered my own 4.5-star player just to see what I would get in return and no gm offered me a 1st round pick in return for him. As far as drafting players, I have drafted players that had player rated as potential 3.5 stars and the player just never improved. My head coach is rated very high in scouting so it seems eventually he would get at least 1 evaluation correct. Thanks for the reply.

[Gary Gorski]

I purposely have made the AI careful in trading regarding draft picks because frankly you are smarter than it is and you have insights it does not. You are better able to understand that a pick value might change significantly especially down the line - you might trade what seems like it would be a good pick in the future but you know you're going to get a good player in that trade and have set yourself up for the ability to remake your team in free agency before that and all of a sudden that future pick turns out to be not so great. You know that could happen but its difficult the get the trade AI to think that way.

As for not getting an offer of a 1st for a star player - again the AI is only going to make what it would deem a reasonable offer and it has to follow salary matching rules which is quite frankly difficult at times. So while you might be willing to let the player go for just one first and then a bunch of garbage salary the AI would not think that and would not make the offer.

The trade AI is such a difficult thing to do because if its off it can greatly upset the balance in a league and I have always tried to error on the side of making it difficult vs easy because its not fun if you can just take advantage of the AI and build a super team with ease. Also in the NBA teams are trading picks further out into the future, there are pick swaps and pick protections, there are multiple deals that involve three or four teams and some teams are just giving away players like Washington did recently with Beal and Porzingis.

I consider adding some of these things but in all honesty its already complicated to try and make the AI work out deals the way it stands now and then adding things like pick protections or swaps or whatever just then further limits what deals can be made because then those things have to be taken into consideration so that the trade doesn't end up violating the Stepien Rule