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Kai/Ash tipped me off to this and his post in another forum was:
"Hmm.
If that's the bug I'm thinking it is, it's caused by importing team rosters during a draft. The only "check" OOTP's import process has ever had is the game date - if an export file is from the same game date, it gets imported. So if an owner exports a file on the draft day but before the picks are made and then you import rosters after running the draft, then the game releases all the players you've drafted in the meantime because they aren't on the team in the export file. It can happen piecemeal, too, if you divide your draft rounds between multiple sims: if you're importing for Round 5, say, the presence of an export file from after Round 1 will cause all the players that team drafted in Rounds 2-4 to be released.
Before OOTP9, the solution was simple (albeit annoying): just don't import rosters on a draft day (since I stopped doing that several seasons ago, the GGNL/BJHL hasn't had any drafted players released). Since drafts had to be forum/e-mail run anyway, it didn't really make all that much difference. But with OOTP9's draft utility, that's no longer really an option, is it? You have to import rosters to get the updated draft lists.
Pending an actual fix from Markus*, I think the best way to minimize/eliminate the problem is probably to delete any export files from your FTP server after each draft "sim" and to simultaneously holler at your owners to make sure they always grab the latest file before updating their draft lists. As long as the only export files on the server are from the absolute latest league file, players shouldn't get released.
All this, of course, assumes that this is the same draft bug that OOTP has, indeed, had for years (and with which I've been successfully dealing). Since the BJHL hasn't yet moved to OOTP9 (we're just about to wrap up a season and do so), I cannot be 100% certain that this isn't some entirely new/different bug to which the above advice does not apply.
- Ash
*: There are really two ways to fix the problem:
1) Add a non-game-date-based verification to the import process (maybe a specific round/pick flag for draft days or something involving the timestamp of the last uplodaed league file, etc.) to prevent exports from before/earlier in a draft from being accepted.
2) Recode how the game handles releasing players in online leagues. Currently (as far as I can tell), the export files contain a roster list which the game then compares to the one the Commish has. If the export file doesn't list players that the Commish's copy has, the players are released. In other words, the release is only implied: the game basically thinks to itself, "if this guy doesn't appear on your roster, you must have wanted him released". If releases were, instead, handled by an explicit "release" command then, absent such a command, players would never be removed from a roster."
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