Notice - Rookie Draft "Gotcha!" Discovered

[RichK]

In our online league, I extract the rookie draft pool into a SQL database because we have external software that allows GMs to set up a "Watch List" of players in the draft pool, and also executes an external draft that is driven off of those lists. Nice process, and it executes the entire draft in itself and posts the results as each is made in our chatrroom so the GMs can watch it "LIVE".

Bad news is that you have to manually enter the picks into the game via the Rookie Draft function after the external draft is over.

This isn't so bad, because the trade off is one commissioner spending about 2 hours entering the picks vs. the entire league spending about 6-8 hours holding a draft.

However, I discovered an infuriating "flaw" in OOTP that is a total killer.

After spending several hours entering the picks into the Rookie Draft function, I then performed our regular SIM. Part of that process was doing an IMPORT ALL TEAMS FROM SERVER and then IMPORT ALL TEAMS FROM IMPORT_EXPORT FOLDER.

Seems that after entering all of those picks, the IMPORT functions completey WIPED OUT the draft. The players drafted were all released from their assigned Rookie League teams.

So, WARNING - after holding your Rookie Draft, DO NOT DO ANY OF THE ONLINE IMPORT FUNCTIONS IN THE CURRENT SIM. YOU MUST DO IT BEFORE THE DRAFT OR THEY WILL WIPE OUT YOUR DRAFT.

Would be nice if OOTP did not have these ways of screwing it's users. It took me 3 attempts (each time having to re-enter all of the draft picks with the game crashing crashing about 20th pick) before figuring out why the picks were being released.

[Nutlaw]

Yeah, you definitely don't want to import team files after drafting.

Furthermore, if your league runs multiple sims on a draft day (i.e. runs a couple of rounds each night), you'll want to delete old team exports that occurred before the most recent round of drafting.

I'll bring this one up with the beta testers.