Today's Update:

• Adjusted the often visited League Transactions page so that it does not automatically pullback the list of transactions until you hit the Go button. This should help owners use this page without the potentially unncessary delay bringing back unwanted data.
• Added coaching staff advice throughout the season. Hitting and Pitching coaches at the minor league levels will now provide feedback regarding players deserving promotions.
• Introduced a check on the Budget page for season 2 and beyond so that your initial player payroll budget cannot be below your current player payroll.
• Fixed a bug on the View Rosters and Trading Block page where the view type was not carrying over properly

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope everyone is as fortunate as Gary Matthews Jr.

Today's Update:

• Improved Free Agent Demand reduction process. Rather than dropping demands in one chunk, demands will be lowered periodically as the negotiation period wears on for free-agents without any offers.
• Free Agent offers made during final 4 hour cycle are now handled properly. Previously, these offers were being ignored.
• Supplemental round draft picks are now re-ordered so that each eligible franchise has a pick before another franchise has 2
• Free-Agent offers are no longer double-counted when trying to submit a new offer to a player while a previous offer is still pending
• Added a franchise setting so owners may toggle the ability to view play-by-play only or the entire boxscore
• Added a minimum of $5M required for prospect payroll at the time of setting budgets. This was necessary so owners who don't sign prospects can have the AI autosign them in order to fill the rookie level roster.
• Made improvements to the World Center page as far as detailing the world rollover schedule
• Improved a section in the engine when player is injured on the base paths. If it's before the 7th, the player rest hierarchy will now be used instead of just grabbing the best pinch-runner available at the position.
• Fixed a bug in the Newcomer of the Year award logic
• Fixed a bug involving SO/BB on the League Leaders page

We should have another update full of bug fixes/improvements within the next week. Enjoy!

Today's Update:

• Introduced prorated in-season free-agency. Players now sign at prorated values after the regular season has begun.
• Pages displaying statistical ratios are now sorting properly (Free-Agent Report, Waiver Wire, Spring Training Squads, Trade Build, Arbitration Report, etc.)
• Corrected a bug involving pitching coaches occasionally looking for a 3B coach job
• Reduced HBP frequency
• Improved Wild Card standings both during and after regular season
• Improved League Leaders page for counting stats and qualified setting
• Improved missed arbitration process. Rather than automatically award case to player, franchise now offers 70% of player demands and a case is now held.
• Expanded Fatigue Level settings for AI pitcher inactivation
• Improved the manner in which worlds are rolled over so that there is no longer a limit to the number of worlds that can be rolled over in a 24 hour period.

For those of you that have experienced site slowness, we are continuing to look into solutions for this. The main slowdowns have been occurring during our event cycle processes.

We hope everyone enjoys the update.

Today's Improvements:

• Future big league free-agents at the minor league level or needing ***ignment may no longer have a long-term contract negotiated. That means only players at the big league level may sign contract extension. This closes a few loopholes.
• The trade chat total is now correct for past chat messages.
• The GM Options page is no longer accessible at any time. There was a piece of code missing, so owners could accept/decline options when they should not have been able to.
• We missed a piece of code during a previous fix where pitching coaches were demanding to be 3B coaches. This fix is now complete.

That's it. Nothing major here, just closing a couple loopholes that were recently brought to our attention. Thanks to those that brought them our way.

Today's Improvements:

• Coach Hiring, Adjusted the column indicating # of interested franchises to be either 0 or 1+ so users can't short-change coaches with only 1 interested franchise.
• Spring Training Squad ***ignment Page, corrected a bug when displaying pitcher stats
• Coach Demands, fixed a bug where a fielding instructor would shift to look for a 3B coaching job (similar to a previous bug)
• Long-Term Contract extensions, will now appear in the Player Profile Transactions page
• Corrected a bug involving player salary when signing a player to a minor league contract after the season started.
• Corrected a bug where signing a player to a minor league contract after the season started would occasionally put the player on the 40-man roster when it should not have
• Engine, corrected a bug in the sac bunt logic
• Engine, corrected a bug involving replacing a player after being ejected following a strike out (if it was the first player listed in the lineup)
• Engine, DHs will no longer be rested in the 9th inning or later
• Engine, improved PR logic following injury on basepath when no pos player is available

That's all for today! Hope everyone had a good holiday season.

Today's Update:

• New Feature -- World Office Franchise Rankings Report
• New Feature -- Ability to block users from World Chat
• Improvement -- GM Office Options page now shows team/mutual options for 5 year window
• Improvement -- GM Amateur Draft Settings has a new starting pitcher player type of Movement
• Improvement -- Bullpen Needs correspondence has been adjusted so it is more meaningful
• Improvement -- Player Demotions for players that were promoted to replace an injured player no longe result in potential ratings drop when demoted.
• Bug fix -- you can no longer inactivate and promote to the big leagues in the same step
• Improvement -- When processing a trade, if one of the owners signed any player involved to a long-term contract after the deal was accepted, the trade will be cancelled.

As far as site performance goes and the occasional page hang, we expect to have a major performance change in about 2-3 weeks.

Also, we've made HBD results available on our WAP site. So, you can now access game results on your cell phone. The site is www.whatifsports.com/wap/default.wml.

Enjoy!

Today's Update:

• Corrected the logic involving p***ed balls. This won't affect good catchers, but will tone down the rate for below average big league catchers.
• Improved logic for removing a specialist pitcher after recording the initial out against the targeted batter. It now evaluates each subsequent hitter and will remove when the matchup is no longer in his favor with other game situation factors built in (outs, baserunners, etc.)
• Corrected two bugs involving compensation picks. We were inadvertantly removing draft compensation picks when the unsigned #1 draft pick signed with another club the following season. We were also occasionally awarding draft compensation picks for supplemental round picks.
• Corrected a small financial mistake for promoting minor league players after their minor league season concluded.
• Corrected a bug that was not allowing budget notes to save properly.

We'll have the mid-season budget shifting feature in next week along with more improvements.

Today's Update:

• You can now view historical playoff results on the Playoffs page
• You can now activate and promote a player in the same step without being told you have too many players on your minor league roster
• Add the value a player's current franchise is paying a player that season to the player profile (which can be different from his current contract if he was acquired via trade, waivers, signed after the season started, etc.)
• Added the Transfer Budget page

Today's Update:

• Added a date to the trade needs page so you can monitor what is a recent post
• introduced the user filtering to the trade chat area. so, if you have a user filtered from your world chat, you won't be able to send/receive trade chat messages from him either
• introduced a world series tropy graphic for previous season world series winners
• corrected a logic flaw in the engine when bringing in an emergency replacement (when your hierarchy can't be used). previously, if a catcher was one of the first guys on your team he'd come in at 2B, for instance, instead of your other SS who didn't happen to be listed in the hierarchy
• corrected a flaw in some player salaries. if a player was signed to a multi-year deal at under the big league minimum (prospects only) and promoted them to the big leaues, they weren't having their salaries increased the next season. now they will. we've also corrected 243 players across all worlds that were not being paid what they should be.
• Added the playing level to the injury correspondence
• corrected a bug in the double-switch logic that would occasionally place the position player and pitcher in the same slot, essentially wasting a player.
• improved the speed of the free agent report. the page loads are still slower than we'd like for worlds in the offseason, but they are faster.

Today's update is a significant one.

We've added the tool that allows you to manually adjust your amateur draft cl***. The settings are still in place to provide you with your initial draft board, but you may then adjust your board manually.

We've also made a big change in the fact that most of our pages now use dynamic sorting so you no longer have to do a round-trip to the server to sort information. There are a few exceptions to this (League Leaders, Player Stats, etc.), but the majority of the site now has this ability. This should be a tremendous time saver and improve overall usage (no more waiting 15 seconds to sort the Free-Agent report!)

Here are a few others:

• When processing trades, we now check to see if any of the players involved have suffered a significant injury since the trade was accepted. If so, the trade is cancelled.
• Adjusted the sac bunt logic so that only pitchers or teams with a very aggressive sac bunt managerial setting will attempt to bunt a runner from 2nd to 3rd base.

Today's Update/Announcement:

• Closed a loophole where injured players that fully healed during the "offseason" were not receiving the proper amount of rehab. Now they do.
• Corrected a bug on the Coach Rehiring page involving sorting
• Made a change to the Amateur Draft Settings page so that you can now save non-player settings without it resetting your manual draft order.
• Corrected a bug on the Player Profile contract page where it was occasionally listing the wrong franchise with a contract
• Engine change, reduced the HBP rate following homers in blowouts
• Engine Change, minor adjustment to specialist logic
• Engine change, minor adjustment to pinch-hitter selection during certain game situations
• Engine change, minor adjustment that allows closers to hit for themselves when called for

Once the current batch of worlds move past the Free-Agent Negotiations period, we will be rolling out the changes to the free-agent compensation system. The recent MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement made changes to this, so we will synch up with their changes. Type A is now the top 20% and Type B is now the 21-40% within the player group. Type B compensation is now only a supplemental pick. You can read the full details on MLB.com.

Today's Update:

• Initial coach demands for rehiring are now based on their previous season's salary. If they are not rehired their demands will be their market value.
• Free agent compensation now reflects the new CBA (see previous post).
• Position is now displayed on the Draft History page.

We apologize for not having issued any updates for awhile. We have been hard at work and we haven't forgotten about HBD.

Today's Update:

• From the Edit Lineups page you can now view split stats. This is based on the selection you have made in the "Type" drop down.
• On the Option Report page we have changed the wording, it now reads "Exercise/Decline" instead of "Accept/Deny". It will also prompt you before any decisions have been committed.
• The position column on the Edit Rosters page is now a link that will take you to the Position ***ignments pop-up page.
• Trade proposals now include a link to the owner profile.
• The ML AI checkboxes will now stay checked if you have selected the AI to manage your ML team.

And last but certainly not least, we have added in Diamonds in the Rough. Occasionally, mediocre players will see a projected ratings boost based on their Coaching Staff and work ethic. This will occur sometime around the mid-point of the season.

Todays Update:

• Player Award Voting now shows critical stats which will make it a much more user friendly process.
• The bug with Split Stats on the Edit Lineups page has been fixed. If a player has no previous at bats versus that particular pitcher he will show up in your lineup/bench with all 0's.
• Slugging percentage is now being calculated correctly on the League Leaders page.

Todays Update:

* You can now view and add players from the selected teams depth chart from the Trade Build page.
* Coach ratings now appear on the Coaches Report page.
* You can now view players who have option years for different franchises in your world on the Options Report page.
* If you have blocked a user their world chat messages will no longer appear in the World Office.
* Improvement to the All Star selection process.
* New Trade History page allows you to view all of the trades that have occurred in the world. This is retroactive (minus cash received) to the worlds inaugural season.
* Player game logs now denote whether that game was played on the road.
* The injuries report page has moved to the knowledge base.



That's all for this week. Enjoy the new page and the enhancements. Much more is on the way!