Well, I've converted a test league over to take a deeper look at stats and the College League. Here are some thoughts.
INITIAL TEST: I did one conversion, but I forgot to turn down player creation ratings, so many of the minor-league "fill-ins" were better than some team starters. (Tester's note: Since the new game requires full minor leagues, the game will create players upon conversion to fill team minor league systems.) I also forgot to turn off player movement, so the computer traded a bunch of guys around. I simmed the season anyway to see stat output and saw the results detailed below. At first, I thought HR might be too high because Topper Lundgren had 35 or so HR at the half. But he was an oddity and cooled down to only hit 50 on the year anyway.
In my 2nd test, I turned down player creation so the fill-ins were crappy. I also set all team to human manager and didn't allow movement. I turned off injuries so that I wouldn't have to micro-manage during the sim. I fixed attendance based on 1st test, and also stolen base frequency (see below).
1 - The college league players will need some adjustment. There is no way to create players with high talents and lower ratings. What really sucks is that you can't set different ratings scales between leagues in the same universe, so we can't set it to 1-5 ratings like we did before since it has to match the 1-10 that we use in our league. Anyway, if you set the Independent College League to be like Single-A, you get players with TALENTS maxed out at about 5's. If you set the Ind. League to be like the Majors, you get players with talents and ratings at Major League level. I think what we'll need to do is let everyone know that when a player comes over from the MCL, his actual ratings will be half of what is listed. That way we can have guys with normal talent levels but not major league ready like we've had in the past.
I'm going to try to find ways to do some mass editing. That way, the MCL will be less time-consuming to set up. As it is, all of the ages will need adjusted to college levels and with 16 teams x 25+ players per team, that's 400+ players to edit. (Tester's note: I have already gotten some ideas on mass editing using the import/export roster function. I still need to test the ramifications of using this each season. i.e. in 6.5 this would dump all players into the minor leagues and we don't want to force owners to move players back every season. Also, as you may notice we are expanding the College League to 16 teams) The other problem is that if we set up the league to have ML level ratings/talents, we'll have a lot more than just a few players with good enough ratings to enter our league. I'm not sure of a good way around this. I guess the other option is to set the league up to be like Single-A so everyone has 4's and 5's for ratings but then bump up a few players per team to be at higher levels. Problem is they might put up godly/unrealistic stats.
2 - Offense. At default levels, batting averages are WAY down. Down about 10 points per league in the .240-.250 overall range. HR seemed to be right on the money, but doubles, triples and base hits in general were down a lot. There were probably 4-5 pitchers PER LEAGUE with ERA's under 2.00. Runs scored were down 10% as a result of fewer hits.
3 - Errors. I also noticed that errors were way too low. Only one team had more than 100 errors on the season, and many were in the 50-60 range. Comparatively, in 2017 there were just a few teams that were UNDER 100 errors.
4 - Stolen bases were way low at defaults. The leader had about 50. I ran another season with default stealing cranked up to VERY HIGH instead of AVERAGE and it was better. Leaders around 70. But overall still about 10-20% lower than "normal" for our league. Might not be a bad thing. Also, individual stealing settings weren't in effect. Once a Ty Cobb gets cranked up to Very Often, he'll probably steal a normal number of bases instead of the 66 that he did in the test. So this is probably fine.
5 - Finances. In my first test, I left average attendance at 26000 or whatever it defaulted to. At that level, revenue was way too low and many teams saw major attendance drops. In my 2nd test, I averaged our attendance from last season and it was closer to 31000. I entered this in and the end of year finances were right on the money. I also kept $10 as the default ticket price.
6 - Overall hitters/teams. Overall, I didn't see any strange individual stats other than the low offense already noted. The top hitters led the league as did the top pitchers. So it looks like players should perform as we expect. Teams did as well. Our standard playoff teams all did well and the Mets won the division again...barely.
NEXT UP: I plan to tweak the error settings as well as the offensive categories to get things closer to what we expect. It doesn't have to be perfect, but the way it was, we would have seen the lowest offensive output the league had ever seen. And both tests I ran fell along almost identical lines, so it wasn't a fluke. I'll try to raise Cobb's individual steal setting as a test case to see if that gets us to the level we expect.