Fundamental flaws... your chance to vent!

[PhillieFever]

Originally Posted by struggles_mightily

I basically agree.

The Juan Encarnacion example has been brought up as a counter to this way of thinking, but it doesn't work. In late 2007, after he sustained the injury, there was a consensus that it was extremely serious.

In January 2008, reports confirmed that he would miss the entire 2008 season, and there was speculation that the injury would end his career. In May, Mozeliak said, "I'm sorry to say that he will not [return to the team]. His injury will likely result in his career ending." It's instructive to look at the language in that quotation, because it hints at the strong reluctance (both for practical and emotional reasons) to simply declare an injury 'career ending'. Even if attempts at rehabilitation and recovery are tokenistic in some very extreme cases, they do occur.

I do think there are some cases where an injury simply 'ends' a career, though. But those happen in certain circumstances. It's easy to see why a veteran on an NRI deal or similar who picks up a reasonably serious injury in the spring would choose to just say, "so long and thanks for all the memories". There's no incentive for him to continue. Still, that's not a 'career ending injury' in the present OOTP sense of the term -- it's a guy picking up a serious injury, weighing up his options, an deciding to call it a day. This is a process, not just an event.

The way I've always had in mind that things should work is that, when a player develops a reasonably serious injury, there should be the possibility (particularly for older or injury-prone players) that the prognosis worsens over time, or that the recovery process goes poorly. Thus, as the injury process lengthens and worsens, the player's skills take a bigger and bigger hit and more and more of his 'useful' career span is used up. Older guys might decide that they've made enough money, don't need to put the strain on their body and at some point decide to just call it quits. Younger guys might experience such a retardation in skills that they can't be useful to a big-league club, and decide to retire because there's no money there for them.

Either way, I think the 'process, not event' way of thinking would be much more realistic and much cooler as well -- it would be kind of neat to follow an injured player's progress, wondering if he'll ever pick up a ball or bat again, knowing that there's a realistic chance he might not.


I'm kind of suspicious of this way of thinking, mostly because there's no way of proving that it's correct. One could make an equal(ly poor) conjecture that accumulating poor stats drives a player on to improve, or that having good stats makes a player 'over-confident' or whatever. We just don't know what the tangible effects of these things are. Talent might not govern 'all' (I'd guess that it's at least 90-95% of performance, though), but judging what percentage of results comes from 'psychological makeup' is extremely spurious, and I'd rather OOTP stayed out of such shady avenues.

While I agree that the way that OOTP handles career enders is not optimal,you have to ask yourself,what amount of resources do you want to give to something that happens maybe once or twice a season.I'd much rather see the team focus on getting the frequency and distribution of injuries correct rather then spend a bunch of time trying to find a way to prolong something that is going to happen anyway because no matter how its portrayed,the career ender is going to be determined at the time of injury.

[struggles_mightily]

Neither I nor anyone else mentioning C.E.Is in this thread has attempted to argue that overhauling this feature is the major concern in building OOTP10. No-one has made any judgment at all on the importance of the feature as far as I am aware. And making such judgments is not what this thread is for. It's now for Markus and the team to look at these suggestions and make decisions about whether implementing certain features is possible, and whether or not the resources that would be expended in that implementation justifies the resultant improvements in gameplay.

...because no matter how its portrayed,the career ender is going to be determined at the time of injury.

Why should this be the case?

[Garlon]

Historical Player Draft Logic -

The AI does not do a good job at picking the best player available when i is their turn to select,, and it extremely overvalues pitchers. I managed a sim from 1900-2008 and built my team sloley through the draft and never made a single trade. In those 108 seasons, I had 8 seasons in which I finished under .500.

The good news is that this can be easily solved, and I will propose it this year in beta testing. We can actually make the AI essentially perfect at the rookie draft in historicals.

[PhillieFever]

Originally Posted by struggles_mightily

Neither I nor anyone else mentioning C.E.Is in this thread has attempted to argue that overhauling this feature is the major concern in building OOTP10. No-one has made any judgment at all on the importance of the feature as far as I am aware. And making such judgments is not what this thread is for. It's now for Markus and the team to look at these suggestions and make decisions about whether implementing certain features is possible, and whether or not the resources that would be expended in that implementation justifies the resultant improvements in gameplay.


Why should this be the case?

It would be the case because thats how the injury model works,when the AI determines that an injury has occurred,it immediately determines the length of the injury FIRST then it determines a body part and diagnosis to match.This is where your proposal runs into problems.To change the CEI's you'd have to overhaul the entire injury system which except for some frequency/distribution issues works very well.That was my point to begin with,the work it would take to change something that happens so infrequently as CEI's isn't worth it IMO.If you feel otherwise than we'll have to agree to disagree.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by bababui

You vastly overlook the mental aspect of development. Players who are performing poorly will become discouraged and depressed and they wont perform to their potential. Conversely, some players with less talent will end up having better careers and stats because their mental and emotional makeup is stronger. Markus's system is a lot more nuanced than the 'talent decides all' school of thought.

I don't overlook that aspect at all. I see all those nuances as things that may affect how rapidly a player moves toward his peak--in other words, all those things can alter ratings. In fact, if I were designing the game I would have a "stable" rating for actual skills and a "current effective rating" that takes into account all those things. My pure guess is that this is what is entailed with the entire player personality code. But if I turn those off, then yes, it should be talent + opportunity + some weird intangibles decides all with regard to rating progression over a player's age. And on the whole, those intangibles should even out such that a review of a couple thousand players leads you to the truth.

However, none of that matters, since my proposal is not about rating progression, but is instead about peak _talents_. And I stand by my statement that a player receiving bad stats should not, for that reason, be more subject to talent hits.

It is a bad design.

This is about the 7,953rd time I've made this argument (only slightly exaggerating), however, and I assume it will be as successful as the other 7,952.

[RonCo]

If the player personality code is not affecting development, than perhaps that's a broken piece of code, too. Either way, I don't think it's relevant to my proposal.

[RonCo]

I wouldn't know, because I turn off player personality when I test. Perhaps that's a flaw in my process. If I cared enough I would take a weekend and test it. But it's not worth giving 12-16 hours of free time to find out when there exists a person who could just tell us.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by RonCo

The other thread around here an the subject shows a way that you can use this to your favor by putting older, developed players into your lower minors.

Of course, in the real world, player eligibility rules in each league pretty much preclude doing that in the lower leagues. AAA and AA levels don't have player elibility rules, but the minor league levels below that do.

[RonCo]

And the real world has what relationship to OOTP?

[struggles_mightily]

Originally Posted by PhillieFever

It would be the case because thats how the injury model works,when the AI determines that an injury has occurred,it immediately determines the length of the injury FIRST then it determines a body part and diagnosis to match.This is where your proposal runs into problems.To change the CEI's you'd have to overhaul the entire injury system which except for some frequency/distribution issues works very well.That was my point to begin with,the work it would take to change something that happens so infrequently as CEI's isn't worth it IMO.If you feel otherwise than we'll have to agree to disagree.

I wasn't aware of that, and that in itself seems like something of an illogical system (maybe not a fundamental 'flaw', exactly...), though from my scant programming experience I can see why it's easier to work that way. CEIs are important for me because, as an historical player, the frequency with which things occur aren't so important as their macro-effect on players and teams. The CEI issue is personally more of a distraction for me than all of the AI in-game management logic issues (for instance) that have been described earlier in this thread -- though I wouldn't be so imperious as to suggest that that makes the injury issue 'more important'. I still believe that an injury overhaul might be worth looking into, though the investment-reward issue is one for the development team to figure out.

Even a cosmetic fix to the way CEIs work would be welcome. Their career-endingness might be pre-ordained, but that wouldn't matter to the player who wouldn't have access to that information. This together with a better conception of which players usually succumb to 'career ending' injuries would be a good start without a complete overhaul.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by struggles_mightily

...and that in itself seems like something of an illogical system (maybe not a fundamental 'flaw', exactly...)

Welcome aboard.

[PhillieFever]

Originally Posted by struggles_mightily

I wasn't aware of that, and that in itself seems like something of an illogical system (maybe not a fundamental 'flaw', exactly...), though from my scant programming experience I can see why it's easier to work that way. CEIs are important for me because, as an historical player, the frequency with which things occur aren't so important as their macro-effect on players and teams. The CEI issue is personally more of a distraction for me than all of the AI in-game management logic issues (for instance) that have been described earlier in this thread -- though I wouldn't be so imperious as to suggest that that makes the injury issue 'more important'. I still believe that an injury overhaul might be worth looking into, though the investment-reward issue is one for the development team to figure out.

Even a cosmetic fix to the way CEIs work would be welcome. Their career-endingness might be pre-ordained, but that wouldn't matter to the player who wouldn't have access to that information. This together with a better conception of which players usually succumb to 'career ending' injuries would be a good start without a complete overhaul.

I also am a 100% historical player and since you say you are too,there's another thing you may not be aware of,its the way recalc works.When playing in Historical leagues,player ratings are determined by"recalc" in order to make the sim more accurate.There isn't actually"player development" like there is in fictional leagues.Players ratings change every year based on their stats for that year plus the year before and after(if using default settings) so depending on your settings injuries may not affect players development one iota.Again,I'm not sure of the settings you use so if you want you can PM me and we can talk about it away from the board.As far as the rest of your thread I agree with you 100%,I also would like a little drama when it comes to CEI's rather than knowing right away.

[pappyzan]

i'd love to see the game utilize some sort of db instead of a ton of text files. even sqlite might be an improvement over the slowness of using text files.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by PhillieFever

It would be the case because thats how the injury model works,when the AI determines that an injury has occurred,it immediately determines the length of the injury FIRST then it determines a body part and diagnosis to match.This is where your proposal runs into problems.To change the CEI's you'd have to overhaul the entire injury system which except for some frequency/distribution issues works very well.That was my point to begin with,the work it would take to change something that happens so infrequently as CEI's isn't worth it IMO.If you feel otherwise than we'll have to agree to disagree.

No, the injury model needs an overhaul. Even to get frequency/distribution right, the injury logic needs to be reversed - the 'decide the injury type, then choose the injury' system is backwards, and unless that's fixed, injuries will never be more realistic than they are now.

As for priorities, there are two factors that I'd think are important: how does something influence the core elements of the game (stats output, player development, etc), and how much do users care? Injuries are fundamentally at the core of the game- they affect development, career totals, season totals, and more, and every user needs to deal with them, no matter how they play. CEIs can be turned off easily, so they aren't so important, but a rework of the injury model should be near the top of the priority list.

[PhillieFever]

Originally Posted by injury log

No, the injury model needs an overhaul. Even to get frequency/distribution right, the injury logic needs to be reversed - the 'decide the injury type, then choose the injury' system is backwards, and unless that's fixed, injuries will never be more realistic than they are now.

As for priorities, there are two factors that I'd think are important: how does something influence the core elements of the game (stats output, player development, etc), and how much do users care? Injuries are fundamentally at the core of the game- they affect development, career totals, season totals, and more, and every user needs to deal with them, no matter how they play. CEIs can be turned off easily, so they aren't so important, but a rework of the injury model should be near the top of the priority list.

Obviously you've been working on this so you know what's needed in order to get things right.I do have a question for you that may make me better understand how the model works.Once the AI decides and injury is going to occur,is it true that the length of the injury is decided first? and then a body part and diagnosis? And if that is the case,how is the length of the injury determined,is it hard coded into the game? this is where I'm missing something

[John C]

Here's something that's got me. I don't know if it has been posted yet, but it has to be looked at:

Salaries are out of whack, and the way you can structure a contract is also a little wacky. In the eMLB, we have a 36-year-old Albert Pujols, well past his prime, who would sign only a two-year, $29m deal. He's getting $16.5m in the first year, $12.5m in the second (which is a team option). He's really not all that useful, but, there he is, eating up a lot of a team's payroll (albeit for one year).

The demands from a player should decrease over time. Jason Varitek just took a one-year deal worth $5m, a pay cut from last year. Bobby Abreu has been offered $8m for a season, and he's a guy who has had very solid numbers throughout his career (not debating him as a player here).

In the eMLB, we have plenty of players who are demanding far more than they should. We have pitchers who have no track record, trying to get $3-5m a year. We have older players who CAN be productive still out there, because their demands are $18-20m a year.

This system needs tweaked. I don't know if it needs an overhaul. But I believe it needs discussed, and changed.

[Eugene Church]

I just ran a test league and three teams had a three-way playoff after the season was over. At first I thought it was for a wild card, but it turns out none of the three teams were in the running for a wild card.

Really strange.

This was posted in my thread about the Playoff problem:

Originally Posted by Boom Boom

I have noticed something funny when I do a custom playoff, each year it reverts back to the standard. Kind of annoying. Different Issue I imagine.

[Eugene Church]

This is a recurring problem that first surfaced in V2007 or maybe V2006.

While working in the depth charts the game crashes and I lose everything I have done since last closing out the game. It usually happens while dropping and dragging.

It still does it in OOTP9. Also there is something new happening. Whenever I make a lot of changes in the player ratings, I get a message that OOTP.exe is closing out the game and I lose whatever I have done since last closing out the game.

As a precaution, I usually work on one team at a time, then close out the game and save the data entry info.

But occasionally I forget to close the game after working 3-4 hours and I get that darn message and have to redo all of the ratings changes.

What prompted this post was I just lost 6 hours work and will have to do all of that tedious stuff again.

I know.
I'm stupid.

Anyone have this happen to them?

[tchalifour]

The icon buttons on the bottom of the screen...I believe its been mentioned you have to click twice to get a screens filters to come back the way you set them. But I've had an annoying occurrence of the buttons being "clickable-through". If I don't click the actually logo in the middle of the button, the game lets me click whatever link is behind it (in a box score or regular news screen). This leads to my web browser popping up constantly and showing the OOTP site when I click the "News" tab! This also slows my computer down to a crawl.

Also, I have a problem with teams and players staying close to the preset salary slots. When Superstar Salary is set to $15 mill, I shouldn't see players (especially average ones) signing for $28 mill/7 years at age 30!


I also agree with all the posts about spring training rosters allowing minor leaguers.

[Malleus Dei]

Originally Posted by RonCo

And the real world has what relationship to OOTP?

Ooh, nice one.