Injury News Idea

[CRTsports.com]

I was trying to see if this has been posted but didn't see anything. And my apologies if I missed it!

When a player suffers an injury late in the season, the news story should reflect that. Way more realistic in my opinion. My current solo league has 10 days left and all the news stories say player x will be out for two weeks, a month etc. While true I just feel a little bit about it will end his season would be a killer addition.

Just my to an overall great game!

[Ambermonk]

There has been much dialog recently with Markus about the action driving the description. While the comments were regarding the graphics & PBP, the same thing applies to your situation. Hopefully the game will evolve to a situation where an evaluation algorithm will evaluate the incident and write a news report composed of several paragraphs which deal with the specifics of the incident.

The algorithm would take into account things like: the type of injury, the longevity, the time of year, number of games remaining, if the player was a starter of backup, the effect on the team, and who the most likely replacement would be.

Wouldn't that be nice

[Eugene Church]

This is the way the news should be.

Unfortunately we can only do a bare-bones, generic stories in most cases.

Even if it were possible to have this in the game, we don't have enough writers to take care of them.

Basically, most of the News stories have been written by about 5 people in the last two years.

But this is a fine suggestion and one I hope Markus will implement soon.

I hope he will give us the means to cover the playoffs in details, too...that is...game-by-game coverage instead of just one single story telling who the champions are.

[Eugene Church]

tysok told me that conditions are already available that may enable us to do this.

I will check it out and let you know.

[Ambermonk]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

tysok told me that conditions are already available that may enable us to do this.

I will check it out and let you know.

I eagerly await.

On a related, and perhaps more important, matter, the same situation holds true for news stories related to batters (4 for 4), and pitchers (shutouts). I think the way to go is to identify the story elements and (initially) have 5 or 6 paragraphs (news items) specific to each. Then the evaluation algorithm could build the story around the situation.

For example (on a batter going 4 for 4) the story elements might be:
1. Player's recent history (current season)
2. Team's recent history (current season)
3. Summary of batter's hits (singles, doubles, etc.)
4. Effect of batter's performance in the game
5. Batter's description of his performance
6. Summary of which Pitchers he batted against
7. Summary of team's results vs this opponent
8. Team's current place in the standings (and future prospects)

The story elements for a pitcher pitching a shutout might be:
1. Player's recent history (current season)
2. Team's recent history (current season)
3. Effect of pitcher's performance in the game
4. Summary of which pitches (curve, fastball, etc.) were effective
5. Key innings & trouble spots
6. Pitcher's description of his performance
7. Summary of team's results vs this opponent
8. Team's current place in the standings (and future prospects)

I'll suggest that the combination of applicable story elements in a news story far outweighs random detail which has no direct relationship to the specific game being described. Even if each story element only had 3 news items (I recommend 5-6 initially), the combination of 6-8 applicable story elements would give a story all the variety that it needed (i.e., say each news story would have 8 story elements and select 1 of the 3 news items for each). The more story elements you include - the less news items for each story you need.

Ideally your news items for each story element might go something like this...

Items - Description
1 - Excellent
2 - Above Average
3 - Normal
2 - Below Average
1 - Poor

This would result in 9 possible news items (in a bell-shaped curve) for each story element. I'm not a math wiz but I believe that the permutations of 8 story elements times 9 news items would be incredible! You probably never see the same story in a single season twice.

[Ambermonk]

Does anyone else have any ideas?