Back after a few years off

[rob_banzai]

I logged in today after getting my OOTP 9 pre-order email and the forum shows I last visited in 2005!

When I left my frustrations with OOTP were primarily with stat corrosion. I liked to play long historical sims, beginning in the 1910s and working my way up. It seemed that in every case with each passing season ALL of my players would just get worse and worse, with their stats and ratings slowly degrading to the point of uselessness. The annual draft was my only way to bring in a player with decent stats.

Spring Training seemed useless as well, with players constantly losing skills. The scouting and minor league managing system did not seem to work.

So I might play through a few decades before getting demoralized with watching historical superstars crash and burn within their first few years in the league while no-names might blossom before the inevitable burn out.

Has this changed over the last three years or is OOTP still mostly aimed at people who enjoy the online league play and the financial model? My nostalgia for the Microleague days shows that my interest is primarily in the gameplay and player development areas.

I love drafting my own teams from the pool of historical players and then managing it through the ages but I just can't stand watching my entire team slowly but surely descend below the Mendoza line no matter how good my managing skills.

P.S. Ha! Just found my old login that goes back to 2002.

[Kelric]

Amazing how players, as they get older, lose their skills. That's supposed to happen.

If you want, these days in historical leagues you can use the auto-recalc function. Setting it to one year will have player ratings reset every season, which will allow players to put up statistics very close to their real life namesakes just as the real career went. Setting it to three years curve the ratings over three seasons, giving you a little fluctuation, but not too much. Setting it to five years will usually make sure great players are great, good are good, etc., but will still give you some differences. Keeping recalc off will let the game engine take over completely, having Ted Williams possibly bust, Phil Plantier hitting 500 homers, so on and so forth.

You can also decide how quickly players age or develop across the league, as well as whether their talents will ever change at all (and if they do, how often it happens). If you want, you can set these so most players are out of baseball by their mid-30s or remain into their mid-40s as productive starters. Injuries can be turned on, off, or set to settings between Very Low and Very High. Same with Position Player fatigue. Or with pitcher fatigue, or even pitcher usage, bunting, steals, defensive replacements, etc., etc., etc.

You can easily have the game follow real life baseball expansion and financials (so a player will earn in game 1940 what a similar player might have earned in 1940, but contracts are not player specific (so Williams won't earn the same he did in 1940, but he should earn star salary, if you follow me)). Or you can have it just follow expansion and not financials, or vice versa.

Historical leagues are much, much, much more customizable these days.

my interest is primarily in the gameplay and player development areas.

I love drafting my own teams from the pool of historical players and then managing it through the ages but I just can't stand watching my entire team slowly but surely descend below the Mendoza line no matter how good my managing skills.

This passage makes no sense to me, whatsoever. Your interest is in gameplay... which has players get older so you HAVE to develop new players... but you hate seeing your players get older.

[rob_banzai]

There is a misunderstanding. I am not complaining about player skills declining with age. I was commenting on how a team regardless of age everyone's output just gets worse with each passing year. So within say a five year period all the players I started with regardless of age are just hitting for lower and lower average, as the pitchers are suffering from ever higher ERAs. This is not representative in any way of the real world where player results might fluctuate but not suffer a mass team based deterioration.

An example I gave was how in the old Spring Training it was not unusual to have almost every player (once again regardless of age) lose points off of their primary skill with every season. So Eddie Murray might be drafted at age 20 with great power numbers and within a short period of time (not over a long career) be reduced to wimpy power numbers. This is quite contrary to what you might see in the real world with a young player slowly building skill, peaking, then heading back down, whether over a short period of time or over twenty years.

That's what I used to experience in the older versions of OOTP and I was curious if that is still the case. So like I said I love taking historical players, redrafting them into my own team structure and then managing through the decades. I just don't want to buy OOTP 9 if it still has that old problem where player performance always just gets worse and worse from the first game onward until your team of superstars is quickly a team of washouts.

[Kelric]

There's something wrong with your game(s) then. Sure, that'll happen to some guys, but I've never seen it happen to entire teams like you describe.

[rob_banzai]

I found my answer over in this thread. Looks like player development is still screwed up, but perhaps not as bad as when I last played. I will keep reading to get some more opinions from the veterans.

[Kelric]

This is where I state again that using either/or/both recalc and setting the player talent change frequency, you can pretty much control this for historical leagues. It's when you don't use recalc or mess with the talent change much that you run into random talent drops and bumps (like I do).