A Voice Crying Out In The Wilderness

[brokenbat]

I know it will fall on deaf ears but allow me to put in a heartfelt plea for there to be NO OOTP 13 because as an online league commissioner and a player the incessant round of new versions is, as we say here in old Blighty, doing my head in.

I can just about put up with the annual expenditure although the built-in obsolescence of previous versions after no more than a year is more than a little offensive (I'm still playing other games that I paid for just once five years ago)! But there has to be a limit to one's patience with the constant hassle that each new version brings to an online league and it's not far away.

Every year I'm faced with the same dilemma of whether to go the new version and lose long standing members who are just fed up with forking out every year or stay with the one I'm using and knowing that it will be near impossible to recruit new members to replace those who drift away bedazzled by the shiny promise of the latest thing.

If I do adopt the new version there's first a hold-up while everybody gets on board and then the !&$£* patching starts which would be fine if everybody had access to the patch immediately (delays of ten days or more for some Mac users every time this year) or it was possible to continue with varying levels of update amongst the membership without screwing up the entire game (after the financial calculation debacle we are now in suspension for the second time in months because player's ages are being incorrectly calculated and their ratings apparently randomly allocated!)

If it's too much to ask that OOTP 13 never see the light of day could we at least delay its release until it actually works. I know its a bit radical to suggest that it be thoroughly tested before it leaves the confines of the workshop but do we really want a repeat of the embarrassment of final patches with more comebacks than Sinatra meaning that 12 will hardly be fit for purpose before it's replaced?

The league I run has never been healthier in terms of participation and now I'm forced to risk that by a hold-up of indeterminate length for the second time in a few months. There's no guarantee that this will be the final, final patch (we obviously can't take anyone's word for it!) and then we'll barely have got our breath back before the whole damn cycle starts again.

OOTP is unquestionably the best baseball sim available and now the only one that I use but my already frazzled patience wears perilously thin and 13 seems much more like a lowering cloud of doom on the horizon than the glimmerings of new dawn from here!

[Bluenoser]

Definitely posted in the wrong forum.

Good luck with your crusade though.