Tonight on 60 Minutes.... The RchW Interview
 

This Hall of Famer has been a member since 2004 have over 7,700 post been thanked by other forum members 1,500 times here he is RchW

When and what version did you start playing OOTP?

I found OOTP in 2004 and bought v5. I think v6 was just released so I quickly bought it and v6.5. Been addicted since then.


What's feature of the game you love most?

I like the whole package but since you ask I like watching player development, especially the marginal player who may have an unexpected burst of good play. The most challenging thing to me is deciding if a 32-34 year old has the ability to give a few more seasons and at what price. I spend a lot of time trying to see patterns in player development and decline.


What's favorite baseball team (any league)?

Long suffering Blue Jays fan (any Toronto sports fan is long suffering). As a child/teenager the Cardinals Tigers Expos and Cubs held my interest in varying amounts. Despite that I am a baseball fan first. I love to play and now watch any baseball at any time anywhere.


How old you?

I'll be 59 in January.


Where are you originally from?

Born in Glasgow, Scotland. Came to Canada in 1966 at 11 and immersed myself in the new and strange sports of Hockey and Baseball.


Are you a family man?

Yes. Married for 26 years and we have two almost grown up children. My wife is a baseball fan so life is good.


What do you for a living?

Three weeks ago I was fired just shy of 25 years into a career of field technical support for insulating glass sealants and spacers. Before that I was an R&D Chemist and a construction inspector/soil and concrete tech.


Besides OOTP do you have any other hobbies or interest?

Long time SF fan. A short list of (possibly 50) favorite authors are Heinlein, Banks, Niven, Dick, Vinge, Stephenson, Mieville. I like reading about Archeology Anthropology Paleontology and Astronomy. Always wanted to do a dig. Maybe next year.


What is your personal view of the current division and play-off format in MLB does it work or needs adjustment?

I don't like the extra wild card but it does sell tickets. Fortunately this year division winners Boston and St.Louis made the WS. I'd like to give division winners more of an advantage in the playoffs. Without that the 162 regular season seems meaningless. A radical idea would be to give any division winner one win ie a 1-0 lead in any series against a WC team. Not sure that would fly with many people though. Another solution would be expansion to 32 teams, Four divisions of four teams in each league with NO INTERLEAGUE PLAY and a 154 game season. With only division winners qualifying all playoff series would be 7 games. This should not be a problem given the early end to the regular season.


When they say MLB has taken a back seat to te NFL and NBA and the state of baseball is not as it used do you agree? Or do feel MLB is as popular as ever?

Not being a big fan of the other sports it's tough to say. As a business baseball seems very healthy right now. Some will be bothered by the wild spending on free agents but it's obvious that the alternative path used by analytical/development based teams (read Cardinals et al) can be successful long term. One could say that Boston has opened a third path by identifying value and synergy outside the top tier FA market. We have to see how they do in 2014-15. As a game baseball needs to address the speed of play and umpiring/video replay. On the competitive side 11 teams won 90 games in 2013. That means 11 teams should feel they have a legitimate shot at the WS. Other teams looking to improve for 2014 could create a very competitive season. Is that the dreaded parity? Not sure, but it has me interested.


If the OOTP team asked you be a consultant what will you change, add or remove for new version of the game?

I'd like player creation to produce a narrower distribution of "good" players. League stat outputs show this. League totals are good but the numbers are distributed over too many players. This is more visible for hitters than pitchers.

I'd like the entire defensive concept reworked both in player creation/development and in the game engine (game play). Too many good hit/bad field players are created/develop. See above re wide distribution. This pool grows because insufficient penalties for poor defense in-game close the door for lesser hitters/better defenders in the minor leagues. In-game play should penalize poor ratings and playing out of position harshly.

A narrower pool of good players plus a better opportunity for good defensive players to develop instead of just good batters should make it easier for the AI to choose who to play. This would reduce the bizarre lineup options we see too often.


What other forum members do you personally enjoy?

Just about everybody. I don't mean to be wishy-washy but almost every person who posts even semi regularly on this forum has a story or a suggestion that's worth considering. Although I don't use mods and logos much, I do think that those guys and anyone else who puts their own work out there to help and improve the experience deserves our gratitude. Even the posters I butt heads with are cool.

Is there any other game or show your currently enjoying you would like to let us know about?

Waiting for Game of Thrones to come back. Big Boardwalk Empire fan. I'm starting to like the "classic" version of FM 13 better but it's still too much dead time. I guess I'm not really a gamer type except for OOTP.

I don't know sci-fi well at all, and it's a common name, but is that Neal Stephenson? I've only read Cryptonomicon, which is one of the great novels of the last 50 years, and I've always wondered if his sci-fi writing was worthwhile.

That's really tough, hope things turn around for you quickly. Man, 25 years invested and getting fired......

Yes and I agree with your assessment of Cryptonomicon. I hesitated lumping Stephenson into the "Science Fiction" box but didn't want to leave him out. Try Snow Crash but beware that it may suffer when compared to Cryptonomicon.

This can't be emphasized enough. Player creation in OOTP is distributed too much along a bell curve, whereas player talent in real life isn't.

good read.

except it isn't replicating real life, only the exceedingly small section of real life that might be talented enough to get drafted. and even with that ootp tosses out a bunch of riff-raff for playability.

in ootp terms most of us here have ratings something like -100. I guess the question is what talent curve are we expecting it to mirror.

Ever get Time Team over your way RchW?

His best work is the three-volume Baroque Cycle (marvelous historical fiction) but his SF is not bad at all. Snow Crash and Anathem are good, and I just finished and enjoyed Reamde (yes, that's how it's spelled), which is an interesting combination of hacking, an MMORPG, extortion and terrorism.

That's just wrong. Sorry, Rich.

I'm not sure how to reply to this. It's like if someone responded to Moby Dick by saying: "well, you know, whales don't really act like that in real life."

I'm well aware that baseball talent isn't evenly distributed across the entire population. Fortunately, OOTP's player creation model doesn't take into account all of the tee-ball players who become car salesmen or computer programmers rather than professional athletes. Instead, the game focuses on those players who might actually be good enough to become professional ballplayers. I didn't think it was necessary to specify that, when I was talking about player talent in "real life," I was talking about real life professional baseball.

Everybody knows that the population that comprises those who are good enough to become pro ballplayers represents a tiny slice of the entire population. And of that tiny slice, the most talented segment represents an even tinier slice at the far end of the talent curve. It's that bell curve that I was talking about. I hope I've made myself clear.

It isn't a bell curve in itself. It's the very far edge of the talent bell curve, chopped off and isolated.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-36eELr6pOt...est_rest_2.png

You're dealing with an even smaller subset than shown there in blue, and one that is farther out to the edge.

This is an interesting premise. I think we should absolutely have a discussion about this at some point, perhaps in its own thread.

What is it that leads you guys to this conclusion? Do you guys have some numbers or have you done any analysis on this or is it based more on a gut feeling?

Also, is your concern more with how stats are distributed or with how ratings are generated?

That's a good point, and it raises the question of what level of talent does an OOTP rating of 1/250 actually represent?

I don't know about 1/250. I do know what some other low levels roughly correspond to.

30/250 or so is right about the level of an average D1 college player.

Markus has said that 20/250 is probably about the level of the German league. Which would mean that it also applies to several of the other top semi-pro leagues in Europe like Spain, France, the Czech Republic and Belgium.

Much below that, I'm unsure of.

Here's what I wrote at the end of my British Baseball Dynasty, which lasted 120 seasons:

That was in version 12, but I don't think things have changed. In general, OOTP does a good job of getting the league-wide totals accurate, but the distribution is off.

There was a fairly big discussion about this being an issue in historical play on the beta forums in the lead up to OOTP 14. Markus made quite a few changes to how the stats are distributed in historical play as a result of the discussion. Things are quite a bit better there.

But as for fictional leagues, I guess that's another question entirely. Were you having the game progressively use the historical settings?

It'd be interesting to see some data from long running OOTP14 leagues to see if this is the case now. Anyone have any observations on your 14 dynasties?

This is a great discussion to have, and I am by no means intending to detract from it, but this is exactly why I play purely fictional. There's no "it should have been this way" thoughts nagging at me. If the top batters in the league hit 25 home runs a piece, it's just a pitcher's league. Records are set and broken all the time with no historical context. I feel like I enjoy it far more than I ever would if I was playing historical and expecting things to be a certain way.

No, it's a bell curve - or at least bell-curve-like.

Your model posits that everyone with sufficient talent (in the blue area at the far right end) will become an athlete, while everyone to the left won't. We know, however, that that's not true. Plenty of people who have the talent to be professional athletes don't take that path, while some people, with marginal skills, nevertheless make it into the professional ranks. There isn't, therefore, a straight black line separating the athletes from the non-athletes, but rather a blurred area near the right end of the curve that gets more blue as you go further to the right.

Isolating the athletes, therefore, doesn't result in a small section of a larger bell curve, it results in a bell curve distribution itself. And that's what we should expect. The average professional baseball player is ... well, average. There aren't a lot of players at the low end, as they tend to get weeded out, and there aren't a lot of players at the high end, because that's the way talent works. Where OOTP's player creation model goes wrong is ignoring the long "tail" at the high end, where the truly great players reside.

Yes.