Identical Lineups
 

Part of me, while improving my team in Perfects, thought this could get kind of boring if everyone can just start the best players & it gets figured out who those are.

Then the math man in me came out and I thought...Well, even though you might get Maddux vs. Maddux in the same series, to have the same P, C, 1B, 2B, 3B, SS, LF, CF, RF in the exact same batting order would be highly unlikely with all the combinations even if there are deemed 2-5 "best" players at a given position that teams start fielding.

I wondering..have two different users fielded identical starting lineups in every respect yet?

On top of that, with strategies & other variables that are probably endless if we went through them, there is no worry at all about games becoming boring stalemates.

Plus it's baseball, & baseball just has a dramatic you-never-know quality about it...in every REAL best-of-7 series, more or less identical teams play each other twice during the series often, and the results are often quite different.

Mathematically possible but realistically impossible - there are too many choices out there. This isn't MLB the show where everyone gets Kershaw vs Kershaw matchups all day long because there isn't enough good cards.


With fatigue kicking in, rest days, uneven amount of games played, depth charts, strategies and platoons, I think it would be near impossible. MAYBE on the first or second game of the season.

I was referring to across the 11,000+ team universe, maybe the same user has fielded two different teams with identical or near-identical lineups but that alone tells me that maybe every single lineup formed by different users has maybe at least had a slightly different twist in ANY given game. Not entirely sure, though.

It's like chimp-human DNA sequence...can be 99% similar and still miles apart from exact match. Ha...

They'd have to have the same 9 (8 + DH) players, the same player as DH, and the same exact card at every position. And they'd have to have them in the same batting order... There are what? 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 (362,880) different possible orders with the same 9 players. They'd have to have the same starting pitcher as well!

I think it depends on how you look at it. So I play a lot of card games and I can have the same argument as you on them. MTG, for instance, has a 60 cards deck(can be more, but 99.99% of the time you stick to 60 for a meta deck), and it's realistically impossible to play the same match where both players' decks are in the same exact orders and both players also play the identical cards at the identical time. Still, seeing the same deck for the hundredth time is boring, even if the matches play out slightly different.

True, the other way to look at it is there are over 3500 cards in the game and it might make it quite a bit more boring if you play actively and the cards are limited mostly to about 250 of those cards...

Makes me wonder a little if the object is really to win. Ha.

But only in that light, not the other.

Well, that's just how it is in a competitive game. No game is really truly balanced and I think DotA might be as close to that as possible. I believe above half of the DotA heroes roster is used in every year's global tournament and that is as diverse as it gets. Or maybe the latest Tekken -- there are still tiers but you can win with the lowest tier in a competitive setting.

In CS, most guns are ignored except for the main rifle on each side and the sniper rifle. In other shooters with characters or classes, there will always be tiers and usually only the top 2-3 tiers are useful. Same goes for other genres like card games, MOBA and etc.

In PT, the 3250 cards are really just the wall to stop you from getting the top 250 cards too easily. I am sure a portion of the 3250 cards are useful in the lower divisions, so it's not that bad, but when it comes to sim games with ratings, it's just by design that only the a low portion of cards will be meta picks. If your objective is victory at all cost, be darned to style, theme and flavors, then you are indeed playing the meta cards, which is a perfectly fine personal choice. It's kind of like lay'n'pray in MMA, very effective if done right albeit very boring for the audience -- but hey, you don't win for the audience, you win for yourself. Not 100% true for MMA though, it's ultimately a viewer sport and you get canned easily if you are boring.

Ha..."Cool" -Butthead

I've always believed that the variables in a game far outweigh the quality of the players. In other words, two exact lineups and pitcher combos simply couldn't perform exactly alike. The talent is all top level, but every pitch will be in a different location - every swing will be at a different angle - every player in the field will be at a different location. This is also how wild card teams sometime beat juggernauts.

Too many variables.

It might get boring seeing the same lineups face each other all the time, but we can guarantee no two games will be alike.

Variables can be found in almost every game nowadays aside from the most basic mobile games(I guess). I don't think that is worthy of a praise, personally. What I hope they can improve is to increase the amount of meta-viable cards so the composition of top lineups are more varied yet still all competitive in the highest level. This can be done by either (1)make more cards useful at the highest level (2)make more useful cards at the highest level (3)tweak the sim engine to increase the amount of workable strategies.

Beautiful

Besides the amount of strategies...(which I think is about sufficient), the more variables to each player, the more unique, the more possible it would be to build a team within a budget that could be competitive. I have not been attempted to be Mr. Efficient yet as far as finding players that can help with lower ratings and cost attached to them but baseball has a number of variables to each game and then the more detailed the players' attributes were, the more realistic, & probably significantly more realistic that a higher % of strategists could compete with HOF teams.

As thorough as statistical records are, there are probably some fans out there for each team that do know the player's records and attributes as well as they know their family & friends.

Idk, I was just thinking of what a large task it would be to get every player in the game replicated down to the details & my thought was a super-fan or 3 from every organization.

In card games, who goes first is so significant that two decks will play very differently even if the players are holding identical cards.

In OOTP, I do think it would be boring to play near identical teams at the highest level since so few cards compete for the top spots (imo, it's far far fewer than 250 cards) and there aren't a lot of tactical decision to be made. Luckily, I don't have enough PP for that to be an issue!

Is 20 behaving like 19, where the pitching was much more "solved" than the batting, contributing to a smaller number meta-viable pitchers?

Everything will change radically once tournaments with various types of restrictions become available. Different kinds of restrictions will lead to different cards being the "best", and new strategies will become viable. I, for one, can't wait.

Some things may change radically, but definitely not everything. Without knowing yet how tournaments will be handled, we can't even say with any confidence what will change. Regardless, there will still be those looking to compete in the main game, even as we compete in unique and interesting tournaments. My question remains valid.

Late Edit: Actually, my question can also apply to tournaments as well. If pitching is solved, the it will still be easy to determine a clear meta staff even after the application of any limiting filters that a specific tournament may demand.

Yes, absolutely. There are a clear top 5 starting pitchers. They're all righties though, and there are some virtually-as-good-as-Walsh pitchers for the 5th spot. Amongst the top lefties, there are 4 tier 1 guys. The only reason to run anyone outside of these 9 guys are limitations on what you can spend, you're running a theme team, or fond childhood memories.

I think tournaments will be a lot harder to solve. One of the reason why tournament pitching is solved is because there are 99s and 100s that just have way more stats than other 90+ rated pitchers. Among golds, silvers, bronzes, and irons that's not so much the case.

Another reason is that, at the top, there are amazing hitters that also play amazing defense at all positions. If that weren't the case, then the relative weight of different pitching stats would change. As it is, Maddux is in the top 5. If there were top level lineups that could make up for poor defense with better offense, Maddux might be out of that team's rotation. In most tournament formats, you wont be able to combine elite defense and elite hitting at all positions, so there'll be more choices that will in turn affect your rotation decisions.

By what measure is Maddux in the top 5?

A database of performance of pitchers across many seasons of many perfect leagues. Also, there is a formula you can apply to any pitcher that's extrapolated from that database, which I think is already discussed in a topic called Pitcher's Ratings or something like that.

Long story short, MOV > CTRL > STUFF. Maddux's ratings are insane.