Current State of the Game
 

I think it goes without saying that this release has been disappointing to say the least. I've been running a 30+ team online league since OOTP13. We're currently on our 9th release of the game and our 118 season as a league. I can safely say that this release has been by far the most frustrating of all. Issues have frequently been appearing since launch:

• Incompletable drafts when importing a CSV.
• Draft log not showing after completion.
• Draft class quality severely lacking compared to previous versions.
• Inexplicably being unable to advance past a specific date (forcing a rollback of almost a month).
• Constant "Out of Memory" crashing.
• Crashing when moving to a different monitor.
• Crashing while saving and losing your world.dat.
• Ticket Prices randomly maxing out.
• INT Complex guys randomly losing their position.
• Rookie Ball players randomly being released.
• Released INT Complex guys ending back up in DFA.
• Constant runtime errors.
• Incorrect waiver order.

This is not even a comprehensive list, just a few that are most prevalent at the top of my brain. There are number of issues that have carried over from previous generations as well. Issues that inexplicably remain in the game despite being reported numerous times. I understand that it is not easy to continually develop a yearly release schedule game. I understand that new features and versions will inevitably bring bugs. Previous releases of the game were never perfect either. They were not this massive of a failure either.

It is hard not to ignore the introduction of Perfect Team coinciding with the down turn of game quality. The focus of the dev team has clearly shifted towards Perfect Team's success. Understandably so given the income the microtransactions Perfect Team has introduced. Paired with the reduction of beta testers for this release, the results have been disastrous. It is clear the game is now more tuned for the Perfect Team experience. The quality of the game has fallen too far the past two releases for anything else to be true.

My greatest fear is the shift in focus will eventually lead to the evaporation of quality online communities and leagues. These communities were once the life blood of OOTP prior to the introduction of Perfect Team. The lack of attention, support, and game quality have put these communities in jeopardy. I've spoken with numerous different league commissioners and members and their experiences have all been the same. Many of them have even expressed a potential for discontinuing their participation if the game quality does not improve. I myself have entertained the prospect of rebooting the league on a previous, more stable, version.

Please, OOTP team, do something. Things NEED to get better. The player base deserves better.

I get the out of memory crash on occasion. It never really bothered me much because it still saves the current state of the simulator.

The thing that really steams me up is the ootp vanishing act. I had to switch to auto-save after every single day because I've lost too much when I had auto-save at once a week. Just a few days ago, I lost hours worth of work and 4 days of games due to the vanishing act. I wanted to put my fist through my screen or just cry. Maybe both. :( Before anyone suggests...their is nothing out of date, like drivers, or anything goofy with windows. In fact, I did a fresh install of Windows about 3-4 weeks ago. It vanished before I did the reformat/reinstall and it vanishes since.

There may be some other little things that I can't think of now, but overall, I have loved OOTP 21!!!

I understand that it saves, but it happens SO frequently.

What the OP said, all of it.

Considering it happened with Madden most notably and other franchises as well, it's really tough to think it's a coincidence that my least favorite version of OOTP is happening right around the time their version of the microtransaction feature is rising to prominence.

It's not a coincidence in the slightest. They found an on-ramp for more money than they've ever made.

As long as Perfect Team exists the base game will suffer.

This game stinks.....I'm done with OOTP it's been getting worse since ootp18. The whole thing with OOTP compared to say the Show or other MLB video games is that the stats were realistic. Now it's not, seems to be more of a concern to make this a video game with the graphics. Too bad...

I really wish Front Page Sports was still around. Loved their baseball and Football games.

I won't even start in on OOTP with the hockey and the supposed Football game they are working on now for almost 3 years now. lol

Couldn’t agree more. I’ve played OOTP since version 3 and this is the buggiest final release by a long shot. A lot of the things that are bugs used to actually work and have broken along the way

It's really sad to hear some folks have had a bad experience with this version of the game:(

That being said, while for sure we can do better in some ways, I do take exception to some of the specific claims made here.

As far as the conclusions here about our focus, all you have to do is look at any regular patch change list to see the respective focus on the regular game as opposed to PT. Most patches, we've put easily 90%+ of the fixes, changes, time and effort etc. into the base game.

There was no reduction of beta testers for this release, in fact the beta team is larger than it ever has been. I have no idea where you might've gotten the idea there was a reduction from, but it's objectively inaccurate.

As far as the actual issues mentioned, a lot of the crashing stuff described is just as likely to be system maintenance and health related issues as game issues.

Out of memory issues can often come from leagues simply getting too big for either the game or your system to handle, and in that case there's nothing we can do about this. The only short term solution is to eliminate any unnecessary data in the save to reduce the size. One long term solution we are actively working on is to make all versions of the game 64-bit in the future, which will go a long way toward eliminating any memory errors and issues.

In spite of selling more games than we have before this year, we've overall received fewer reports of crashes and major issues than we have for any previous versions. So far from somehow having gone downhill, according to the majority of the feedback we've received, this is the most stable version of the game ever.

Now of course, just because that's the case for the majority of users, doesn't mean it's the case for everyone.

One thing we have noticed is a significant increase in reports of instability of Macs immediately after the most recent MacOS update. The problem here is that the issues seem to be related to something Apple unilaterally changed in that update without informing developers about.

We're working on trying to determine what it is that actually changed and what can be done to fix it, though if past experience is any guide, the most effective fix is likely to come from Apple themselves in their next OS update.

As far as some of the other stuff mentioned, like Rookie Ball players randomly being released, released INT Complex guys ending back up in DFA etc. we need to hear about these things through official channels to fix them. The incorrect waiver order for instance, was reported and should be fixed now in the latest patch.

If you report this through the bugs forum or (best of all) through tech support and also include league files that show where this is happening, then we'll look into it and fix it if at all possible, just like we do for as many of the issues reported as we can.

If you already did report it and haven't heard back, then please bump the report or even just directly send a message to one of the team to let us know it's there and to take a look at it, and we'll try our best to do so. It's not that we want to ignore any issues, but we have a lot on our plates, we are are human and we do miss things and can use reminders sometimes.

The one issue I have with this is that this never happened for any of us on 20, but now basically every league member is having this happen on 21. I don't see how this makes sense unless there's some underlying issue inside the game. RAM usage is drastically higher on 21 compared to 20.

Surely the league has gotten bigger in the time between 20 and 21, right?

If so, that's likely the issue right there. When any league gets too big, this sort of thing will happen and the longer the league is running for, the bigger it will get. It may've been borderline before and just tipped over the edge after it got a little bigger.

Now, if you have a copy of the league that's exactly the same on both 20 and 21 and this is happening on 21 but not 20, then yeah, that could be a potential indication of something wrong. In that case, please upload/post a link to both files so we can load each up and compare them.

But generally speaking, the main thing to do in a case like this is to decrease the amount of retired players saved, decrease the amount of stats saved, decrease the amount of feeder/secondary leagues, decrease the amount of boxscores etc to get the league size down a bit.

Like I mentioned in my first post, the ultimate solution for this will be making the game 64-bit on all platforms, which is high on our list of things to do for the future.

It shouldn't get massively bigger from 20 to 21. There's no reason for a file to have exponential growth when it's a file that's already 100 years into a league. If we were going from say, 15 years to 25? I'd get it then. But not 100 to 102 and having crashes.

Especially on a system that's doubled the RAM available, had a massive upgrade with the GPU (which I know barely means anything for OOTP), and been cleaned up, along with a league file that's been cleaned up as well.

It's definitely an issue under the hood with larger files, and yes. I 100% agree that 64 bit is a must and needs to happen with the next release.

Like I mentioned though, it may simply have tipped over the borderline between no issue/issue for the file size, and with a file with a size issue can increase the memory used beyond simply a linear increase.

The amount of RAM on the system is pretty much irrelevant with a 32-bit game. The game can only use so much, and it's likely less than is available on any reasonably modern system.

As per above, if you have two copies of the league file that are either the same or nearly the same on 20 and 21, if you get a copy of both to us, we can check it out and see if there's an underlying issue or not.

I don't have the 20 file anymore, since that was deleted due to being obsolete for me, but i remember checking and it was about a 5% file size increase after only 1 season, and the file has not gone up near that much any season since.

But what I'm getting out of this is that for long time leagues who are having memory issues, there's going to be no point in upgrading to 22 if the game isn't 64 bit, since the game can't handle it, due to the file always increasing in size somewhat when versions change.

Yes, that makes sense and that's why getting the game to 64-bit on all platforms, not just the platforms where it is now, is really, really high on our priority list.

Whether that's an issue or not depends on how close it was to being at the limit before and that's not something I can tell you offhand.

But what you guys are describing indicates to be a file that simply got too big. Doing the housecleaning stuff I suggested above should at least get you moving forward without or at least with significantly reducing memory errors, if you do enough of it and get the file size down a good bit.

We've already done it. We reduced the file size by 3 GB along with changing what all the game saves about a month and a half ago when OP made a different post about the file crashing any time we advanced past a certain day, and it did nothing to stop crashing.

If it's crashing every time at a specific day, it's possible there's some corruption or another issue in the file.

If you can get us a copy we can look at it and see what's going on and depending on the cause may be able to fix it.

We already fixed that issue. We used an older file and had no more crash issues with simming that specific day.

But it still doesn't change that we did what was suggested here for memory crashes and it did nothing for crash issues.

If the file is still too big, even after making changes, then it's not going to eliminate any issues. It may still need to be slimmed down even more.

Anyway, the next step here would be to get us a copy of the file that we can look at and go from there depending on what we find.