Quote:
Originally Posted by Seviien
Todd Van Poppel was "can't miss" too at one point 
I can't say anything for the AI and how it decides to release players, but in aggregate the player development Model in v9 is the best it's ever been -- and the best in any baseball sim I've ever taken a look at. Some players are going to bust. It just happens. If anything, OOTP needs more superstars to come out of nowhere. If you run a league for any length of time, the top 10 all-time HR hitters will ALWAYS be taken within the top 10 picks of the draft -- usually within the top 5 picks.
FWIW...
Since OOTP 2006 I've plotted the stat ouputs per AB or per BF for players at different ages in fictional OOTP leagues that have been running for at least 50 years. Then I compared those results back to MLB for the same time period.
e.g. I'd let a fictional league run from 1900 to 2008, then take the stat outputs from the league for the 1980-2008, chop them up by player age, and then compare those results to simmilarly sliced MLB data from the same time period.
Those reports, coupled with Ronco's comparisons of ratings to Tango data helped Markus ground the development model during the beta process.
In 2006 we were way, way off. So far off it wasn't funny.
In 2007 / v8 we made huge improvements and things got close enough to "perfect" that 99% of people won't notice what could be better.
In v9, things got a tad better than in v8
On the whole, I'd say we're 90% or better at capturing how players really develop. "Stuff" is still lacking, or at least it was the last time I ran a test.
just my $0.02 |
Since you bring my name into it ...
I'll say that overall the development curves in v9 appear to me to be a fairly big step backward, requiring changes in the aging and development modifiers to bring them closer into line with reality (not really necessary in v2007). They have also not improved as I would expect them to have--pitchers are still off, and hitters still hold their power too long.
Career lengths are still too short overall (possibly due to AI, but I don't think so, since I've been testing mostly at AI settings highly weighted to ratings). The numbers appear to be pretty much equal from v2007->v9.
Its one "improvement" is that Markus muted the number of big changes, thereby lowering the number of immediate and vocal complaints. Ths is a big improvement because it was no fun whatsoever to have all your great prospects killed by the v2007 game engine...I heartily recommend changing to v9 for this factor only (my online league will be doing so soon). However, all this has really done in the big picture is remove some of the variation and surprise from the draft. You see fewer stars coming from late rounds. There are some, of course. But not many...and HOF registers are still massively swayed to the 1st round, as you noted.
As I said, I view the dev curves in v9 to be quite a bit inferior to those in v2007. Quite honestly, and with nothing but proper reverence for the dev team and all Markus's hard work, I would appreciate it if my name weren't associated with them.