[Syd Thrift]

This idea that OOTP is "skin deep" is just plain ludicrous on its face. Come on, now. The game has issues, I will admit. It's far from perfect. It's also the best career sim on the market, and it's the best career sim on the market because it is MASSIVELY deep. It's far and away the deepest baseball sim on the market. Realistically, look at the game compared to its competitors, not to a Platonic ideal of what OOTP should be. It's *miles* ahead of Baseball Mogul and the last version of Puresim, and in ways that will not be easy for Clay Dreslough or Shaun Sullivan to match. It's comparable IMO to games like AgeOD's Civil War, titles that are so impressively deep, in fact, that it's very hard for new users to understand them well enough to have fun using them.

A big part of that, ironically, is due to the guy who's calling the game skin deep. RonCo, you've spent the past couple years sitting right up against the glass of the OOTP engine, seeing all the flaws and all the ways it should be better. Those flaws definitely exist and nobody is arguing that they do not. But if you don't think the game is deep relative to anything else on the market, including Football Manager (FM has deeper player interaction, something you've, of course, rallied against, but it doesn't hold a candle to the depth of player development and the relationship of little stats that nobody but 3 people will notice that OOTP has), you're too close to see this.

Just wanted to point out a couple of these insanely little things:

- Fielding chances by position change over time according to how they changed in real life. No, seriously. A pitcher in the 1890s will take about 50% more chances per season than a guy in 2007.

- Some of the stats that the game regulates from season to season:

Sacrifice hits
How often a league steals, based on the number of times a runner is on first base (this interferes with the stealing strategy settings, but like I said, the game isn't perfect)
The percentage of double plays that are GIDPs versus lineout DPs or the strike em out throw em out variety
Outfield assists
Endurance (measured by number of outs per appearance) for both starters and relievers
Groundball percentage
Wild pitches, balks, and passed balls

- 3 1/2 megabytes worth of play by play and news story text (SOM and DMB probably have OOTP beat, but they have almost a decade on the game of users writing their text for them, so that's to be expected... nonetheless, it's a huge range of available PBP that takes a pretty good amount of time to get tired of).