Quote:
Originally Posted by BruceM
Claiming you're the best and claiming you're accurate are two different things. To me, OOTP is the best historical, but that's because I'm not concerned with accuracy as in mimicing real baseball.
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I don't play historical games just because I like to spend a lot of time tooling with archetypes, inventing my own fantasy almost-everything, and experimenting with crazy lineup/strategy schemes; but I can understand this line of thought. In a simulation, I imagine there to be a lot of "wiggle room" for a player to change in ways that he didn't in real life and for teams to make mistakes they did not in real life and/or avoid mistakes they did make. A series of weird disasters that occurred in real life may not ruin the team if they do not occur in the sim and a successful real-life franchise could likewise find itself disaster-prone in a sim.
To get back to "wiggle room", I'd like to share my own real life baseball story: As a teenager, I was a knuckleballer with such ridiculous movement on my pitches that they were practically unhittable (and I
easily struck out guys who have gone on to successful MLB careers). Most of the innings I pitched yielded no hits. However, I was unable to get my control to a point where I wasn't hitting batters and throwing wild pitches in every game. I went to camps, worked on all of my mechanics with top-flight pitching coaches, etc. and nothing worked. After countless hours of practice and determination with no improvement, I gave up. However, if my pitching "career" were simulated many times, who is to say that something wouldn't "click" one (or even most) of those times, leading me to have a reasonable degree of control and allowing me to go on to a successful (simulated) MLB career?
What I'm saying is that, in pro sports, most of the benchwarmers are among the best players in the world. If one coach (or fellow player) reaches that bench player in a profound way, history can change. People like to think of their favorite players as having a static set of skills and measurable talent when, in real life, they are human beings who are constantly tinkering with their games and working hard to improve (and in some cases, to maintain the high level they have achieved and eventually failing that when Father Time inevitably takes over). Real people have niggling injuries, psychological blocks, turbulent personal lives, addictions, and occasional confidence problems (too much or too little). When you're simulating an athlete's career, it's nice to have such variation. Sometimes Joe Blow has the stunning revelation that he didn't have in real life, fixes the hitch in his swing and has a better career than Ted Williams (and fixing it for one season before reverting to his old form is certainly believable). Sometimes Pete Rose will develop an even nastier habit and his career will fade early. I would find this kind of variation believable and acceptable, though I believe that the AI managers benching great players for no discernible reason would annoy me, too.
And, yeah, if OOTP focused more on it's Fictional play, I'd be thrilled. Heh.
