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My point is simply that players retire all the time because of injury - and that's what an 'instant CEI' is in OOTP: a player choosing to retire after suffering an injury. There are a few reasons OOTP's CEI model is unrealistic - things that can't be fixed unless the injury model is made more sophisticated:
-it is exceptionally rare in real life for a player to retire the same day he suffers an injury, simply because it takes time to complete a diagnosis. That's not only true of CEIs - it's pretty much true of most long injuries in real life. Until the game includes delayed diagnoses (pitcher reports 'elbow soreness', then a few days later it's discovered he has a torn UCL), OOTP won't be able to model this aspect of real life. This aspect of CEI modeling in OOTP understandably provokes user complaints;
-in real life, there are three broad types of CEI:
--catastrophic trauma suffered in-game. This type of injury is rare in real life (though Juan Encarnacion's injury attests to their occurrence), and when a player suffers an instant CEI in OOTP, the presentation of the injury to users makes it appear that the player has suffered this kind of injury. These types of instant CEIs used to be common in earlier versions of OOTP; most of these instant CEIs were replaced in OOTP-X with setback/CEIs, though there are likely still too many;
--off field injury. Off field injuries frequently, and tragically, end real life player careers. OOTP has never tried to model this. Now if users want young players to retire in OOTP with the same frequency as in real life, the only way the game can do this at the moment is to give them instant CEIs through in-game injuries. It would certainly be preferable, in my mind, to make the number of in-game CEIs realistic, and to introduce a more sophisticated off-field injury system that the user could elect to turn off if he doesn't want to use it;
--injuries that lead players to retire immediately because they, for whatever reason, are not inclined to go through the extensive rehab required. This is, by far, the most common type of 'instant CEI' in real life (though of course the real life player often doesn't retire immediately in order to keep earning a paycheque). In a more sophisticated injury system, several factors would weigh into the AI decision to make such an injury a CEI:
----most importantly, whether the injury is a repeat injury. In most cases, players who retire immediately from a serious injury have sustained a similar severe injury in the past. When surgery isn't successful the first time, that normally indicates some kind of structural failure that can't be corrected through surgery, making a repeat surgery unlikely to succeed. For OOTP to model this, it would need to keep track of the number of severe injuries a player has sustained, something the game doesn't do at the moment;
----player age. Older players are far more likely to retire because of severe injury than younger ones, simply because it makes less sense for them to attempt a comeback, considering their age and likely ability by the time they return. OOTP could take age into account, but doesn't at the moment;
----player ability. Star players are less likely to retire immediately than scrub players; they have a much stronger economic incentive to attempt to come back;
----player personality. This is impossible to quantify, but one could imagine that a player with a strong work ethic is more likely to attempt a comeback.
In a realistic CEI system, I could imagine seeing about one 'traumatic' CEI each year or two, one off-field CEI per year, and about two or three 'retire because I don't want to complete the rehab' CEIs per year. In this way, CEIs would affect the right calibre of player - too many stars suffer CEIs in OOTP at present. The same personality/history factors that might affect instant CEIs could also be incorporated into determining whether a setback CEI occurs, which would enhance the realism of all CEI AI decisions.
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