Quote:
Originally Posted by Killing Time
No, you're casting aside the wants of a lot of users and being real callous about it.
You don't have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that releasing this tool to the public would lead to much better rosters. You don't want much better rosters? If you don't then you're in a very small minority group. In fact you may be the only person in it.
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Okay, I should have said "needs", not "wants."
Naturally, hundreds of users will want this if:
- It's free
- And before they are faced with the reality of the amount of time and resources they'd need to put into it to get the app up and running
Saying, "You don't have to be Stephen Hawking to figure out that releasing this tool to the public would lead to much better rosters," isn't really a valid argument, it's just a method to avoid having to use reason to defend your position.
I don't mind hearing your position and if the argument is persuasive, plus you get the bonus that perhaps Markus or someone will decide to release it to the public.
Here's my take.
- We already have some good rosters out there. Only one was made using this web app. All the others were made using other means.
- Could the web app make better rosters? Absolutely, because better happens to be an inaccurate method of describing quality. If Aaron Heilman in the OOTP-released 2009 Roster doesn't have a slider, but his real life counterpart developed one in spring training, then a new Roster that adds in the slider is "better." It's not significantly better.
- There is the concept of diminishing returns to consider. If the OOTP-released 2009 Roster had every batter and pitcher as batting and throwing right-handed, then the overall state of the Roster is pretty lousy and there's a great deal of improvement to be had by correcting the batting and throwing. (It's also very easy to track down this information).
If the OOTP-released 2009 Roster doesn't have Colleges for a lot of players, that's less significant. It doesn't impact the game as much, plus the info is slightly harder to track down (admittedly not as much as several years ago).
The list of users who would run out and "upgrade" their roster because of the new college data would be much less than if you were correcting batting/throwing.
That's diminishing return: the effort you put into updating the colleges is worth much less than the effort you put into batting/throwing arms. Hence, the better the quality of the rosters today the more effort you need to put in to making the rosters significantly better.
- The only real difference having this functionality as such on the web rather than in the model is that more than one person could work on it simultaneously or you could easily collaborate with a large amount of users on a roster. If you are one person editing a roster, or say, two people editing a roster each exchanging the league files once every few days, there's no benefit here. If you just play OOTP and never aim to create a roster, then you don't need this. So I do maintain that the amount of users that would really use this is probably small.
- Markus and company may not have created this to ever be for public consumption. It's not possible to say definitively how easy or hard it is to set up, but I know from personal experience that I cannot just take the code from my web-based OOTP site and port it over to my other OOTP league without a huge amount of effort. And I wrote all the code for it. I can't even imagine what someone else would make of it.
- Again, it's their work and their property. Any expectations that do not take into account this point or the prior point just aren't being realistic that the people who have and deserve to have the most say are Markus and company.
I do offer the idea that a really great middle ground would be to consider setting up environments on ootpdevelopments.com for people like Gambo and others if they want to collaborate on, say a very accurate 1983 season disk.