[Curtis]

Originally Posted by Jontler

Am I to understand it is the intent of the game to make AAAA players popular? Are players with AAAA ratings, who put up AAAA statistics, supposed to be popular? Is it reasonable to assume such players would be popular in real life?

I'm having trouble understanding how this could be working as intended.

I realize this is only one guy, but allow me to acquaint you with Eddie Kranepool. For several seasons the only reason Eddie wasn't either cut or traded for a lefthanded batgirl to work the third base line was because he was 'an original Met'. Late in his career he became actually useful, and his last four seasons he put on the most sustained performance of superb pinch hitting of which I am aware, but for two thirds of his tenure he was a classic AAAA player.

On the other side of the coin we have Willie Mays, who deteriorated badly his last three seasons, though he continued to make the All Star team every year (the best argument I know for not letting the fans select). Many 'future Hall of Famers' collapse in their last couple of seasons, but if they were playing in an OotP Baseball game I'd expect them to have very high free agent demands and probably bidding wars over them.

Originally Posted by megamanmatt

My only issue with popularity is there are too many nationally popular players and too few who are only popular locally.

In the historical game I tried (lost it in the process of updating to 10.4) there were far too few nationally popular players, and the popularity ratings seemed to be assigned arbitrarily. I was doing 1962, with which I have a little familiarity, and players I never heard of were getting high popularities, while those I thought of as the stars of the era (Aaron, Banks, Matthews) were completely unknown. In exasperation I eventually went through and promoted everyone with five years of service out of the lowest popularity level, those with ten years out of the bottom two, those with fifteen years out of the bottom three, and those with twenty years out of the bottom four on the grounds that anyone who had managed to hang around that long had to have some level of fan base.

Originally Posted by Jontler

Either way, it certainly seems to me that ratings are playing a much bigger role in arbitration/contracts/popularity than they should. In my humble opinion, actual performance should be the overriding factor. I can see including ratings for the reasons you outlined, Markus, but they have far too much influence right now.

One of the biggest flaws I see in factoring ratings into arbitration/contracts/popularity is that you're not allowing the free market to be, um, a free market. Players are judged by the game first and the GMs going after the players second. Perhaps this is ideal for a solo or historic league, but in an online league it just results in a lot of guys either (a) making far too much in arbitration (b) being released to save money and costing their team fan interest (c) demanding far more than is reasonable in free agency and/or (d) rotting in FA/some international league because no human owner would dream of signing them to anything close to what they're demanding.

Your second paragraph is interesting, and I must admit I hadn't considered that angle, being strictly a solo gamer. I do disagree with part of your first paragraph.

I agree that ratings should not impact national popularity, and probably shouldn't impact local popularity after the rookie season. I do think they should be the drivers in arbitration and free agent negotiations. It has nothing to do with reality; it's an issue of fairness. I see repeated posts where people claim the AI is stupid and easy to outwit (though you couldn't prove it by me), and using ratings rather than (or as a heavy modifier to) stats acts as a game-balancer. If the game doesn't do it, then you'll have a bunch of guys who hit/pitched way above their stats getting overpaid, while a bunch of guys who underperformed are underpaid. I'm certainly going to take advantage of that by trading my $3 million overpaid player for the AI's $3 million underpaid player. In a heartbeat. And twice on Sunday.

Originally Posted by Buane

Those arbitration examples I posted earlier are absurd and indefensible, and they're not outliers - they're only the most ridiculous examples of an epidemic that we see every offseason.

And if it were just a case of potential playing into the equation, I think we could all live with that. We'd shell out a few extra million for that budding superstar knowing he was on his way to stardom.

If they're the most ridiculous examples, then they're outliers. I think that's a pretty good definition of an outlier.

And I agree that potentials shouldn't affect negotiations, except for the draft bonus negotiations being added in Version 11. Ratings should be important, for the reason mentioned above.