[BMW]

Originally Posted by Malleus Dei

Cdidman, are you an ex-Mogul player by any chance?

All those features are very Football Manager too. (I haven't played Mogul in years, I dunno if that's part of their current feature set.)

Features like that have their pluses and minuses. The biggest minus is probably that it can be very overwhelming to a player who expects to be able to effectively micromanage every last detail of every player. It's a big turn-off for those sorts of players (although some may not be playing with the current "personalities" system anyway).

I think that the plus side is that (given that you play with "personalities" on) it could be used to effectively run more realistic development.

I touched on this during one debate I had recently, in regards to parts of OOTP that had no real statistical basis in fact and were implemented using common sense/instinct to model the system with a goal of playability rather than literal realism.

The point I was arguing against was a general idea that new features should not enter OOTP unless there was some way of proving cause and effect via hard data and analysis. My argument against was that there are already features in the game that couldn't have relied on hard data and they also happen to work fine, from a playability standpoint.

It also brought up the point that in real life, I don't think you can broadly assign that a coach is just generally "good" or "bad" at something. They won't affect all players equally. Coaching is more likely effective or non-effective based on the talent of the player and the relationship between the coach and player.

There is a balance of realism and gameplay (especially ease of gameplay) that needs to be made with developing a game. I'm firmly in the camp that the gameplay should trump the realism where they conflict, but I'm certainly not the only voice. Everyone here is respected and some may agree with me, some may be firmly in the camp of realism first, and some may be more moderate.

I marvel at LGO's knowledge of the rules of the game, but I know that I've seen plenty of examples of rules that he's brought up that would make the game more complex to program, clunkier to play or both. Simply being as realistic as possible isn't the sole goal. That's why all games have aspects that approximate reality in a way that is engaging for the player.

There are aspects of OOTP right now that work despite having a lack of data. There's no data that I know of that defines how a pitching coach and batting coach play into player development. Let's face it - common sense dictates that a the interpersonal relationship between batting coach and hitter is far more likely than that the coach has a generic "skill" that equally affects all players.

Sparky Anderson once called Torey Lovullo "the finest young player I've seen Johnny Bench." So that proves two things: 1. You can't take anecdotal statements as fact (he may have been stretching the truth to make Torey feel better or increase his value) or 2. you can't assign broad values to things like "spotting talent" or "managing rookies" - there's just too much data where a single scout or coach will succeed spectacularly once and spectacularly fail in a similar situation.

So a player may credit a pitching coach with teaching him a devastating new pitch when that pitch could possibly stem from his natural talent (i.e. Roger Craig never created a squadron of Mike Scotts). How could you trust an interview?

So all the aspects currently in OOTP regarding coaching development is really gameplay designed off common sense - not hard data. And for any demerit you could levy against the realism of a system like that, nobody has to ask on the boards "what does Handle Rookies" mean?

I'm sure that I don't have to go into too much detail as to how the existence and effects of the personality ratings can't be programmed off hard data. But again, they are meaningful to the end user and you don't have to go through the 50 billion+ variables that it would take to approximate anything close to a real human mind to use and understand the system. So boiling it down to a few key variables to drive aspects of development for which we have no hard data is highly unrealistic, but very gameplay friendly.