[fhomess]

I think some of Fidel’s ideas are probably a good point to start off with when thinking about the discussion of how would one develop internal tools to OOTP that would track commissioner activities. I don’t think they all make sense in their current form, but that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t lead to tools that would make sense. Editing an ammy draft pool before they’re drafted may not need auditing, but editing a fringe prospect into a star certainly might.

That said, count me among those that really wonders how big an issue this really is. I’m not sure I really think OOTP needs to have tools like these added to the game. I suspect that the vast majority of the online league commishes out there are on the up and up. I have no doubt that there are those who are cheating in their online leagues right now. I’ve seen it in the past, and the number of leagues that are active means that the odds are highly in the corner of some commishes not being trustworthy. To me, this type of behavior has never cast a bad light on OOTP itself. It has always cast a bad light on the individuals responsible. The reputation of OOTP doesn’t suffer. Obviously, it makes for a bad experience for those involved in the league. It could very well turn some folks off to OOTP, but I’ve not heard of that voiced. I’m also not sure what adding these tools really provides. I suppose it adds some peace of mind, but if you’re actually worried that your commish is cheating to the point where you’d want to review these types of audits, you probably ought to leave the league and join a different one. Once the suspicion of misuse is there, the seeds of a bad relationship are planted. It’s not that hard to find a league that’s been around for awhile and/or has a reputable commish. There are even a number of leagues that have commishes who don’t run a team in the league – which is generally an indication they’re not going to cheat. For those of us who’ve been around, if you see a league with some names you recognize, you can probably get a sense of the reputation of the league. For newbies, it’s a bit harder to know how to find a good league, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a good thing to advertise auditing tools in such a way that it appears that cheating is prevalent. Transparency is good, but not always good advertising.

So in short, while I don’t think the ideas are necessarily bad, I’d rather not see Markus spend time developing these tools. There are enough other improvements he can make to the user interface, in-game AI, financial model, etc, and this seems like a limited enough problem that I don’t see it as being particularly beneficial to develop.