[ctorg]

For me, "real" baseball is not enough. If this game only had that as an option, I seriously never would have come to it. I was specifically looking for a game that would let me create my own version of baseball history with my own players and such. Just playing real baseball as it is is, for me, boring and unimaginative. Most of the fun of OOTP is coming up with novel ideas for leagues.

What other people think of this board is irrelevant to whether adding women as an option is a good idea. People are not going to buy the game at a lower rate because there is an option to allow women. They may roll their eyes or never use it or whatever, but it's a pretty lame reason to not buy the game considering its other features.

I also don't go for the argument of not spending precious coding time on some element of the game or another anymore. Every year there are a number of features added to the game that I'll never use, and that a lot of other people will probably never use. OOTP has developed into a game with so many options that there are now niches within the community whose playing styles differ very widely and only cross paths in a few places, from historical simmers to modern only to fictional only and so on. More and more, additions to the game will cater to niches rather than huge swaths of the fan base. That's because the game is already very good at its core now and, while there can always be improvement of course, adding bells and whistles does attract new people.

Is it realistic to have the option of women playing baseball? Considering that there was actually once a women's baseball league, I think it is. Imagine playing out a theoretical timeline in which the AAGPBL was successful and some of its best players made it into MLB. Did this happen? No. Could it have happened? We can't possibly know. Does it matter if it could have happened or not? No. It only matters whether some people might be interested in exploring the idea in the context of a game, and I bet there are quite a few who would be.