Quote:
Originally Posted by Gomer
I've heard somewhere that since OOTP 13, injuries do NOT affect player development or player ratings.
Is this true?
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No, that is not true at all. But the influence of injuries on ratings/development was toned down in OOTP-12 (I think - so many versions I can't remember exactly when each change happened).
There's a bit of a long history here. Many years ago, back in OOTP 2006 or 2007, players would just lose or gain Potential randomly, and instantaneously. Some people thought that was bizarre (and I guess it is!). They argued that a player should never suddenly lose potential without some reason, and that injuries were the only sensible reason someone might suddenly lose potential. That may sound right, but it isn't, and it led to some misguided changes to the game.
In response, two changes were made to OOTP: potential changes were made gradual instead of instantaneous (which alone completely solved the issue with sudden potential changes, so no other changes were needed), and injuries were made the primary cause of potential drops. But baseball players are very unpredictable, and OOTP needs to generate a lot of potential drops. When injuries are the only cause of potential drops, OOTP needs even minor injuries to cause potential loss, and in OOTP-9 (or some earlier version - can't remember which) a chipped tooth or scratched fingernail could turn a top prospect into a career minor leaguer.
That caused a lot of problems. With that development model, your optimal strategy becomes to avoid playing your prospects at all, because you don't want to expose them to injury risk. That's clearly not how real baseball works. But even more importantly, injuries just don't cause that many players to drop off a cliff in real life. I looked at real life player performance before and after isolated long-term injuries, and for batters, it is very rare that a single injury has any significant lasting effect on performance. The one exception is serious leg injuries, which typically produce a noticeable drop in stolen base attempts (Speed, in OOTP terms). For pitchers, it happens a bit more often that an injury is 'catastrophic' (i.e. producing a noticeably negative effect on performance), but it is still true that most pitchers return from injury quite successfully.
So OOTP now models injury effects more realistically. Significant injuries sometimes hurt ratings, but that is not the norm, especially for batters. Injuries do have short-term effects on performance; players can have day-to-day injuries which temporarily hurt ratings, and players will have some 'rust' when returning from DL assignments. Randomness (along with other factors, like personality ratings) again plays an important role in determining potential ratings changes, and short-term injuries should never have catastrophic effects on ratings.