[injury log]

Originally Posted by The Wolf

In no particular order:

1. Storylines have overwhelmingly negative outcomes. Real baseball does not. Right now turning storylines on can be a handicap. It certainly can be depressing or upsetting (see the recent thread on the death of a child).

2. The punitive outcomes were reduced, but still exist, and are unbalanced. Why?

3. Storylines significantly increase the randomness in a league. You are telling me that no one considered this or cares about it?

4. If the purpose was to tell stories, then why so many punitive outcomes? You can tell entertaining stories without them.

It may be that no one wanted to reply to your questions because they didn't want to be drawn into an extended point-by-point debate. I certainly don't, personally, so I'll just say this and then probably absent myself from the conversation:

• is it possible you haven't used storylines in a while? Your impressions of the feature are completely different from mine. I don't find them to have 'overwhelmingly negative' consequences (while some do have negative results, they are so rare it would be hard to justify using the word "overwhelming"). I also haven't yet, in the newest version of OOTP, encountered a storyline which had any kind of negative impact on my team (on budget or market size or fan interest). And many storylines, whether you're aware of it or not, have positive outcomes. So when that player shows up at Spring Training after a strenuous offseason workout regimen, his ratings might improve. It's true that in OOTP13 a few storylines had absurd results, but most or all of those have been fixed, and it's possible that many of your concerns about the feature have already been addressed.
  
• some of the concerns about storylines in this thread are so minor that they shouldn't be used to indict the entire system. If a skiing injury can happen during the season, or a storyline about plasma TVs can happen in 1911, that's just a token error. If it's reported, it can easily be fixed. It's not a fundamental failing of the storyline system.
  
• someone else already brought this up, but I don't understand your comments about "skill" and storylines. Luck and uncertainty are often present in games of skill (poker, say) -- indeed, they're often the very reason skill is required to play the game well. Poker isn't a game at all if you can see everyone's hands and you know what cards will be dealt. OOTP is much less of a skill game if you, for example, turn off injuries, since then you don't need to exercise any skill in planning for contingencies, building a bench and minor league depth, and imagining a spectrum of possible outcomes over the course of a season. If off-field incidents add to the uncertainty a GM faces during a year, that adds to the opportunities the GM has to make strategic decisions and exercise his skill. I imagine a real-life GM considering signing Milton Bradley, say, and asking "if I sign this guy, what am I going to have to put up with during the season? Is it worth it?" The GM can't know in advance, but Bradley's "personality" adds another dimension to the GM's decisionmaking process, and thus another opportunity for that GM to use his foresight and evaluation skills to come to a good decision.
  
• When you write things like "Storylines significantly increase the randomness in a league. You are telling me that no one considered this or cares about it?", are you aware that this is a straw man? I point this out again because it bothers me no end when people reply to me with straw men - you did it twice replying to me in the other locked thread. Questdog never even brought up whether the OOTP development team cares about the randomness introduced by storylines. You're inventing a position he has never supported and attacking him for it. Can I ask you when replying to me, at least, to reply to what I've said, and not to some more ridiculous position that I never said but which is easier to attack?
  
• But to point, we have had long discussions on beta about precisely that issue. So injuries, for example, can affect the development of prospects. When we introduce a lot of injuries through the storyline system, it then becomes important to confirm that either those injuries don't affect development, or that their negative effects are counterbalanced by additional positive effects in the development engine. But in general, you dramatically overstate the influence storylines have. Their effects are utterly inconsequential when compared with, say, injuries, or with the simple randomness of normal player development.
  
• And, more important still, there is nowhere near as much randomness in OOTP now as there is in real life, with or without storylines. I don't know that this is a bad thing, because OOTP is a game, and people want games to be fun. But if you ever do something like compare the bust-rate of 1st round draft picks in real life and in OOTP, you'll find that player development in OOTP is vastly more predictable than real life player development. OOTP actually needs more randomness, not less, if you want it to get closer to reality.