Thanks again for the thoughtful replies. I very much appreciate the willingness of folks here to give of their time and attention, to help others get past the overwhelmed and paralyzed stage.
Speaking of which:
Quote:
Originally Posted by themonk
But realized that I'll not probably be able to set up the "perfect" league. Just started playing, and made the appropriate adjustments as I went along...
|
Once, when I was having trouble getting a project done--or even properly started--I got some useful advice from a professor who was similarly prone to paralyzing perfectionism.
He had just published a book. He told me that in order to get that book written, and to let go of it once it had reached a reasonable state of done-ness, he had to keep telling himself that the
next book could be perfect...this one just needed to get shipped out the door.
(He still did a fine job on that book, by the way.)
So this is what I'll do. My
next league can be a perfect fictorcial creation along the lines of mad schemes #1 and #2 above. This league, the one I use to get properly started with OOTP 14, will be a full-fictional league along the lines of simpler scheme #3.
Classic League Baseball, according to my storyline, will be a league founded in reaction to MLB's efforts to murder itself in the 1990s with a Series-cancelling labor dispute, steroids, the wild card, interleague play, overexpansion and improper expansion
*, walk-up music, and other excrescences from the reign of the Interim Commissioner-for-Life. In theory, I suppose CLB would be in competition with MLB; for this reason, all teams will be located in cities that were without MLB franchises as of CLB's founding (1995, most likely). In practice, sanity will surely dictate that I run the league as the only one in its OOTP universe, and not spend a second worrying about what might be going on anywhere else.
Classic League Baseball will consist of the Western League and Federal League. (Reviving historic names will be a theme in setting up the league.) Each league will have 8 teams; divisional play will not be necessary.
Here are some questions I'm mulling over now that I've decided that much:
1) Would it be a huge blunder to shorten the season? Going with a classic 154-game season would make the season totals make more sense, of course...but I know me, I'll be tempted to manage every single game by hand, in which case trimming the schedule could really help move things along.
2) Minor leagues: How much will I need? Would one AAA affiliate and one AA affiliate per franchise sound good? And how about feeder leagues...would one properly-sized collegiate league do the trick, perhaps?
3) I suppose I'll start by using the Fictional League Creation Wizard, to avoid being confronted with the full 747 cockpit full of options. What changes should I consider making to the default settings (including those the Wizard might not cover?).
4) One thing I don't quite understand about fictional leagues is how they handle progression over time. In historical leagues, everything from league-average statistics to financials changes over time...does all this remain static in a fictional league? (And does it default to being based on the selected starting year, or on 2013?)
5) I've seen that some people prefer to discard the initial batch of players created with a new fictional league, or they run the league a while before jumping in, and there may be other strategies as well that I'm not bright enough to have understood at first glance. Would there be any serious disadvantages to just creating the league, holding an inaugural draft, and running with it? (I'm inclined to do it that way not just because it's simpler, but also because if the league is my creation I'd prefer to be fully involved from day 1 and not miss any of its history...and also also, inaugural drafts are fun.)
6) I don't want to jump too far down the rabbit hole of add-ons...but I suspect I'll want to use something like the Nickname Project as a source of plug-and-play logos and uniforms...don't know how I'll handle ballparks...and hmm, maybe Questdog's Names Files would be good to use. Am I on the right track here?
I hope I'm not abusing folks' courtesy by continuing to throw out questions and thoughts. Many thanks again for the helpful replies so far.
* By "improper expansion" I mean placing teams in spring-training locales. If you ask me (and I don't know why you wouldn't), Florida and Arizona should be allowed to have either
spring training or
major-league franchises, but not both.