Quote:
Originally Posted by cuervo72
The problem with online leagues is that anything past that number of rounds just becomes tedium.
For ages the FOBL was five rounds, and that sufficed (This was in the v5 days, where for many, many organizations the minor leagues were an afterthought. There wasn't enough players to fill them, and nobody much cared.) With later versions (v9, v11, v13 -- you can see a pattern here), we expanded to ten rounds to fill out the minors and to add a little bit of lotto goodness - but only the first five rounds were drafted manually, and only those picks were tradable. Rounds 6-10 were just auto-drafted; in many cases owners couldn't see too much differentiating players in the 4th and 5th rounds as it was, so no reason to drag the draft process out. A few seasons ago we decided to generate 11 rounds-worth of players, but only draft 10 to attempt to get a slightly better spread.
That's just how things go. It's the same for FOF leagues - seven rounds, and things start to really wane in the 4th or 5th round (or for a poor class, even the third).
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The thing that strikes me about trying to emulate how MLB approaches international players - and having the game rely on that player pool being there - is that as RonCo said a few pages ago it only became this way relatively recently (so if you're trying to emulate a different era it really doesn't make any sense), and that as a system it is really screwed up and anti-competitive. International signings and player development are basically the wild west. It doesn't necessarily play well with MP.
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From what you're describing, I'd say you may just be generating too few players overall for the kind of ratings you want, which is likely what created the issue with not having enough highly rated players at the MLB level.
How many levels of minor leagues do you guys use?
I'll post something Markus told me recently. It's not directly applicable to the issue of having too few players, rather it's in regard to having too many, but it provides some insight into how OOTP works in regard to ratings and talent.
"Well, 35 rounds is the number that perfectly keeps the major league in balance in terms of league quality. More player equals more potential for talent boosts, hence more quality players and watered down stats in the end. So, I would rather not change that number
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So though he didn't explicitly say so it seems to me that if having more than 35 rounds (including int signings) of draftable players likely results in having too many highly rated players, then having way less than 35 rounds (while also not including int signings) will tend to have the opposite effect and result in too few talent boosts and too few highly rated players overall.
So your league's issue isn't really that the game needs int signings and "relies on that player pool being there" it's that in addition to not having int signings turned on, you're also seemingly generating way too few players in the draft.
Now in and of itself that's not an issue. As I've tried to explain, the OOTP ratings system is really flexible. It's perfectly possible to build a properly functioning league, with good statistical distribution and everything, while using only a small portion of the ratings scale.
I'm building the rl German League for myself right now, and there will end up being very few guys rated much higher than 40/250 in it. Most guys will be rated in the 20/250 range. Even though that's the case, the league will still function perfectly well , the stat distribution between the best and worst players will look good etc.
So even if a given league has what seems to be too few highly rated players, it really won't matter. The league will still function well. The problem comes from folks seeing those ratings getting low and being unhappy because that's not what they want, or expect.
So in the end, if you want the ratings for a given league to look like they do in the MLB roster set or a typical out of the box MLB league, it's really necessary to generate much more than 11 rounds worth of draftable players and no int fa's in order to get that to happen.