[Lou Gehrig]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Just a friendly reminder to folks who have been around the block a couple times now from those of us who have been around the block a looooooooooooooot of times (speaking as someone who's bought or been on the beta team for this game going back to version 3)... there are probably going to be a large number of brand new players of this game, and many of them are going to be asking some really dumb questions. I would respectfully submit that over the next, say, 2 or 3 weeks, if you believe that a question is really dumb and being typed in by some kind of mouth-breathing idiot, please err on the side of not expressing this on the forums. A couple of friendly reasons:

1. Sure, you are no employee of OOTP and it is a free country, but when a brand new person comes to this site and is treated rudely, the experience for them will reflect poorly on the brand. The more money Markus makes off of this game, the more devs he can bring in and eventually he'll be able to [s]afford me[/s] do all the things you want the game to do.

2. Just because a person has dumb questions doesn't mean they're a dummy in all cases. A lot of people get driven here because they yearn for a really good, accurate baseball sim, or because someone on FanGraphs mentioned using the game and they want to give it a try, or even because TotalBiscuit called it the ultimate baseball sim, they're inveterate Football Manager players who like baseball, and they want to test it out. These people may actually be smarter than you at things like how baseball or player development or sabermetrics works. If you lord over the one thing that you are (currently) smarter at then they are, you kind of start to look petty.

3. Some of these folks will stick around, and personally I would rather see people stick around because they had a pleasant experience than because they enjoy abuse and eventually the chance to abuse others.

I would also like to suggest if you are helping a new person, please have an understanding that their computer literacy may not be as high as yours (especially us old guys) and maybe take a little extra time not to assume they know an acronym or where to find something on the computer. Great post Syd.