All this talk about the Usage Tracker has got me wondering where in the OOTP universe do my stars and superstars go supernova or simply collapse upon themselves and become black holes.
I selected "Historical" in the player poll someone linked to here simply because that's where I always start, somewhere in the past. However, I seldom do straight up historical sims. I've always found that playing that way produces nothing but extreme expectations, so when Roger Maris doesn't hit 61 in '61 (which he has never done in any straight historical sim I've ever done), I feel cheated and end up micromanaging everything (editing lifetime player stats, tweaking ability and potential ratings, etc.) until I feel satisfied with the results.
What I prefer doing instead is starting my historical sims at some point in the past (depending on what type of music I feel like listening to) and then turning off player recalc and setting the TCR rating to 200. Once I do that, for reasons I can't really explain, it's no longer an historical simulation in my mind and I welcome if not eagerly anticipate ahistorical outcomes, and OOTP has never disappointed.
I've had games where Hank Aaron only hit 260 career HR's while Rick Bladt hit 500+ (who? I know, right?
), Sandy Koufax blew his arm out at 20, while Scipio Spinks (He's not a Roman general. I checked.) pitched well into his 40s winning 300+ games. It's like an historical fiction simulation without the fictional players, or where the real players are simply surrogates for fictional players, if that makes any sense.
I'm absolutely hooked on playing this way and can't wait to see the whacky results that OOTP 17 will produce under these settings with 100,000 historical minor leaguers to randomize. Maybe Joe Bauman can hit 70 homers in the majors, or John Elway become every much the icon in The Bronx as an RF that he became in Denver as a QB, and so on.