[Orcin]

1. Historical minors don't work for me. Every time that I start a league with this feature I find something that looks wonky to me. I started in 1969 and the expansion teams had only a couple of low level affiliates. Even though this is true in real life, I didn't like playing this way. I want to be able to import the real historical minor leaguers into my own semi-fictional organization structure that is stable from year-to-year. I started a couple of others and ended up with career minor leaguers as stars because they were significantly overrated (recalc makes this much better though if you are not in Challenge Mode and can use it).

2. Challenge Mode is only for players that simulate their games. If you play out your games, or even sim daily and smell the coffee, you can never accumulate the number of seasons played required to appear on the leaderboard. Despite efforts by the developers to keep the leaderboard honest, it is also plagued by cheating. I know the leaderboard doesn't matter, and that is another reason not to bother with this feature. I had high hopes.

3. This is a personal preference only, but I don't like playing historical leagues using the player development engine (as forced by Challenge Mode). I don't like seeing fringe players appear as ready-to-play high-potential rookies and develop into all-stars. I don't mind the player dev engine taking over after a player was supposed to retire, but I want the real stars to be the stars in my game. Again, just my preference.

Having learned these things, I can now enjoy the rest of my summer immersed in a historical league using recalc and reserve rosters while playing as GM/MGR on a day-by-day basis, and ignore both historical minors and Challenge Mode until they are improved.

Feel free to share your highs and lows this year, or disagree with my conclusions. I would love to learn that I am wrong about any of this. (Thanks for the replies, Lukas.)