Originally Posted by Syd Thrift
I feel like I beat this drum a lot but... OOTP's strength is as a mutli-season GM sim. Personally I like to get really, really deep into single (fictional) seasons but for me a big part of the fun factor is not knowing if the 32 year old left fielder who led the league in HRs and RBIs 3 seasons ago but, halfway through the year, has 3 HRs in 42 games (granted, he's already missed a quarter of the year with an injury) has lost it or is just in a slump. Or was he ever really that good when he had the 43 dingers? I don't know the answer to this. I prefer not knowing and having to make a decision. In this case his team is winning anyway and he doesn't seem to be actively hurting them so I'm keeping him in the lineup but there are definitely guys nipping at his heels.
I feel like we see this about this time every year: people come in, want to play the game like Strat, and then when it doesn't behave exactly like SOM they get mad and announce their anger to everyone. It's not Strat. It doesn't intend to be Strat. It's not a cards-and-dice game. It's particularly not going to be Strat when it comes to single-season replays because Strat goes in and hand-curates those seasons (and then charge as much as OOTP does for the entire game, which, let's face it, is the real reason why these people bought OOTP in the first place). It still does a pretty good job with single season replays but it's not really built for that. The more I play OOTP the less I like the idea of the single-season replay - no season is just stuck in time; all baseball seasons are transitioning from the season and era before to the next season and era - but if that's how you want to play, go ahead. Just... don't knock the game because it doesn't do things it wasn't really ever intended to do.
Also, SOM absolutely fudges dice rolls, specifically when it comes to low-chance plays like triples by Cecil Fielder, so let's not pretend otherwise. I think you can still turn that off but it's a thing. Personally I much prefer the OOTP tools-based method of fielding instead of the SOM "1e16" style, although I do get the allure of being able to see first-hand how horrible playing like a 4e27 guy at short is (where in OOTP we had to suss that kind of thing out by doing lots and lots of replays - just to note, though, fielding in OOTP is extremely important, easily as important as it is in SOM). I even prefer the purely-stat-generated approach to fielding with the caveat that I play fictional and so don't have to worry about like Ozzie Smith being a 75/80 fielder in the early 90s or what have you.
OOTP is a very robust game and I encourage everyone to play it their way. I think the game shines in terms of needing the least amount of tinkering to get it to look right when you do modern, non-fictional leagues (although if you start in the current year, after a couple seasons all your draftees are going to be fictional of course, plus by 20 years or so in virtually all of your players will also be fictional), but I have had lots of success over the years playing fictional leagues in various eras (currently I'm in 1970 but I've done leagues in the postwar era, the 30s, the deadball era, and even a pretty big dive into the 19th century a couple years ago). Just remember that the further away you get from the thing the devs build for, the more hurdles you'll probably need to jump through, and if you expect the game to do a tertiary thing as well as other games do their primary thing, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment, much the same as if you tried to use Quake to run a chess tournament.
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