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Originally Posted by Pelican
Well put.
I wish we could move away from this “malevolent developer” theory, which makes no commercial sense, in that it would ultimately be self-defeating. I just don’t see anything to support such a dark theory. But then I am not one to find a conspiracy behind every bug or flow or unexpected result.
I appreciate the need that some have for documentation, even though that is not me at all. I am sorry that the effort to provide video tutorials, clearly as an effort to satisfy this need, has not been better received by this group. But I suspect that what some seek is not basic guidance but a peek under the hood to the actual coding. Again, I have no need for that (and candidly no ability to understand it), and would much rather find out about changes through experience, rather than have some kind of advance documentation. Learn by doing, rather than learn by reading about it in advance.
I don’t mean to criticize those who demand documentation or want to understand how programming has changed. Those were the guys (and girls!) who looked under the hood and tinkered, while I was happy to drive the car and do nothing more than pump gas and change oil. What I honestly don’t know, in this gaming context, is what obligation developers have to disclose coding secrets. Doesn’t that verge on an “intellectual property” issue? [Apologies. I am a lawyer.]. I don’t know how far that can go. To return to. The car analogy, companies publish “shop manuals” for cars. But they don’t tell all. I guess there is a happy medium.
To me, far better to devote scarce human talent resources to improving the game, rather than documenting the improvements. But I do get that there should be a balance of some kind.
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There's also bound to be a bit of an art to that: I don't think the majority of the players want to know the exact algorithm to determine anything/everything, but at the same time you want to have some kind of sensical explanation or else people go crazy interpreting stuff. I also just like having lots of data available to push through so that the data nerds on our side of things can run tests agnostic of what the devs say the ratings do and see how things work out.
For instance, CBeisbol recently re-posted the study he did on defense on OOTP21, which showed a negative correlation between fielders' arm and runs saved - the worse the arm, the more outs that fielder created (and therefore the more runs he saves). I think this was due in large part to the fact that there were waaaay too many baserunner kills until a patch that came out in the summer of last year but it's the kind of thing that can lead you to see that (also I still have a general sense that runners take OF arm into waaay too much of a consideration when attempting extra bases, but there's little that I can do to prove that one way or the other absent scraping the play-by-play). Even if a study like this uncovers nothing, it's a good way for you, the end user, to understand how the game works and reacts accordingly (and a study like this will often highlight unintended issues the devs didn't mean to create - for instance, that study also showed the MASSIVE differences that Catcher Ability generated, and while that in and of itself may not have been what caused OOTPD to turn that down / turn into an option, it's something that was out there that we could point to).