[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

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).

Exactly. We need more threads like A Developer's Guide to Strategy on topics such as how the players ratings affect stats. We need more behind the scenes type threads that helps us understand what is actually going on.