[Aztecs - WLB]

I appreciate your efforts and your communication with the people who play your games. I'd like to offer my perspective on some things the game could use to help increase my enjoyment.

1) I'd like to see the interface be a bit different where as it doesn't bury my screen when I play it. It is the only program I own that I have to minimize to see anything else on my screen. This is particularly annoying when I am trying to write articles and either have to save a report (that can be partial screen) or flip back and forth from OOTP to Word.

2) I'd like to see the online league exports feature greatly enhanced. Right now it appears that Commishs' have to manually zip the file and post it. This typically means that everything under the sun comes with it. Old emails, old boxscores, retired player list, almanacs, etc. I'm on a dial-up and the 13 Meg size files by season end are _almost_ enough to get me to quit OOTP leagues altogether. It couldn't be that hard for the game to neatly package all the updated or new files together for a small download.

3) I'd like to see a feature that allows online leagues to see EVERY single action the Commish takes that alters ANY sort of aspect of the game. Some kind of unalterable file log that makes it impossible for Commish's to cheat and makes the league bulletproof and beyond consideration of unethical behavior. This feature would eliminate some major issues I've seen in leagues that collapse.

4) I'd like to see less extremes in the statistical models. I think we can all agree that the overall league stats are impressive in how close they can come to real world models, but my league has had one pitcher who has 7 no-hitters in one season. This is WAY beyond the acceptable standards of deviation. There always seems to be 3-7 players in the league that put up monster numbers. Please try to level it out so that the difference between stars is not so extreme.

5) Please make the financial model more sophisticated. The market size/fan base levels seem to jump totally at random and there doesn't seem to be any benefit for having a dynasty or sucking for a decade. The mechandising revenue should have a major connection to gate sales. My merch revenue seems to increase about 1-2% annually regardless of how well my team does. It would be nice to have the option to have different levels of seating costs and maybe different benefits/costs for them. No stadium has all $9 seats. Maybe there could be a sliding mix of scales for the % of total seats and how many bleachers, folding indiv seats, box seats, luxury boxes, etc there are. You could have a system that charges a team to make changes to the mix or to modify the ballpark. Essentially the financial model could be much much more interesting and dynamic. It's almost embarrassingly simplistic currently.

6) I'd like to see the ballpark factors handled differently. I don't know how it works now, but when I break the numbers down it appears that if you have a park with a 1.20 hit for avg and a .80 hit for homer rating you end up with about a 1.20 hit for avg result but about a 1.05 homerun result. Does it figure for hits first and then decide if you hit a homer or not? If so then this totally screws with the ballpark figures. I also question the method for figuring homeruns. I don't think it has a thing to do with field dimensions but instead whether the ball was hit and if it was a homer or not. Then I think the game assigns a distance to the homer. As a test I made a ballpark that was 500' to both left and right and 550' down the middle. I gave the park 30' wallls all around. I simmed a game and there were 2 homeruns. One went for 503' and the other went 505'. Forget the fact that both of those would have hit the wall and been doubles, there is no chance that there would be 2 homeruns in park like this. There might be a couple homeruns a year. I'd encourage you to not allow anyone to set %'s of the various types of hits. That should be determined by the engine determining a hit, deciding on a direction, vertical angle and power to see where it ends up. Then the fielder would be determined if he could get there or not. This would actually be simming baseball, not assigning percentages to make players fit into some range. With this anyone could look at a stadium and see the ratings for the park as they develop instead of knowing what it will be before the ball is thrown.

That's all I'll throw out there for now. Please understand that I love your game and that I will continue playing. I am giving you feedback because you are requesting it and because I think I know what makes games cool. If you ever want to discuss this in more detail I'd be happy to. I've thought a lot about your game and could help you make some major improvements.

Never stop until you have achieved perfection. Then make it even better.

ben d ferguson at yah oo dot com (no spaces + proper symbols)