We had a somewhat intense discussion
here about whether it is advisable to run leagues with both recalc and the player development system turned on.
Numerous posters on the official forums have done this over the years.
I was curious, so I ran three test random debut leagues:
- One with the default settings on (development system only)
- One with both the development system and a 5 year recalc turned on
- One with recalc only and no development system
I ran each of these leagues with the default settings, starting the game in 1901 and running it through the end of the 2022 season. I didn't delete any players at the start, mess with the era settings, change around ballparks, or any of the fun stuff. This was strictly an autoplay only experiment.
The results were pretty interesting.
There wasn't a huge difference between having only the development system on and having both the development system and recalc on. Players did what I think we would expect them to do. In both situations, Babe Ruth wound up being a pitcher for about 6 or 7 seasons before converting to the outfield full time. The stats were more or less in line with what I'd expect, though there were a few small oddities here and there — Babe Ruth hit over 1000 home runs in one of the simulations, Ted Williams hit over 1000 in another, Williams had a year where he hit .444, that sort of thing.
However, running with recalc only on really screwed things up.
If you only have recalc running, the game simply doesn't know that players need to retire. Teams would put 80 and 90 year old players out regularly. Moises Alou played through age 122 without any discernible loss in ability.
I'm not sure why recalc is set up like this. Intuitively, I'd expect players to weaken as they get further away from seasons in which they actually played in real life. For whatever reason, the game engine simply doesn't do that.
Having "retire according to history" turned on (it was turned on in all three runs, since it's turned on by default) didn't do anything for the recalc only save. I think this is because I was running a random debut. I'd expect it to work if you had players coming into your save the same year they debuted in real life.
Here are a few takeaways:
- You can run recalc together with the development engine, even in OOTP 25. Personally, I prefer this approach, and am planning on pushing up talent change randomness to the max as well to allow for some in-season variety.
- The development system by itself works well. It seems that the days of Ruth pitching for his entire career are behind us.
- Don't run recalc only. The results were ridiculous. Xander Bogaerts hit .500 in 2013 using this setting, lol.
I made a video explaining all of this
here, and created a blog post
here with screenshots and stats, for those who are curious.