[Charlie Hough]

The NeLs are already treated as major leagues for the purposes of calculating player ratings in OOTP. Their AAA status in league structure views is mostly just a cosmetic issue, and I'll explain that shortly. Improvements to NeL ratings calculations were made for OOTP25 and are ongoing, but the ratings are already based on the players' stats being considered MLB level. However, there are still some issues to be resolved. One big one in the past was due to adjust/weaken settings for pitchers and batters who have fewer IP and AB than OOTP's default thresholds. In the NeLs, there are star players who end up below these thresholds because the NeLs only played about half the number of official games as MLB teams did. This caused some problems with some players' stats being adjusted. A lot of this was fixed during beta testing for OOTP25, but I've found some continuing issues where some players are still a bit off, but thankfully they're now very close to where they should be.

However, what's causing the confusion over NeL status in OOTP is that the NeLs are still listed as AAA leagues when you're looking at the league structures. This is more of a cosmetic issue because the AAA status there doesn't determine how player stats and ratings will be handled. But the developers have mentioned that it's going to be very complicated and difficult to fix that and change that indicator to MLB because doing so will potentially have some kind of cascading effect and break some of the league structure functionality. I don't know the details, but that's the general issue and why the NeLs still show up as AAA on some screens.

Long-term, the developers want to get everything as close to perfect as possible, and there are people who've been involved in beta testing and research who've been pushing for continued improvement. Huge improvement was made with OOTP25, but unfortunately it's not a quick and easy fix to close the rest of the gaps.