[Eckstein 4 Prez]

I am just reading this now, and first of all I'm really glad my online leagues are still on 25, because I look at minor league stats to decide when to move guys from one level to the next.

First, I think there's a fundamental disconnect here with what is meant by "current ratings" and "potential ratings." Let's imagine two extreme players. One is a distant cousin of Willie Mays, but his ancestors weren't enslaved, so he's living in Africa, never having played baseball, but moves to the States at age 18 and finds that he enjoys it. This guy has excellent, maybe superstar potential ratings but his current ratings should be terrible - he has no experience at all. That's how I understand it.

Meanwhile, a second guy has lived, eaten and breathed baseball his entire life. He comes into the draft with a very polished game, but it also turns out that he's pretty close to his ceiling - maybe his "current ratings" are good enough to be a borderline big leaguer but his "potential ratings" aren't really any higher.

Seems to me the second guy could probably hold his own and do well in the high minor leagues, while the first guy should be awful even in the low minors and the question is whether he's able to develop quickly enough to get to that lofty potential.

But the point is that, to me, "potential" ratings just show a person's ceiling - nothing more. "Current" ratings show what that person is capable of now, and I thought those would be the only things ever used to determine performance. Some people here have objected that guys with high ceilings should dominate the low minors, and no doubt that is true. But they should do so because their ratings should move more quickly than others, as their current performance starts to approach their potential.

And of course, I think the real reason people are upset is because an element has been introduced that runs counter to baseball knowledge that's so fundamental that Bill James had basically proven it in the 1990s: there's nothing qualitatively different between the minor leagues and the major leagues. There was this persistent idea until that point that some guys just didn't have the mental makeup or whatever to thrive at the highest level. James proved mathematically that this was nonsense - once you were able to quantify the varying levels of competition, players performed just like they were supposed to.

Introducing an element that applies to performance in the minor leagues but not in the major leagues creates two problems. One is with OOTP's game engine as a baseball simulator: there's nothing qualitatively different between how a player should perform in the minor leagues versus the major leagues once you factor in the changing talent level. Creating some artificial thing where "guys just need time to figure it out" smacks of the bad old days, when players would have "clutch" or "RBI" ratings - it's not how the game works, and this has been understood mathematically since around OOTP1. Adding this stuff in makes the engine less realistic, and it gets people worried because it suggests a willingness to put in intangible hoodoo rather than having mathematical-based simulations that people can rely on.

The second problem is as a gameplay element. Once you've played it for a while, solo OOTP is pretty easy when you play with ratings on. I tend to either turn them off entirely or only have very rudimentary ratings, because otherwise there's not a ton of challenge. Most solo players who've been at it for a few decades that I know do the same thing. As a matter of gameplay, this makes it impossible to do anything like this because when looking at minor league stats, I now know that this is done through the "minor league engine" and not the regular one, and that it's taking different things into account. So I have to turn everything on to have any confidence in the game, and now I'm back to the point where the game is too easy. I want a challenge, but I don't want the challenge to be arbitrary and opaque as a matter of gameplay - this is supposed to be baseball, not Calvinball.

Finally, I think the biggest concern people have is that this fundamental shift - adding weird intangible factors to certain parts of the engine - was just thrown in there without any discussion and this was only discovered by a person running tests. Honestly, I think a lot of people in this thread are doing him a disservice - while he has been pretty strident in this thread, he has uncovered something that is (a) extremely important and that (b) was just put live into the sim engine without any discussion or notification. We owe him a debt of gratitude, and if he's shouting it from the proverbial rooftops, it's understandable - imagine that feeling he must have had when running that test and realizing there was something not right happening.

When I first started playing OOTP (version 4!), there was a clutch rating, pitchers had an "avoid hits" rating that was pretty fundamental to their skill, etc. Markus didn't grow up steeped in baseball lore or research, but one of the best things about him was his interest in learning those things and trying to add them to the game. His change to the DIPS-based engine in the mid-2000s was pretty cutting edge for the time and it's a big part of what helped OOTP win the battle of the baseball sims, in my opinion.

I have to say that doing something to the game engine that makes the minor league simulations happen in a way that's different from the major league engine feels to me like a big step back, back to the discredited "there's something different about the big leagues" school of thought that was debunked decades ago. It's also a very bad time to do something like this - every longtime player I know is very nervous about what the first non-Markus version would be like, and everyone also knows that Perfect Team is the revenue engine for the game, so there's concern that single-player OOTP will become something of an afterthought. This certainly isn't going to do anything to make me worry about that any less.

Finally, if these critical posts cause the discussion to be brought to an end, I'll be even more worried. The most optimistic thing I can say about this discovery is that we have developers in the thread who've been willing to engage. I appreciate that, and I think it's very important for the future of the game for this to be a discussion, where the wisdom of the community is used as a feedback mechanism. I don't think this change accurately reflects the best research about baseball skills, but really the worst thing about it is that it was simply added in without any discussion ahead of time. The best thing is that this discussion is taking place now. People here really care about making sure the sim engine is as realistic as possible, and also that it provides the best and most realistic gameplay experience. For the reasons I've explained, I think this fails on both fronts, and I hope we can continue the productive discussion about it.