[Karl Pagel Blues]

Let me start by saying something that doesn't get said enough around here:

OOTP is a wonderful game. Even after all these years, Out of the Park Baseball remains truly in a league of its own.

To the Developers, I want to say this:

I don’t envy your job. It must be incredibly frustrating to spend an entire development cycle working on new features and fixes, only to see the forum flooded with complaints and negativity – most of it critical and much of it repetitive. I can only imagine how exhausting that must feel. And yet… the vast majority of those posts come from people like me who care. Because the game is worth caring about.

I pre-ordered every version since OOTP 16. I always played in modern-day and single-player mode, acting as GM and Manager.

Year after year, we got new features, tweaks, and cosmetic improvements. But underlying problems remained, many of which existed for years. To those of us who noticed them, these issues never seemed to get the attention they deserved.

For the past hour, I was reading through forum posts from 2022 and 2023.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

There’s nothing for me to say that hasn’t already been said.

So, for me, the road ends here. The same core flaws have outlived my patience.

OOTP’s so-called “AI” doesn’t deserve to be called AI. It’s a legacy logic tree making static decisions with no memory, no learning, and often no context.

No, I’m not angry. Disappointed? Yes. In a world where almost everything feels like a clone or a cash-grab, OOTP has always stood out as something genuinely unique. There’s nothing else like it. There never has been. And for that, I’ll always be grateful.

But it's time to move on.