Hi all, just want to give my two cents to this issue that I have been experiencing for last several years on OOTP and what I believe is the cause and why not all people are having the same issue.
The earliest I can remember having the slow down issue was on OOTP21. Back then I used to do as many others have suggested and closed the game down and reloaded. Eventually after being far enough in a save the time to do this was too long for my impatient brain, so started looking for other way of stopping the slow down.
The first fix was switching from full screen to windowed and back to full screen, this would then make the game run perfectly. A couple editions of OOTP doing this for every slow down was good enough for me until I came to OOTP25 and by complete accident during a slow down found just opening the game settings and pressing OK without changing anything fixed the slow down! Huzzah no more spending 8 seconds switching the screen size!
Once OOTP26 rolled around however, this no longer worked. I went back to switching to windowed mode and back but that also didn't work. After following every step from others online (anti virus settings, facegen, ballpark etc) nothing would fix the slow down other than quitting the whole game.
This meant I completely skipped 26 and remained on 25. I watched with tentative hope at the 27 forums during the beta when people were reporting slow downs and memory leaks and hoped this could mean it was killed off once and for all. However once I purchased 27 I found it was the same as 26 and a slow down could not be fixed in any way bar a complete reset of the game.
Now I hope I haven't bored you with my story because now is the part where after countless hours of testing (and I mean triple digits!) I believe I have found what causes the slow down and why it may not affect everyone regardless of their rig.
The way I play OOTP is fully immersed, I control every team in my organisation all the way down to rookie ball, doing every roster promotion and demotion during the season and setting the lineups and pitching staff for my teams (yes overkill I'm sorry!) Now the biggest cause of slow down I have found is on any screen with "drag and drop" features, such as the roster screen or lineups screen.
After I had finished moving the 50th or so player around my organisation to another team (a particular issue at the start of a season when setting up teams and needing to promote a lot of players at once) the lag would appear!
I thought I was on to something so went to the lineup screen for my minor league teams and instead of just setting the lineup once, I began moving players back and forth between positions as a test. Lo and behold after a few times dragging and dropping the lag appeared!
I then figured I would try a game the way I assume more people commonly play (no offence intended!) I loaded a complete fresh game, didn't bother with any minor responsibilities picked my starting lineup and simmed away. After the season I flicked through different screens and there was no lag! I proceeded to simulate multiple seasons upon seasons and again there was no lag!
After repeating these tests ad nauseum, I am confident that something to do with dragging and dropping (whether that be a player from one team to another or dragging a player into a lineup) after this has been done frequently enough, this causes the issue.
Now I am not at all technically minded so have no idea how, why, when, where, who, what this could happen. But I hope someone out there much smarter than me (not a hard bar to pass!) Could possibly take this knowledge and info and my hundreds of hours and ensure they aren't wasted by potentially fixing this issue once and for all?!
Sorry my first post became an essay, but seeing those advanced stats on 27 makes me so desperate to finally be able to upgrade from 25 and play the game the way I (and hopefully at least one other) enjoy!
Much love to you all, take care
Dean
