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Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan
Doing 'historic' leagues in soccer is much much more problematic than for baseball for various reasons:
* The rules of soccer have changed hugely over the years and to do an accurate representation of a historic league you'd need to implement all of these nuances in the game ...
* Lack of accurate historic data, due to the scope of the game ...
* Change in composition of the leagues themselves over the years has been huge ... plus the various point scoring methods used in competitions ....
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Yes, for historical football leagues it would probably be more diffcult. But some of the points you mentioned above also confront OOTP.
The rules of baseball have also changed quite a bit over the years, both on and off the field. But while many rules from baseball's past have not been implemented in OOTP by Markus, the flavour is there and that's a good starting point. By loading in the historic players from the Lahman Database, their seasonal statistics can still come out to fairly good approximations of the real past, thanks to the options for tweaking such things in OOTP. Ask Markus about it, I'm sure he can explain this aspect to his game much better than I can.
Similarly, baseball has changed its league compositions as well over the years. In 1901, it was two 8 team leagues, which then expanded to two 10 team leagues, then two 12 team leagues which were each split into two 6 team divisions, then eventually to two 14 team leagues each with two 7 team divisions, which were later realigned into 3 divisions in each league, and so forth. OOTP is able to handle all of these compositions, along with many more that never actually happened in the major leagues. Again, Markus can better explain just how much his game can handle various league compositions.
Finally, you're right about the lack of historical stats for football, that probably would be the biggest drawback. This is definitely not an issue for baseball, as it has a long and very detailed statistical past, and a number of excellent web sites devoted to that aspect alone.
But that's why I focused more on the fictional side of things...
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Originally Posted by Marc Vaughan
With regards to ficticious leagues we have a 'random' option which you can select at startup to randomise all the players in the game, we'll probably look to improve this further at some point in the future to make this style of play more configurable - however we have lots we want to implement on the 'realistic' game at the moment.
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Yes, I was aware of that. And I understand that the focus is mostly on recreating the existing world, and that's fine. I just wanted to point out that a more robust system for creating fictional worlds that goes beyond just creating imaginary players for the existing leagues would pull even more people to the game, and give them a new and interesting way of playing it.
For example, one could decide to create a Super-Premier League using, say, the 12 best teams from the current Premier League to see what that would be like. Or, one could create an entirely fictional Britannia Football Association using whatever clubs or host cities they felt like. Similarly, someone could decide to make a pan-European league of the continent's strongest clubs playing out a season every year, or for North America, create an entirely imaginary North American Soccer Union of the biggest 16 or 20 cities. These kinds of ideas are just scratching the surface.
Just take a spin through the 'Dynasty" section of the OOTP boards to get an idea of the many different ways people have created fictional leagues, either entirely imaginary or inspired by "what if" scenarios from baseball's actual past. Or, just take some time trying these kinds of things out in OOTP itself; the possibilities available may seem rather overwhelming at first, but many OOTP players would never go back to just playing out MLB as it exists today after getting into fictional leagues. They can be that rewarding and that enjoyable!