Your experience with regard to OOTP14 is somewhat similar to mine. But I viewed it much more positively.
I've been playing OOTP since Season Ticket Baseball (2001) and have found solo playing on normal settings to be somewhat easy. In the sense of being able to take over a struggling team and turn them into a consistent winner. Not just a playoff winner, but a championship winner, as a general rule.
But in OOTP14, while I could still rebuild a moribund team into a powerhouse in a couple of seasons, I found it much harder to grasp the brass ring. I'd either get knocked out in the first round or lose the 7th game of the championship. In the 18 seasons I played in a particular league, I won two championships and lost about four.
One particular season, we were projected to be the top team in the league. We had turned the corner the previous season and squeaked into the playoffs. But then the wheels fell off: some key players fell to injury and others all had off-years. We were 12 game below .500 and couldn't gain any traction. I was frustrated.
But then I remembered: This is just like real life. As a GM, how should I handle this? Should I offload these players and start over, or should I stick with these guys and just weather the storm? And how would I spin this the to fans as well as to the writers who once predicted great things for us, but were now are writing us off?
In the end I made some modest moves that got us back over .500 but still missed the playoffs by a few games.
The next season, everything came together like it was expected the previous year. The players that I stuck by with rewarded me with great seasons and we finished in first place. We had the best record in the league, but of course that meant nothing in the playoffs, and we ended up losing in the championship round.
Despite the frustration at times with nothing coming easy for me, I found I enjoyed the OOTP14 experience so much that I skipped OOTP15.
I now play OOTP16, but I will always have a soft spot for OOTP14 because it wasn't willing to simply roll over and play dead - it had no hesitation to bite me back at times. Just like real life.
