[Bluenoser]

Originally Posted by 01010010

Out of whack compared to what *I* think they should be in my real players mid-1980s historical league, based on living through and following baseball very closely during that era, and out of whack relative to what I've seen in my other OOTP leagues.

The game obviously doesn't know these are real players. It generates the popularity tags based mainly on ratings, not randomly. It does a rather good job of it, but for example if a superstar happened to have a bad or injured season the year the historical league was created and a fringe player had a great fluke season, the game quite reasonably might tag the superstar as insignificant and the fringe player as extremely popular. That bugs me and will bug me each and every time I look at those two players. As a historical simmer, I like to "fix" these things.

However, I can't just start changing things willy-nilly. I don't want an *unreasonably* high/low number of "popular" players, because it impacts attendance, financials, player movement, etc. What is a reasonable or unreasonable number? I have no clue. It's a question that can't be answered. But for my purposes, roughly reflecting the distribution you see in a newly created fictional game or the MLB quickstart is as good as anything. If the game in a new league generally labels 1 percent of players extremely popular and 2.5 percent very popular, etc., or whatever, then I'm comfortable keeping my edits roughly in line with those numbers. Then things take off and popularity is all determined by what happens in the game.

Well, I see what you're saying/asking for, but as to the bolded/underlined above - why would that bug you? It's very realistic. There's been plenty of popular players who were nothing more than journeymen. There's been plenty of All-Stars that fans can't stand. And seeing guys have off years and falling out of favour or having a fluke year and gaining favour is very normal and realistic.