My first reaction when I opened up the OOTP text editor was: "Good LORD, there are a lot of templates here." Which there are; thousands and thousands of them. But the second thing I said was, "AND ALL OF THEM WILL BOW TO ME, FOR I CONTROL THEM UTTERLY!" ... and the best part is, I do!
So as I rolled up my sleeves and set to work, I hummed a merry tune, undaunted by the enormity of my task. OK, maybe I was slightly daunted: it's /really/ gonna be a lot of work. To put it in perspective, I've been editing comments for several hours now, and I'm only about halfway through the first subcategory of the first
category of text objects. There's an amazing amount of text in this game, and I salute Markus for putting it together, especially in a foreign language.
Having said that, I'm about to tear down all his work and reassemble it in a manner much more to my liking. First up: editing the e-mails you receive in player contract negotiations.
I've always thought that you could just do so much
more with those e-mails-- that you could make the game world a thousand times more immersive by giving them some real variety and personality, and that's what I've been doing so far. Generally, what I do is select a text object that's slightly... off... and then edit it so that it's (usually) longer and is more polished or conversational (or both).
Now, sometimes the original text is just a hideous abortion of the English language and there's no real way to clean it up. When that happens, I take it as a sign to scrap it all and re-write it from the bottom up-- and have a little fun in doing so. Which brings me to the subject of today's sample of my work. And yes, for "[Person.First Name]," you SHOULD be reading "Rickey."
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Don't worry, most of the new messages are about half this long. I promise.
[Person.Full Name Link] is in the building, and he's in full effect. Listen up, because I'm here to speak the plain and simple truth.
And you know what that truth is? I'm looking for a better deal here. The [Team.Nickname Link] have made me an offer that's a whole lot closer to what I'm looking for than your deal ever was. But don't despair: there's still time for you to make a better offer. [Person.First Name] knows it's not in his best interests to sign a contract without giving the other bidders one last chance to top it. Truly, [Person.First Name] is as wise as he is just, and as just as he is studly. And, as at least one fine honey in every city in the league can tell you, [Person.First Name] is extremely studly.
[Person.First Name] does request that you not show this e-mail to his wife, however.
Now let me be upfront with you: just a few minutes ago, I called another club (who shall remain nameless) and told them the same thing I'm telling you right now: [Team.City] has made me the best offer so far, but if you want to make a couple changes and resubmit your offer, I'll consider it. Well, they hemmed and hawed and said, "Oh, well, we're very busy but we'll have an offer for you in the next few days; be patient." Well, guess who just got crossed off [Person.First Name]'s list of destinations?
That's right: they did, 'cause I took it as an insult. Hey, I'm not some random scrub here-- I'm a player of some stature in this league, and frankly, I should have your full attention when you negotiate with me. I mean, if you can't take the time to show me that you want me on your club, then I guess y'all will have to do without me.
So get your offer in, and get it to me in a hurry.
[Person.Link]
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But writing a long and personalized e-mail like this is absolutely pointless if you can't also ensure that getting it will be EXTREMELY rare. After all, if you get the same message twice in the space of, say, three weeks, you'll actually be MORE irritated than you will by repetitive generic messages. So how do I ensure that these messages are rare?
Two ways: first, you can set conditions for each text object. Using a condition for a text object is kind of like using a filter for a player search-- the text object will only be displayed if the condition is met. In this case, I set CONDITION: MINIMUM PLAYER QUALITY IS 4. Player quality is rated on a 1 to 7 scale, where 3 is an average major leaguer and 7 is an all-time great. So when you get this message, it really /won't/ be from "some random scrub"; at the very least, the player will be a good-to-very-good player whose self-opinion is, uh, a little bit inflated, and it might also come from a star.
But, although that goes /some/ way towards making it unlikely that this message will be repeated, it still sounds /fairly/ likely that it will be. This is where the second part of my concept comes in: Markus wrote a ton of these text objects, which is why they very rarely repeat. I'm not going to delete those-- I'm going to alter and, in some cases, entirely rewrite them, so that the frequency of each /individual/ e-mail is still fairly low.
Will that actually work? I won't know until I run a test league with this puppy, and that'll be a while in the future.
In the next exciting, yet much /shorter/ update, you'll hear all about what I'm doing with the contract negotiation e-mails that are supposed to read like they've been sent in by an agent, including several samples that give you a taste of how a much more ordinary e-mail in this category looks. That's all for now, though, so I'll wrap up with a progress report:
CURRENT SUBCATEGORY: PLAYER_CONTRACT_REACTION_GOT_BETTER_OFFER
CURRENT CATEGORY: PLAYER CONTRACT NEGOTIATION
SUBCATEGORY COMPLETION %: ~50
CATEGORY COMPLETION %: Oh, geez. It must be under 5%. It might be under 1%.
PROJECT COMPLETION %: Let's just say I'm not too far along, OK? And then let us never speak of it again.