A Better Way to Rate Players

[bababui]

Based on the Football Manager Model of rating players, I would like to see OOTP go to a much more complex player rating system...something like this....

Technical Abilities

Hitting

Contact- The ability to put bat on ball

Bat Control- The ability to place the ball

Bunting

Patience


Pitching

Control


Fielding

Hands

Range



MENTAL ATTRIBUTES

Aggression- Does the player aggresively dive for balls, go for the extra base, etc

Anticipation- The ability of a fielder to guess where a batted ball will go or whether a pitcher will attempt a pick off or go to the plate

Bravery- Does the player relish late game/pressure situations or is he timid..will he take a risk in diving for a ball??

Composure- The ability of a pitcher to deal with late inning pressure situations

Decisions- Does the player throw to the right base/cut-off man...pitch around key hitters if necessary

Flair- Will the player try to make a circus catch? A random small increase/decrease in def abilities as he showboats

Influence- The ability of an experienced/intelligent/respected player to slightly increase the abilities of players around him

Positioning- Does the player place himself in the optimal position to make a play?


Mental Traits

Adaptability- Will a player be able to fit into a club far away from home?

Controversy- Will the players antics hurt team moral?

Loyalty

Pressure

Professionalism

Sportsmanship

Tempurment


PHYSICAL ABILITIES

Acceleration

Agility

Balance

Jumping

Natural Fitness- Will the player recover quickly from the wear and tear of a season?

Speed

Stamina

Strength- determines power along with contact and aggresiveness


HIDDEN ABILITIES

Consistancy

Dirtiness

Importance

Injury

Versatility

How would the community respond to a more complex way of player rating/creation? Personally I would love it as it would make it a little more difficult to quickly and easily identify great players and would make it easier to aquire players that play more specific styles of baseball.

If motivated, please add more categories or criticize existing ones.

[jbergey22]

Love this idea!

[lewis31lewis52]

One of the great things about FM would be perfect in OOTP.

For example, that young stud CF may have good technical ratings, but his mental rating are poor. Do you keep him and hope he doesn't crumble under the pressure, or do you trade him and find out he holds up just fine?

[Russ]

This along with career progression and media/player interaction are the things I would love to see from FM.

[Kaitiaki]

Hate it. If anything, I want fewer ratings, not more. More is not always better. Up to a certain point, more choice adds strategy in terms of weighing the pros and cons of taking players with different skillsets.

Beyond that, it becomes so murky that you're only adding confusion without meaningfully increasing the strategic depth of the game.

Worse, many of the ratings you want to add are of the unquantifiable/incomprehensible sort. "Dirtiness"? "Importance"? How can you possibly quantify - in other words, give a number to - the effect of such things? And even if you can decide how to rate a person in such categories, how do you quantify the impact of those ratings on play results and statistics?

Inevitably, we'd be talking about ratings that would have mere fractions of a percentage points worth of impact on any given game situation - any more, and the "core" abilities like contact and bat control would be too diminished to have the significance they should. One of the keys to good game design is to offer the user meaningful, interesting choices. Your system would offer many choices, but the impact of one over the other would be so small in most cases that there would be no meaningful difference. All that achieves is fostering frustration among users who resent having wasted their time on a moot point.

The other major flaw in your rating system is that bears no resemblance to modern, sabermetric baseball theory. The rating categories that OOTP uses weren't pulled out of some random hat - they're largely the result of years of statistical research into what truly constitutes a skill for baseball players and what doesn't. "Bravery" in your example is another word for "clutch", which the body of statistical evidence strongly suggests does not exist. Nor does your system reflect traditional scouting-based systems of player analysis. Half a dozen or more of your separate ratings would be covered by what scouts often call "makeup".

My conclusion is very simple. Your system is overly complicated, making an already challenging game even less user-friendly. It introduces variables that would have next to no impact, making the payoff for finally learning the complex system less rewarding. And it would take the game away from feeling like baseball by forcing users to evaluate players in ways that are completely alien to a fan of Major League Baseball, regardless of whether that person is a disciple of Joe Morgan or Voros McCracken.

Sorry, but I don't like it.

- Kai

[CBLCardinals]

Originally Posted by Kaitiaki

Hate it. If anything, I want fewer ratings, not more. More is not always better. Up to a certain point, more choice adds strategy in terms of weighing the pros and cons of taking players with different skillsets.

Beyond that, it becomes so murky that you're only adding confusion without meaningfully increasing the strategic depth of the game.

Worse, many of the ratings you want to add are of the unquantifiable/incomprehensible sort. "Dirtiness"? "Importance"? How can you possibly quantify - in other words, give a number to - the effect of such things? And even if you can decide how to rate a person in such categories, how do you quantify the impact of those ratings on play results and statistics?

Inevitably, we'd be talking about ratings that would have mere fractions of a percentage points worth of impact on any given game situation - any more, and the "core" abilities like contact and bat control would be too diminished to have the significance they should. One of the keys to good game design is to offer the user meaningful, interesting choices. Your system would offer many choices, but the impact of one over the other would be so small in most cases that there would be no meaningful difference. All that achieves is fostering frustration among users who resent having wasted their time on a moot point.

The other major flaw in your rating system is that bears no resemblance to modern, sabermetric baseball theory. The rating categories that OOTP uses weren't pulled out of some random hat - they're largely the result of years of statistical research into what truly constitutes a skill for baseball players and what doesn't. "Bravery" in your example is another word for "clutch", which the body of statistical evidence strongly suggests does not exist. Nor does your system reflect traditional scouting-based systems of player analysis. Half a dozen or more of your separate ratings would be covered by what scouts often call "makeup".

My conclusion is very simple. Your system is overly complicated, making an already challenging game even less user-friendly. It introduces variables that would have next to no impact, making the payoff for finally learning the complex system less rewarding. And it would take the game away from feeling like baseball by forcing users to evaluate players in ways that are completely alien to a fan of Major League Baseball, regardless of whether that person is a disciple of Joe Morgan or Voros McCracken.

Sorry, but I don't like it.

- Kai

agreed 100% Kai...

[bababui]

The other major flaw in your rating system is that bears no resemblance to modern, sabermetric baseball theory.

OOTP will have to decide whether it wants to be a numbers regurgitator or a baseball game based on the whole spectrum of human experience. Sabermetrics is great for fantasy baseball but its extrapolation to real life baseball is problematic....because some things are quite difficult to represent numerically. How to make an accurate OOTP version of A-Rod that doesnt include Mental Ratings?

Having Physical/Mental/Technical ratings really doesnt make things that much more complicated; rather it makes things more precise in that it better represents the variation in abilities amongst players.

[Prodigal Son]

Sorry babs, but I agree with kaitiaki 100%.

This reminds me of when people were talking about overhauling the defensive system a few years back in the days of v5 - 6.5, and there were some who wanted it to have several additional ratings. Some wanted there to be upwards of a dozen defensive skill ratings from reaction time to throwing release quickness. But at some point, you have to wonder what is necessary to the game experience and at what point you have a game that is really intimidating (especially to new users) and have ratings that aren't ultimately too important. Ex.) A reaction time rating may not add much variation or realism above what the range rating already provides.

I'm not opposed to adding ratings as long as they are consistent with real baseball player abilities that are able to be modeled and somewhat identified in terms of magnitude or quantification. For example, there should be ratings that seperate a player's proneness to commit fielding errors compared to his proneness to commit throwing errors. This has legitimate gameplay effects, as fielding errors and throwing errors affect plays differently. And there is enough variation among players in real life to make it relevant. An infielder like Rafael Furcal commits a lot more throwing errors than glove errors, while a guy like Chipper Jones rarely commits a throwing error but commits a fair amount of fielding errors. One example of how they differ is that a throwing error by an infielder often results in the hitter reaching second, whereas the fielding error keeps the runner at first in a very high percentage of instances.

Sort of a long-winded example, but it speaks to my point: I'm all for adding ratings if they have a basis in reality, a good degree of variation among real players, and a significant gameplay impact.

[bababui]

PS..have you played Football Manager? They have a dizzying number of categories players are rated on; at first its confusing but it allows for a much greater shading of players. As a poster mentioned above (Lewis),

"For example, that young stud CF may have good technical ratings, but his mental rating are poor. Do you keep him and hope he doesn't crumble under the pressure, or do you trade him and find out he holds up just fine?"

Increasingly, mental and emotional factors are being played out in real baseball..from Delman Young throwing his bat at the umpire to Rick Ankiel's meltdown.

I wish there was a way Markus could borrow some FM code and play with extra ratings through testers.

[Muppetus Galacticus]

It is great for FM and EHM, but it might make things a bit clunky in OOTP. Lets face it, baseball players don't really do a lot do they? They don't have to have vision and skill to make a pass, nor do they need to tackle/check, and they certainly don't move around much compared to other team sports.

I wouldn't mind a few more attributes though, just maybe split up the ones we already have.

[Honolulu Blue]

Originally Posted by Kaitiaki

Hate it.

Agree.

One of the major reasons that I couldn't get into CM/FM was that there were SO many ratings that each added SO little to my understanding of how good this guy or that guy is supposed to be that I had to rely on the computer to do all my sorting. Not fun.

[Dagrims]

Originally Posted by bababui

OOTP will have to decide whether it wants to be a numbers regurgitator or a baseball game based on the whole spectrum of human experience.

I hope that OOTP continues to decide to be a baseball game based on numbers (i.e., statistics and ratings). What you are suggesting sounds more like a baseball role-playing game. Maybe ITP 2.

Originally Posted by bababui

Sabermetrics is great for fantasy baseball but its extrapolation to real life baseball is problematic....because some things are quite difficult to represent numerically. How to make an accurate OOTP version of A-Rod that doesnt include Mental Ratings?

Base it on his statistics. That should work out pretty well.

[Dagrims]

Originally Posted by Kaitiaki

My conclusion is very simple. Your system is overly complicated, making an already challenging game even less user-friendly. It introduces variables that would have next to no impact, making the payoff for finally learning the complex system less rewarding. And it would take the game away from feeling like baseball by forcing users to evaluate players in ways that are completely alien to a fan of Major League Baseball, regardless of whether that person is a disciple of Joe Morgan or Voros McCracken.

I completely agree with this paragraph. It's like baseball for people that don't follow baseball.

It would also be the complete end of historical replays. What were Mickey Vernon's balance and professionalism ratings again?

[redmarkYankees]

I guess there's potential for being able to select which 'ratings set' to play with. The historical/statistical simmers can use the existing, while the fantasy role players can use an expanded version. These would need to be toggleable, so the game would need to be able to convert between the two. For the 'role playing' set, you could go further and lose ratings such as "contact" or "power" entirely, making that be determined by a combination of physical/mental ratings (bat speed, balance, judgement, strength, timing etc).

[CBL-Commish]

Can you even imagine making a roster set where you have to come up with dozens of ratings (many subjective) for each of thousands and thousands of players?

A CubbyFan/Rolen roster would go from a difficult thing that's often released weeks or months after the game to something that might happen if someone could recruit hundreds of volunteers to help.

This would also render Lahman imports either impossible or far less accurate. You'd be flat-out making up 3/4 of the new ratings for thousands of historical players.

[atlbrave1]

Originally Posted by bababui

How to make an accurate OOTP version of A-Rod that doesnt include Mental Ratings?

OK, I'll bite. What mental rating are you planning on giving A-Rod? Are you going to give him ratings that will decrease his abilities so that he only hits .280/.362/.485 in the postseason (vs. .306/.386/.573 in the regular season). Can we get a mental rating for Jeter too, so that we can make sure he hits .314/.384/.479 in the postseason (vs. .317/.388/.463 in the regular season).

I'm not saying that there isn't a mental aspect to baseball, but I'm pretty sure I could make a few dollars if I could quantify it. If you can't quantify it, I don't want it affecting player's ratings on the field.

[redmarkYankees]

Originally Posted by CBL-Commish

Can you even imagine making a roster set where you have to come up with dozens of ratings (many subjective) for each of thousands and thousands of players?

A CubbyFan/Rolen roster would go from a difficult thing that's often released weeks or months after the game to something that might happen if someone could recruit hundreds of volunteers to help.

This would also render Lahman imports either impossible or far less accurate. You'd be flat-out making up 3/4 of the new ratings for thousands of historical players.

I'm not actually supporting the idea for historical sims (or for any sims if the player doesn't want to use it), but you wouldn't need to do all of this. It would be relatively straightforward for the game to create the new ratings on default/neutral values, with some slight random variations, or entirely randomly (or any of those, at the players choice). You could use standard Lahman imports, with the game then adding mental/roleplay ratings, while extrapolating reasonable approximations of physical abilities from the stats.

[Giants44]

I will respectfully say that I don't like this idea at all.

I think games like soccer and hockey (and even basketball for that matter) that are "free-flowing" and can be played in a number of different styles fit better these large groups of ratings.

baseball by nature is so much more structured - I think more ratings hurt.

the only other rating I would like to see is something along the lines of "craftsman" something to represent the older player with diminished skills who still contributes primarily because of experience. but that is an entire different argument.

[TwinMonster]

I have to agree with the poster that mentioned the real roster issue. Perhaps the new ratings idea would work well for fictional leagues but it would make it really tough with historical or real-world sims. That being said, I do think it's an interesting idea. Just not functional with real life stats.

[Russ]

Having more attributes would also help if the player interaction was made deeper which I hope is on the agenda for 2008. I'm with you Babs.