A Few Questions From A Prospective Buyer

[atcdelay]

1. How long does it take on average to play a one-pitch per batter baseball game? How is the quality of the play-by-text as compared to Diamond Mind Baseball?

2. The online manual does not get into much depth about how a player's personality ratings affects results. I would like some feedback as to their influence. Players in Football Manager (Worldwide Soccer Manager), the gold standard as far as career sims go, have fourteen different mental attributes that are known, as well as a number of hidden ones.

3. In reference to #2 question above, are there any additional hidden attributes in OOTP besides injury proneness?

4. In all the screenshots, only one ballpark is displayed. Are the other MLB ballparks available for viewing?

5. I live in a small city which is probably in the OOTP database. Do I have the option of making my city a 'big league' city with other cities, regardless of their size, my minor league affliliates?

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

[Cornelius McGillicuddy]

1. I still play ver 9 and the pbp is good, don't know how it compares though.

4. You can download many more parks on padresfan's site (or elsewhere) for free.

5. Yes.

Don't know the rest.

[eriqjaffe]

1) 1 pitch per batter usually takes ~ 15-20 minutes. You have the ability to change the speed the PBP is displayed at, which will (obviously) change how quickly you can play a game. No idea how it compares to DMB, as I don't have it.

2) The influence personality ratings have is intentionally vague. It has an effect. How much? Only Markus really knows. But that, to me, is similar to how it works in real life. How much does an angry player really effect the clubhouse? Who can really say?

3) There are also leadership ratings that have an obscured effect on the game as well.

[Mt Fire Fighter]

The one pitch mode takes about 15-20 minutes to play per game.

The PBP in OOTP is as good if not better than DMB. OOTP has many more options than DMB and is head and shoulders above DMB, you can customize it almost any way you want. You can get any ballpark that you want even 'fantasy' parks.

And I have found that statistical accuracy again is better than DMB.

I play historical seasons and all are available from I think the 1890's to the current date at no additional charge.

Overall I find OOTP to be the best baseball out there.

John

[TribeFanInNC]

Originally Posted by atcdelay

1. How long does it take on average to play a one-pitch per batter baseball game? How is the quality of the play-by-text as compared to Diamond Mind Baseball?

About 15 minutes using a fast PbP speed, could be faster if you use the instant PbP

Originally Posted by atcdelay

2. The online manual does not get into much depth about how a player's personality ratings affects results. I would like some feedback as to their influence. Players in Football Manager (Worldwide Soccer Manager), the gold standard as far as career sims go, have fourteen different mental attributes that are known, as well as a number of hidden ones.

There are six main personality attributes. They affect play and development to varying degrees. I haven't played FM, but I imagine it is a little less in-depth than that. But they definitely have an effect. Greed attribute obviously affects contract negotiations. Things like intelligence and work ethic affect general development in various ways. Also smaller things like birthplace have effects on where a player might sign in free agency. Lastly, there is also a morale system that has a significant effect on results.

Originally Posted by atcdelay

3. In reference to #2 question above, are there any additional hidden attributes in OOTP besides injury proneness?

Probably. I believe there is a hidden rust system. Maybe others.

Originally Posted by atcdelay

4. In all the screenshots, only one ballpark is displayed. Are the other MLB ballparks available for viewing?

Only the one picture comes with the game. There are add-on mods that can be easily added to use in the game. See the Mod section of the forum.

Originally Posted by atcdelay

5. I live in a small city which is probably in the OOTP database. Do I have the option of making my city a 'big league' city with other cities, regardless of their size, my minor league affliliates?

Yes. You can do anything you want with the cities. They are easy to change. You can even add cities to the txt file if cities you want do not exist in the database. You can even make an entire Hobbit planet of cities if that floats your boat.

[Cork55]

Originally Posted by atcdelay

1. How long does it take on average to play a one-pitch per batter baseball game? How is the quality of the play-by-text as compared to Diamond Mind Baseball?

I own both games and a one pitch game of OOTP takes anywhere from 20-25 minutes depending on the score. A low scoring game can be played in as little as 15 minutes. OOTP is very similar to DMB in this area.

Having been a part of the OOTP PbP team for 3 releases, I can absolutely say that the OOTP PbP is as good as or better than the DMB PbP. Both are great but OOTP has much more variety than DMB. the best thing about the OOTP PbP is that it will continue to get better with each release.

2. The online manual does not get into much depth about how a player's personality ratings affects results. I would like some feedback as to their influence. Players in Football Manager (Worldwide Soccer Manager), the gold standard as far as career sims go, have fourteen different mental attributes that are known, as well as a number of hidden ones.

Greed can make potential free agents decline a contract extension. other things can make players demand a position switch (RP to a closer for example, or a player wanting to be hitting in the middle of the order). The ratings work, but this aspect of OOTP is still far from finished.

3. In reference to #2 question above, are there any additional hidden attributes in OOTP besides injury proneness?

Not sure about this.

4. In all the screenshots, only one ballpark is displayed. Are the other MLB ballparks available for viewing?

You can add tons of different ball parks to the game. All you need are the stadium images. You can even do day/night images for extra realism. Ball park images can be found very easily at any of the OOTP mod sites.

5. I live in a small city which is probably in the OOTP database. Do I have the option of making my city a 'big league' city with other cities, regardless of their size, my minor league affliliates?

You should be able make your small town a big league by adding it to your league and tweaking a few things.

Thanks in advance for the feedback.

As a life long DMB user and DMB fan, OOTP offers me the in game greatness that DMB has along with the fun that a career mode offers. Now I can play out all my games and also run my league for many seasons. It is incredibly fun to generate some history for a league prior to taking over a team. looking at the various league records and following the careers of the players is great fun if you like this kind of stuff.

Add in the fact that you can use custom logos, uniforms, ball parks and that the game generates pictures for all the fictional players and you have the ability to simulate a living/breathing baseball league.

Buying this game is an absolute no-brainer.

-Cork55

[ike121212]

1. about 10 minutes
2. There's 6 personality ratings and dozens of skill ratings. The personality ratings effect player development and contract negotiations. Leadership is suppossed to give some kind of boost to the team. I think they also impact the players morale, which impacts their performance.
3. not that I know of
4. you can download ballpark mods to get others. I'm sure there's some kind of licensing issue.
5. Yes. You can edit market size, interest, and loyalty of an team/market.

[LeiterFanatic]

FWIW, there is something about the DMB play-by-play that is golden. I prefer it to OOTP but I cannot say that I have a complaint about the OOTP PBP

[Malleus Dei]

Originally Posted by LeiterFanatic

FWIW, there is something about the DMB play-by-play that is golden. I prefer it to OOTP but I cannot say that I have a complaint about the OOTP PBP

What he said. DMB's PBP is truly the gold standard and my favorite, but OOTP's PBP is just too good these days to have anything to complain about beyond the fact that's not DMB's PBP.

[Malleus Dei]

Actdelay, you might want to check out Main to see what mods are readily available for OOTP X.

[Isura]

1. 10 minutes playing every batter. 5 minutes when I skip until the 7th inning, and handle substitions from there on (playing NL rules of course).

2. There was a study done for OOTP 9, and iirc the effects of personality were very minimal. I'm inclined to think it hasn't changed much since there is no mention of it in the feature list for OOTP 10.

[Vinny P.]

Time-wise, it can take anywhere between 15-45 minutes to play a game in PBP, depending on the speed the text appears. I usually take about a half hour for my game, because I like to get really immersed in the "action." (I have a great imagination. My mom always said so, and I know how to give my twin bro nightmares. )

I've never used DMB, but the PBP is very good. You even actually have the ability to edit the PBP text.....I think. I never had any reason to try it, but I think I read somewhere that it's a text file that cvan be edited. But there are placeholders and stuff, so it's probably not recommended to mess with it.

Go to Padresfan's site, or "all sim baseball". Google those two sites, and you'll find a good amount of custom content.

[OldFatGuy]

Just wanted to add here that the time it takes to play a game can vary IMMENSELY judging from the other posts here, depending on the settings you use and your "style."

I play out every inning of every game, 1-pitch mode, and it takes less than 5 minutes each. I have timed it at as little as 3, but that's even going faster than usual for me as I was trying to just see how long it took. It's usually about 5 minutes per game for me. Which is why I've played over 15 years worth of games I guess (although that's in an OOTP8 league). But I've played lots in OOTPX as well.

EDIT: What I mean by settings, for example, is I disable sound and ball animation (neither interest me in the least) and I use Short PbP, Very Fast PbP Speed, Delay Mode-Per Character. No warm-up rule.

[TribeFanInNC]

Originally Posted by OldFatGuy

Just wanted to add here that the time it takes to play a game can vary IMMENSELY judging from the other posts here, depending on the settings you use and your "style."

This is definitely true. It can take anywhere between 5-45 mins depending on how fast or slow you go.

[Cornelius McGillicuddy]

Regarding the pbp. Again I have ver 9 so it's not as good as ver 10. The last couple of days I've been looking at Action PC which is supposed to be comparable to Diamond (or maybe not ?) and is supposed to have an excellent text pbp. Imo the pbp in ootp v9 is way better. The flow is better. The wording is better.

Maybe there will be a World Series sale again this year and I'll get ver 10 and have an even better pbp. That's one of the things I like most about this game.

[conception]

After trying Front Office Football, I realized just how good OOTP PBP really is. Version X seems to have solidified this a lot, and while there are a lot of sayings in the PBP that I do recognize from years of playing the game, with version X I feel less like I'm seeing the same phrases over and over.

I've never played DMB and it may be better, but OOTP PBP is certainly very good on its own and I would consider it a plus feature of the game.

In regards to actually playing a game, one of the reasons why I love OOTP is that I can have it sim while not paying 100 percent active attention to the game. I do play some games in one pitch mode, but when I have a task or something else that I need to take my active attention, I usually set up a game to sim while I am busy. I can watch every now and then, especially when I know that a big game moment is coming. It's a lot of fun because I can still get a feel for what my team actually plays like in-game, but I don't have to be there clicking a button to make it go.

[Kobeck]

I am really enjoying the free OOTP8.
I purchased 6 and 6.5 a while ago.

My issue with dropping the $$$s on OOTPX is that we all know OOTPXI will be out in a few months so I might as well save my $$$s till April.

I would definatly have to have a big discount on OOTPXI to purchase OOTPX at this time.

[Vinny P.]

Originally Posted by Kobeck

I am really enjoying the free OOTP8.
I purchased 6 and 6.5 a while ago.

My issue with dropping the $$$s on OOTPX is that we all know OOTPXI will be out in a few months so I might as well save my $$$s till April.

I would definatly have to have a big discount on OOTPXI to purchase OOTPX at this time.

Nobody said anything about release dates for XI, did they?

[Walkoff]

Originally Posted by Nihilianth

Nobody said anything about release dates for XI, did they?

Chances are XI won't be out in April unless something changes. OOTP X is totally worth it anyway, and then you can join an online league right away!

[Cornelius McGillicuddy]

Well, if they have a WS sale on X for $25 I'm going to buy it. Otherwise it's waiting for XI. Either way is ok since ver 9 is fine.