feeder league balance

[kbuchanan]

I was wondering if anybody knows if the game automatically keeps the proper level of talent entering the draft regardless of the amount of feeder teams. The mod I am using has 112 (or something) NCAA teams, 24 njcaa teams and 50 high school teams. I set the number of rounds to 50 to try to be more realistic. I think that is a good number of teams to feed my league for 50 rounds, but I am very concerned that I will end up having a league full of high rated players after a while. Does anybody know if the game manages that, or does it just randomly generate players so that the bigger your feeder system is the more good players you get for the few MLB spots you have at the top.

I notice that I have like 6-8 or so 4+ star potential players on each high school team. At first I was thinking that this means that this means they would be or 5 stars in the majors, but I did notice that when I get scouting reports they say they are 5 stars for the current league. Does that mean that if I have 2, potential 5 star players in my high school feeder league, that in AA one could be a 5 star and the other 2? If that is the case It would make me feel a little better. I probably need to sim out a bunch of seasons and see what happens.

[bmerryman]

The manual says that 6-9 players will be fed into the parent league per feeder team. Basing calculations on 6 players per feeder then you will need roughly 8 (50 divided by 6) feeder teams per parent team. Therefore, if you had 30 teams in your "Major League" then you would need to setup 240-250 feeder teams. This formula has worked well for me in my sims.

[Mel Ott]

Originally Posted by kbuchanan

I was wondering if anybody knows if the game automatically keeps the proper level of talent entering the draft regardless of the amount of feeder teams. The mod I am using has 112 (or something) NCAA teams, 24 njcaa teams and 50 high school teams. I set the number of rounds to 50 to try to be more realistic. I think that is a good number of teams to feed my league for 50 rounds, but I am very concerned that I will end up having a league full of high rated players after a while. Does anybody know if the game manages that, or does it just randomly generate players so that the bigger your feeder system is the more good players you get for the few MLB spots you have at the top.

There are a number of threads complaining about the ability of the game to manage the talent coming into leagues through feeder leagues.

In a nutshell, the game seems to generate highly talented players as a more-or-less fixed percentage of all players generated. The more rounds you have each year, the more players will be generated, and (eventually) the league will go through 'talent inflation'.

When the feeder system is used, the game generates players for each team, rather than creating a draft pool whose size you can fix before the draft. It also seems to be the case that feeder leagues take a few seasons to get up to "full production."

If you have a lot of draft rounds, and a lot of feeder teams, you will sooner or later have a highly-talented league with a lot of free agents. If that's what you like, then the setup you have will do that (although, as bmerryman suggests, you probably need more feeder teams than you have to fully populate a 50-round draft).

I think the biggest thing you might want to think about is whether you really need a 50-round draft. For reasons I'm still not clear on, the accepted formula for draft rounds is (5*number of minor-league affiliates), with a minimum of 5 rounds for a league with no minors. That ratio appears to keep talent in the league fairly consistent. I personally suspect that a league can get by with even fewer rounds in the draft, but I haven't tested that theory myself. It seems to me that the draft simply needs to replace all the players who leave the league entirely - mainly through retirement; but that's probably a discussion for another thread.

The bottom line is, more rounds = more talent in the leagues.

[kbuchanan]

Thanks for the info.

One of the reasons that I went to a 50 round draft is becasue my feeder leagues are producing 1800-2000 draft eligible players every year. The reason is, my high school and NCAA leagues are only 4 year leagues rather than 5 like the calculations in the manual use. So I am producing about 2 more players per team in those leagues. Also the NJCAA is only a 2 year league, so produces 300+ players a year even though it is only 24 teams. So, the feeder leagues I have now are producing plenty of players for a 50 round draft. But from what you are saying I guess it is just what I was affraid of. I didn't really don't want my majors to be over loaded with talent.

[Mel Ott]

Originally Posted by kbuchanan

Thanks for the info.

One of the reasons that I went to a 50 round draft is becasue my feeder leagues are producing 1800-2000 draft eligible players every year. The reason is, my high school and NCAA leagues are only 4 year leagues rather than 5 like the calculations in the manual use. So I am producing about 2 more players per team in those leagues. Also the NJCAA is only a 2 year league, so produces 300+ players a year even though it is only 24 teams. So, the feeder leagues I have now are producing plenty of players for a 50 round draft. But from what you are saying I guess it is just what I was affraid of. I didn't really don't want my majors to be over loaded with talent.

Yeah, other people have run into problems trying to accurately reproduce the US college and HS baseball leagues as feeders. My guess is that the game generates too many players per team for an accurate reproduction of that system.

[Who Killed Kenny?]

IRL major league teams have more than just one of each AAA, AA, A, SA, and Rookie teams. Perhaps consider using a bigger minor league system.

Also, what exactly happens in a super-talented universe? Is the problem that the stats are askewed? Lets say normally an average player is 4 out of 8. In a super-talented league is an average player 6 out of 8? Does this affect salaries or is a 6 out of 8 now-average player getting paid the same amount as 4 out of 8 in a normal setting. I don't see a problem unless it means that my lowly scrub is now asking for $10m a year.

[kbuchanan]

Originally Posted by Who Killed Kenny?

IRL major league teams have more than just one of each AAA, AA, A, SA, and Rookie teams. Perhaps consider using a bigger minor league system.

Also, what exactly happens in a super-talented universe? Is the problem that the stats are askewed? Lets say normally an average player is 4 out of 8. In a super-talented league is an average player 6 out of 8? Does this affect salaries or is a 6 out of 8 now-average player getting paid the same amount as 4 out of 8 in a normal setting. I don't see a problem unless it means that my lowly scrub is now asking for $10m a year.

Yeah I think I'm going to try to do a little testing and see if I can tell what will happen over 100 years with my setup.

[The_Offspring187]

Originally Posted by kbuchanan

Yeah I think I'm going to try to do a little testing and see if I can tell what will happen over 100 years with my setup.

Please post when you are finished and let us know how this goes.

I haven't bought OOTP yet (I've been on board since OOTP3) for a few reasons, most notably lack of money and time. Reading about people doing these high school and college feeder leagues is definitely piquing my interest on OOTP 2007. In my OOTP6 league I had a Japanese League and a Dominican Republic league as well as the majors and minors.

I'd like to have something similar but with high school/college teams as well. How hard would it be for me to implement this? I use fictional teams and league setups so I don't need a 100% accurate representation of the number of colleges and high schools out there. I guess it would be interesting to create an independent league too and let some of the lower players feed into there and try to make a name for themselves.

My biggest complaint with OOTP06 was how slow it was on my computer. Is 07 any faster, and if I had a league set up like this, how could I expect performance to be?

Thanks for your help!

[kbuchanan]

I'm working on it, but it's going slow. I can only sim about 6 to 8 seasons before my game crashes. I posted about it on the tech support forum but nobody was able to offer any suggestions. It seems to be releated to facegen. I disabled facegen but I am still having the crashes when saving faces and it corrupts the face file so that I can't start the league until I copy over it from a backup. It's not that big of a deal, but it would go a lot faster if If I could sim 20 or 30 seasons overnight or while I'm at work, instead of just 6.

[kbuchanan]

In case anyone is interested, I wanted to list my findings. I ran two 75 season sims. First league was MLB, full minors, 2 foreign leagues and no feeder leagues. I used a 50 round draft (because that is what I wanted to use if it works out alright) and had the game generate enough players for 55 rounds. this league was making 1800 players for the draft every year and 1500 were drafted.

The second league was the same as above, except it had a 50 team high school feeder league (4 year), a 24 team junior college league (2 year), and a 112 team NCAA feeder league (4 year). Draft was populated by feeder leagues only. Draft classes ranged from 1700 to 2200 players. So I was producing more players per draft in the second league.

My primary goal was to see if I would over load my league with talent having such a large draft and so many feeder teams.

I noticed very little difference in the stats being generated over 75 years. The first league seemed to produce more outliers, but overall the stats were very consistant over the 75 seasons. One strange thing is that both leagues seemed to have on average lower ERA's and BA's the first 10 years and then went up by about .20 and averaged around the same for the other 60 years. This resulted in the NL having ERA average around 3.97 for the first 10 years and 4.18 for the other 60. This was the same in both leagues. I also compared the stats of all minor leagues and again it was very consistent. It is also of note that I used SkyDogs settings (with a few minor tweaks) and got exactly the stats I was looking for. I believe that the effects of such a large draft class had no effect on the stats, and I am very happy with those results.

Second I tried to use the overall ratings and potential ratings to compare leagues. I think the game may actually control the overall ratings. Each league every time I checked had almost exactly the same number of players with certain overall ratings. using 20 to 80 her is what I found every time I checked ( usually every 10 years):

4 to 6 players with overall rating 80
40 to 45 players over 75
215 to 225 over 60
395 to 405 0ver 45

This was every single time within this narrow range in both leagues. I think the game must meter the overall talent in the majors. It got a little weird with potential ratings, but I couldn't fully understand the results. I had many more players in the second league with potentials higher than 21 and a much larger amount of high potential players in the draft. The weirdest part is that the percentage of players with a potential higher than 21 in both leagues was very low. only 6.2% in the first league and 10.2% in the second league. I was really interested to see if the players for example in the bottom 30% of the league were getting better over time, but it was impossible for me to compare players accurately over time. Since they all had overall ratings of 20 and the individual ratings were all over the board I had no real way to compare players. I will say that the differences in potential seemed to have no effect on the majors. It seems that the large part of those extra players with high potential where in the feeder leagues which you would expect. Here are the ratings for all players in the majors in both leagues:

league 1:
375 players with overall 45+
650 players with overall 21+
386 players with potential 45+
725 players with potential 21+

league 2:
375 players with overall 45+
609 players with overall 21+
376 players with potential 45+
660 players with potential 21+

This is actually the second test I did I did 50 seasons with almost identical results. I made a couple adjustments and stopped every 10 seasons to record data on the second test, so it is better documented. I wanted to repeat the tests with only a 25 round draft, but I am very happy with these results and don't really feel that having such a big feeder system will have a detrimental impact on my league, so I'm going to skip that test because I am anxious to get playing. I hope this helps people that want to use feeder leagues.

[fhomess]

One comment on feeder leagues that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere:
The game doesn't always get the talent distribution of the drafts to match the talent distribution in the league at the start of the league. If you really want to get the balance right, set up your league, sim 20 seasons, then wipe all the league stats and history and start your league from there. As long as you don't change league settings, the feeder leagues will be consistent in the talent they produce. So letting the leagues run their course for 20 seasons gives you a chance to get away from the big bang issues that feeder league talent and major league talent don't seem to mesh well at the start of a league.

[NomarHits400]

Originally Posted by fhomess

One comment on feeder leagues that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere:
The game doesn't always get the talent distribution of the drafts to match the talent distribution in the league at the start of the league. If you really want to get the balance right, set up your league, sim 20 seasons, then wipe all the league stats and history and start your league from there. As long as you don't change league settings, the feeder leagues will be consistent in the talent they produce. So letting the leagues run their course for 20 seasons gives you a chance to get away from the big bang issues that feeder league talent and major league talent don't seem to mesh well at the start of a league.

Of course, this is a real prblem if I dont' want to wait for 20 years for things to settle down....As work-arounds go, this needs some work.

I have my feeder PCM's set for my Feeder teams- but it really takes a lot of work- I was hoping this would be addressed in a patch- but I am pretty sure it hasn't even been acknowledged.

[fhomess]

Originally Posted by NomarHits400

Of course, this is a real prblem if I dont' want to wait for 20 years for things to settle down....As work-arounds go, this needs some work.

I don't see why it needs work as a work around. It works very well and doesn't take very long. The idea behind clearing the history is so that even though you've simmed 20 years, it looks like you're starting from scratch and all the leagues in your universe are already "mature". It's pretty easy to tell the game to sim 20 years and not have to do a thing along the way. It doesn't even take all that long to sim out those 20 years. Then you clear the league history so that those 20 years of games look like they never happened, but you've got a league model that's already worked out any potential issues from league creation.

I suppose "doesn't take very long" is a relative expression. In my mind, if I'm setting up a complex feeder system, I don't expect to get my league configured in 5 minutes. I can sim 20 years in less than a couple of hours and have no problem going off to do something like eat dinner, exercise, and/or take the dogs out for some fetch in the meantime. When I come back, it should be all ready for me to wipe the data and start my league and I haven't wasted any time just sitting and watching the years roll by.

Anyway, I'm not saying that the feeder PCM's shouldn't be improved. Certainly they can and should be. I fully support any improvements to the feeder league model which is nice but isn't very robust at this point (please let high schoolers go to college! they need higher education!).

[NomarHits400]

Originally Posted by fhomess

I don't see why it needs work as a work around. It works very well and doesn't take very long. The idea behind clearing the history is so that even though you've simmed 20 years, it looks like you're starting from scratch and all the leagues in your universe are already "mature". It's pretty easy to tell the game to sim 20 years and not have to do a thing along the way. It doesn't even take all that long to sim out those 20 years. Then you clear the league history so that those 20 years of games look like they never happened, but you've got a league model that's already worked out any potential issues from league creation.

I suppose "doesn't take very long" is a relative expression. In my mind, if I'm setting up a complex feeder system, I don't expect to get my league configured in 5 minutes. I can sim 20 years in less than a couple of hours and have no problem going off to do something like eat dinner, exercise, and/or take the dogs out for some fetch in the meantime. When I come back, it should be all ready for me to wipe the data and start my league and I haven't wasted any time just sitting and watching the years roll by.

Anyway, I'm not saying that the feeder PCM's shouldn't be improved. Certainly they can and should be. I fully support any improvements to the feeder league model which is nice but isn't very robust at this point (please let high schoolers go to college! they need higher education!).

I understand your point- and if you're playing fictional- this may be a good option. But if I want to use real rosters- and I play 20 years in, I have completely lost my purpose for playing with real rosters in the first place as I am the same position I would have been had I started with a fictional universe to begin with; that is- I play with real players so I know the talent of the league to start. I don't mind mixing in fictional players as I go- but I prefer this to be a gradual process- and as such I learn the strengths/weakness's of the league over time. I suppose I am in the minority- but that's why I am calling it a work around- no offense intended.

[fhomess]

Originally Posted by NomarHits400

I understand your point- and if you're playing fictional- this may be a good option. But if I want to use real rosters- and I play 20 years in, I have completely lost my purpose for playing with real rosters in the first place as I am the same position I would have been had I started with a fictional universe to begin with; that is- I play with real players so I know the talent of the league to start. I don't mind mixing in fictional players as I go- but I prefer this to be a gradual process- and as such I learn the strengths/weakness's of the league over time. I suppose I am in the minority- but that's why I am calling it a work around- no offense intended.

Ah, well if you had said that you were wanting it for real rosters I'd have gotten your point better. I agree that it's a work-around either way, though. I never play real rosters, so it works for me.

[Underlined.i]

Originally Posted by NomarHits400

I understand your point- and if you're playing fictional- this may be a good option. But if I want to use real rosters- and I play 20 years in, I have completely lost my purpose for playing with real rosters in the first place as I am the same position I would have been had I started with a fictional universe to begin with; that is- I play with real players so I know the talent of the league to start. I don't mind mixing in fictional players as I go- but I prefer this to be a gradual process- and as such I learn the strengths/weakness's of the league over time. I suppose I am in the minority- but that's why I am calling it a work around- no offense intended.

Same here. I am stoked for some of these real rosters to come out. I would like to use feeder leagues because it seems like a great aspect of the game. I feel the same way, in that I want to start with real guys so I know what's going on. Once these fictional guys start coming in one year at a time it is a lot easier to get a feel for the league and really get to know the players. Starting completely fictional I feel as though I am in way over my head and I can't learn about anyone.