Despite what MD says, PureSim ain't that bad

Johnny Slick · 04-02-2005, 02:41 PM

I've been toying around with it last night and this morning and probably will fork out the 30 clams it costs to buy the thing outright. It's faaaaaaaaaaar from perfect, but isn't the worst thing I've seen either.

Positives
---------

The "magazine" that the game produces every week is a lot more fun to read than OOTP's Player/Pitcher of the Week remarks. Basically, each 'zine looks at the hot and cold players and then shows the top rankings by a couple of stats. This is really, really cool for those of us who like to play in "God mode."

Tools-based defense. MILES better than what OOTP has. In PS, you don't play Mark McGwire at shortstop because he's got no range, no hands, and no arm, NOT because he's not rated to play the position.

Expanded roster sizes are smaller and therefore more manageable in PS. That might actually be a negative for some; for me, it's not. PS only sims one level of minors, which is all I need.

The engine is a LOT more customizeable than OOTP's. Taking a cue from Front Page Sports: Baseball (which Shaun Sullivan wrote a lot of utilities for back in the day), PS gives you a rather large XML file where you can edit year-by-year ratings adjusts, player aging and development, which attributes the AI will value the most when building a team, success rates of 1-run strategies like the hit-and-run and the steal, and a bunch more (the xml file, when loaded into Word, is 68 pages long).

The stat-generator part of the engine is a LOT more intuitive and flexible. One of my biggest pet peeves with OOTP is the "make the engine numbers go up to make your league's stats go down" bit. This actually creates two problems:

1. It's not terribly easy to grok. I just stick each year's league numbers into a spreadsheet I've created, cross-reference them with the numbers I want the league to produce, and pop the adjusted totals into the system. A lot of people who are not mathematically inclined are not going to go this route and for that reason are basically stuck playing 2005 baseball.

2. The high/low thing also means that statistically bizarre years are basically un-replayable unless you make major concessions. By "bizarre" I mean the entire dead ball era, 1930, and so on. Oh... I can sort of do the deadball era by grossly lowering Ks in the engine (and thus making them really, really high in the game), but to me, seeing Walter Johnson and co. pitch 340 innings (good) with 360 strikeouts (bad) detracts from my playing experience.

In 154 game seasons, position players have actually been seen to play 154 games!

Individual player usage logic can be accessed directly from the player's card. This makes a lot more sense than how OOTP is set up.

Silver Slugger awards! (although you can't change the names of the league MVP, Cy Young, ROY, Gold Glove, and Best Hitter (Silver Slugger) awards, which is a minor bummer).

Negatives
---------
The game takes too long to sim. I think it's because it uses MS Access as its database and so must go through the query process every single time the thing wants to think about moving a player up or down in the rotation/lineup. In any case, my somewhere-around-2-gigahertz computer took a good hour to sim out a year using the "Fast Sim" option.

There's no "restart season" button, at least as far as I can tell. Major bummer, because one thing I really like to do in OOTP when starting a new league based on a prior era is to sim a season, see how off the ratings I've created for the league are, and then adjust them accordingly. Some people like to do this several times. Well, so far as I can tell, you can't do that at ALL in PS right now.

The managerial AI is supposedly smarter than OOTP, but I have yet to see it. Actually, so far some of the stats it's putting out remind me of the goofiness you saw in v3: guys with really, really bad records pitching way too many innings or getting way too many at-bats, some pitchers throwing 100+ games a year (remember, the RECORD for games pitched is 108). A lot of this might have been my doing (I simmed a year but had all teams on Human control), so I'll reserve my final judgement on this matter until later.

The game apparently keeps track of a lot of stats, but the ones it gives you regular access to are very limited. In one sense, this isn't so bad for me; in fact, I kind of prefer not knowing what a guy's slugging average vs. left-handers is when I'm doing a fictional 1924 replay. After all, managers of the day only had a vague sense of platoon splits. On the other hand, all those extra numbers can be fun to look at at times, and right now PS won't show them.

No depth charts in PS so far as I can tell. Well, there is a cool graphical representation of the guys you've got on your team and in your system at each position, but you can't to my knowledge go in and say "I want to rest my starting LF 18% of the time vs. righties, and of that 18% I want my 4th OFer to start half and my 5th to start the other half."

On game engine issues outside of the single/double/HR/etc. modifiers, it's pretty much uncharted territory. I think the game just hasn't been around long enough for folks to figure out exactly what levels you want your starting pitchers' endurance rates to be at in the dead ball era or in the 1970s. This is one area where OOTP really has PS beat. Not to say that OOTP is perfect in this regard; there's just less stuff to get your head around.

Both games are very customizeable and both games have a sizeable fan base that enjoys modding/tweaking the game. OOTP's fan base, though, is a lot bigger and so far at least is a lot more active with this kind of thing. No Catobase for PS, for example. Example, heck... that may be the biggest reason why OOTP still roxors. Beyond that, though, OOTP's community is quite a bit bigger, for better or for worse.

Final Thoughts
---------------
In general, let me say this: this game is a lot further along than MD in particular and other OOTP fanboys in general think it is. It does several things very, very well, and since there won't be a new iteration of Markus' game for several months, we don't even necessarily need to choose between the two right now. Even when they are competing against each other, I suspect it will be more a competition for the limited playing time each text sim fan has rather than a competition for dollars; I know I could easily spend 80-90 bucks a year on two very good baseball games.

And, of course, the existence of a worthy rival is only good news for OOTP, for reasons I've already stated ad nauseum.

Mike D · 04-02-2005, 02:45 PM

STFU noob.

sebastian0622 · 04-02-2005, 04:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Johnny Slick

Tools-based defense. MILES better than what OOTP has. In PS, you don't play Mark McGwire at shortstop because he's got no range, no hands, and no arm, NOT because he's not rated to play the position.

Awesome, and along with some of the other positives, is reason for me to finally remember to download the demo.

ihatenames · 04-02-2005, 05:13 PM

i played it for a while when it was still free. i had trouble getting into it. I have no real complaints, but i think the UI could use some work.

reds1 · 04-02-2005, 05:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ihatenames

i played it for a while when it was still free. i had trouble getting into it. I have no real complaints, but i think the UI could use some work.

Took the words out of my mouth. I'm just so used to OOTP and it's interface. But it's defininitely a game that I'm going to keep checking out and try again if I can.

Le Grande Orange · 04-02-2005, 06:41 PM

Depending on what you like to do, this factor may be a big drawback to PureSim: it has no manually controlled league realignment or expansion ability.

You can have the league set up to expand on its own, which it will do after some period of time based on some criteria, but when it does expand you get no control whatsoever over where the new teams will go or how other teams will shift around in response. The result is that you can get some pretty large realignments taking place in response to the expansion, changes which you may not like and cannot change or influence.

If you turn off this expansion feature, then your league will remain at the same size and alignment for its entire life.

In either case, you can't do a historical replay because you can't have the major leagues match their historical expansions and realignments.

On the upside, the game does apparently handle doubleheaders without any issues, unlike OOTP6 which still has some problems with twin bills.

cknox0723 · 04-02-2005, 07:49 PM

thanks for the post, john. i'm plenty happy with the ootp but like you said, it's nice to see another half-decent game out there. excellent summary.

Draft Dodger · 04-02-2005, 08:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ihatenames

i played it for a while when it was still free. i had trouble getting into it. I have no real complaints, but i think the UI could use some work.

that was my opinion as well. seemed like a lot of really promising ideas, but I had a hard time getting around the UI. I'm not a huge fan of the OOTP UI, but PS made me appreciate it more.

LeiterFanatic · 04-03-2005, 12:21 AM

I have a love hate relationship with it. I find the In-game play is fantastically immersive, due to nice stadium backgrounds (with a little hunting on thr web) and the player photos really are better implemented that OOTP. But the free agency bidding needs some work and guys who lean toward your offer mysteriously up and sign with a betetr offer you had no chance to counter. I actually love the game and cant stay away from it for long. D/L it, you'll like it everyone.

Dazooz · 04-03-2005, 10:26 AM

I play both!

Sandstorm3 · 04-04-2005, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeiterFanatic

But the free agency bidding needs some work and guys who lean toward your offer mysteriously up and sign with a betetr offer you had no chance to counter.

This was my biggest problem with the game.

I enjoyed the g one season I played, but when there was no chance to counter an offer, I realy lost intrest.

Johnny Slick · 04-05-2005, 12:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sandstorm3

This was my biggest problem with the game.

I enjoyed the g one season I played, but when there was no chance to counter an offer, I realy lost intrest.

I hear it's gotten better in that respect, but since I don't use financials in games, I would not be able to directly comment on that...

CubsLose · 04-05-2005, 10:17 AM

I started with baseball text sims using PureSim, and I would probably still be playing it if I didn't have countless download problems. PS has a great PbP screen showing you where balls fall on the field of play. It also has a fantastic financial coefficient allowing you recreate salaries from every era.

Having said that, all of the problems listed in above posts are legitimate complaints, and I am now so immersed in OOTP that I can't imagine playing any other sim.

Jestre · 04-06-2005, 08:15 AM

Puresim does give you a great ingame experience, it just "feels" better than OOTP. Problem for me is that I am a deadball fan and Puresim does not do a good job of recreating deadball play. Also every strategic move made ingame requires you to pull up a menu to make selections from which in deadball games is quite frequently and it really detracts from the flow of the game. I had no real problem with the sim speed but I understand that the recent iteration of PS has increased speed significantly. If PS addresses the deadball strategy issues and adjusts the strategy choices to keystrokes from the game field screen I would probably prefer playing PS to OOTP.

LeiterFanatic · 04-06-2005, 10:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jestre

Puresim does give you a great ingame experience, it just "feels" better than OOTP. Problem for me is that I am a deadball fan and Puresim does not do a good job of recreating deadball play. Also every strategic move made ingame requires you to pull up a menu to make selections from which in deadball games is quite frequently and it really detracts from the flow of the game. I had no real problem with the sim speed but I understand that the recent iteration of PS has increased speed significantly. If PS addresses the deadball strategy issues and adjusts the strategy choices to keystrokes from the game field screen I would probably prefer playing PS to OOTP.

Somebody made a "deadball" skin for the game which is awesome... I also think there is a XML file for deadball era play which tinkers with the settings to better reflect the times. If I can, I'll return with a link to those...

Link for skin is dead... I will do some hunting. Ask on the PureSim message board.

Jestre · 04-06-2005, 10:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeiterFanatic

Somebody made a "deadball" skin for the game which is awesome... I also think there is a XML file for deadball era play which tinkers with the settings to better reflect the times. If I can, I'll return with a link to those...

Link for skin is dead... I will do some hunting. Ask on the PureSim message board.

Actually I was the one that posted the DB skin, its in the Sienna Skin thread, I altered the Sienna skin that someone had done... used some images I had etc... the xml adjustments would be appreciated.

LeiterFanatic · 04-06-2005, 01:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jestre

Actually I was the one that posted the DB skin, its in the Sienna Skin thread, I altered the Sienna skin that someone had done... used some images I had etc... the xml adjustments would be appreciated.

Ooops Great job then lol.... I dont play deadball but it looked pretty cool.

It was SonofShibe's that I saw... check here for his skin images. http://home.nc.rr.com/whizkidweb/index.htm

he has a nice deadball facepack for d/l there

Jestre · 04-06-2005, 02:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeiterFanatic

Ooops Great job then lol.... I dont play deadball but it looked pretty cool.

It was SonofShibe's that I saw... check here for his skin images. http://home.nc.rr.com/whizkidweb/index.htm

he has a nice deadball facepack for d/l there

Yeah I have combined all the facepaks I can find from the deadball days and added/replaced many I found on my own or used from Conlon Cards. My photo pak for that period has over 1200 images.

Here are links to a couple good sites for pics on oldtimers:

http://www.thedeadballera.com/Player...y_Singles.html
http://www.baseballlibrary.com/baseb...y/ballplayers/

LeiterFanatic · 04-06-2005, 04:10 PM

ok sir,
i wont presume anymore to tell you your business!

Beach23BoyP · 04-07-2005, 10:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by LeiterFanatic

Somebody made a "deadball" skin for the game which is awesome... I also think there is a XML file for deadball era play which tinkers with the settings to better reflect the times. If I can, I'll return with a link to those...

Link for skin is dead... I will do some hunting. Ask on the PureSim message board.

The "Deadball Era" skin is not out yet. However, when it is released it will be (or should be) very easy to "tweak" the XML file to reflect that era of baseball. And BTW, you can also via the XML file reflect not only the ball play of that era, but also the "money" and the "player movement" between teams.

PureSim's "XML" file is a fabulous tool for those who "dare". Finally, the only other skin out for PS at this point in time is my "Sienna Skin".

04-02-2005, 02:41 PM	#1
Johnny Slick Banned Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Seattle Posts: 1,012	Despite what MD says, PureSim ain't that bad I've been toying around with it last night and this morning and probably will fork out the 30 clams it costs to buy the thing outright. It's faaaaaaaaaaar from perfect, but isn't the worst thing I've seen either. Positives --------- The "magazine" that the game produces every week is a lot more fun to read than OOTP's Player/Pitcher of the Week remarks. Basically, each 'zine looks at the hot and cold players and then shows the top rankings by a couple of stats. This is really, really cool for those of us who like to play in "God mode." Tools-based defense. MILES better than what OOTP has. In PS, you don't play Mark McGwire at shortstop because he's got no range, no hands, and no arm, NOT because he's not rated to play the position. Expanded roster sizes are smaller and therefore more manageable in PS. That might actually be a negative for some; for me, it's not. PS only sims one level of minors, which is all I need. The engine is a LOT more customizeable than OOTP's. Taking a cue from Front Page Sports: Baseball (which Shaun Sullivan wrote a lot of utilities for back in the day), PS gives you a rather large XML file where you can edit year-by-year ratings adjusts, player aging and development, which attributes the AI will value the most when building a team, success rates of 1-run strategies like the hit-and-run and the steal, and a bunch more (the xml file, when loaded into Word, is 68 pages long). The stat-generator part of the engine is a LOT more intuitive and flexible. One of my biggest pet peeves with OOTP is the "make the engine numbers go up to make your league's stats go down" bit. This actually creates two problems: 1. It's not terribly easy to grok. I just stick each year's league numbers into a spreadsheet I've created, cross-reference them with the numbers I want the league to produce, and pop the adjusted totals into the system. A lot of people who are not mathematically inclined are not going to go this route and for that reason are basically stuck playing 2005 baseball. 2. The high/low thing also means that statistically bizarre years are basically un-replayable unless you make major concessions. By "bizarre" I mean the entire dead ball era, 1930, and so on. Oh... I can sort of do the deadball era by grossly lowering Ks in the engine (and thus making them really, really high in the game), but to me, seeing Walter Johnson and co. pitch 340 innings (good) with 360 strikeouts (bad) detracts from my playing experience. In 154 game seasons, position players have actually been seen to play 154 games! Individual player usage logic can be accessed directly from the player's card. This makes a lot more sense than how OOTP is set up. Silver Slugger awards! (although you can't change the names of the league MVP, Cy Young, ROY, Gold Glove, and Best Hitter (Silver Slugger) awards, which is a minor bummer). Negatives --------- The game takes too long to sim. I think it's because it uses MS Access as its database and so must go through the query process every single time the thing wants to think about moving a player up or down in the rotation/lineup. In any case, my somewhere-around-2-gigahertz computer took a good hour to sim out a year using the "Fast Sim" option. There's no "restart season" button, at least as far as I can tell. Major bummer, because one thing I really like to do in OOTP when starting a new league based on a prior era is to sim a season, see how off the ratings I've created for the league are, and then adjust them accordingly. Some people like to do this several times. Well, so far as I can tell, you can't do that at ALL in PS right now. The managerial AI is supposedly smarter than OOTP, but I have yet to see it. Actually, so far some of the stats it's putting out remind me of the goofiness you saw in v3: guys with really, really bad records pitching way too many innings or getting way too many at-bats, some pitchers throwing 100+ games a year (remember, the RECORD for games pitched is 108). A lot of this might have been my doing (I simmed a year but had all teams on Human control), so I'll reserve my final judgement on this matter until later. The game apparently keeps track of a lot of stats, but the ones it gives you regular access to are very limited. In one sense, this isn't so bad for me; in fact, I kind of prefer not knowing what a guy's slugging average vs. left-handers is when I'm doing a fictional 1924 replay. After all, managers of the day only had a vague sense of platoon splits. On the other hand, all those extra numbers can be fun to look at at times, and right now PS won't show them. No depth charts in PS so far as I can tell. Well, there is a cool graphical representation of the guys you've got on your team and in your system at each position, but you can't to my knowledge go in and say "I want to rest my starting LF 18% of the time vs. righties, and of that 18% I want my 4th OFer to start half and my 5th to start the other half." On game engine issues outside of the single/double/HR/etc. modifiers, it's pretty much uncharted territory. I think the game just hasn't been around long enough for folks to figure out exactly what levels you want your starting pitchers' endurance rates to be at in the dead ball era or in the 1970s. This is one area where OOTP really has PS beat. Not to say that OOTP is perfect in this regard; there's just less stuff to get your head around. Both games are very customizeable and both games have a sizeable fan base that enjoys modding/tweaking the game. OOTP's fan base, though, is a lot bigger and so far at least is a lot more active with this kind of thing. No Catobase for PS, for example. Example, heck... that may be the biggest reason why OOTP still roxors. Beyond that, though, OOTP's community is quite a bit bigger, for better or for worse. Final Thoughts --------------- In general, let me say this: this game is a lot further along than MD in particular and other OOTP fanboys in general think it is. It does several things very, very well, and since there won't be a new iteration of Markus' game for several months, we don't even necessarily need to choose between the two right now. Even when they are competing against each other, I suspect it will be more a competition for the limited playing time each text sim fan has rather than a competition for dollars; I know I could easily spend 80-90 bucks a year on two very good baseball games. And, of course, the existence of a worthy rival is only good news for OOTP, for reasons I've already stated ad nauseum.

04-02-2005, 02:45 PM	#2
Mike D Hall Of Famer Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: In a van, down by the river Posts: 2,802	STFU noob. __________________ Sometimes the best laid plans will never get you laid the way you plan.

04-02-2005, 05:13 PM	#4
ihatenames Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Rockford Posts: 2,534	i played it for a while when it was still free. i had trouble getting into it. I have no real complaints, but i think the UI could use some work. __________________ New Album coming soon!

04-06-2005, 08:15 AM	#14
Jestre All Star Reserve Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: North Smithfield,Ri,USA Posts: 612	Puresim does give you a great ingame experience, it just "feels" better than OOTP. Problem for me is that I am a deadball fan and Puresim does not do a good job of recreating deadball play. Also every strategic move made ingame requires you to pull up a menu to make selections from which in deadball games is quite frequently and it really detracts from the flow of the game. I had no real problem with the sim speed but I understand that the recent iteration of PS has increased speed significantly. If PS addresses the deadball strategy issues and adjusts the strategy choices to keystrokes from the game field screen I would probably prefer playing PS to OOTP. __________________ My eyes perceive the present, but my roots are imbedded deeply in the grandeur of the past. "Chief Meyers"

04-02-2005, 06:41 PM	#6
Le Grande Orange Hall Of Famer Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: Up There Posts: 15,644	Depending on what you like to do, this factor may be a big drawback to PureSim: it has no manually controlled league realignment or expansion ability. You can have the league set up to expand on its own, which it will do after some period of time based on some criteria, but when it does expand you get no control whatsoever over where the new teams will go or how other teams will shift around in response. The result is that you can get some pretty large realignments taking place in response to the expansion, changes which you may not like and cannot change or influence. If you turn off this expansion feature, then your league will remain at the same size and alignment for its entire life. In either case, you can't do a historical replay because you can't have the major leagues match their historical expansions and realignments. On the upside, the game does apparently handle doubleheaders without any issues, unlike OOTP6 which still has some problems with twin bills.

04-03-2005, 12:21 AM	#9
LeiterFanatic All Star Starter Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Miami, FL Posts: 1,348	I have a love hate relationship with it. I find the In-game play is fantastically immersive, due to nice stadium backgrounds (with a little hunting on thr web) and the player photos really are better implemented that OOTP. But the free agency bidding needs some work and guys who lean toward your offer mysteriously up and sign with a betetr offer you had no chance to counter. I actually love the game and cant stay away from it for long. D/L it, you'll like it everyone.

04-03-2005, 10:26 AM	#10
Dazooz Minors (Double A) Join Date: Dec 2001 Posts: 193	I play both!

04-05-2005, 10:17 AM	#13
CubsLose Minors (Single A) Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: London, England Posts: 87	I started with baseball text sims using PureSim, and I would probably still be playing it if I didn't have countless download problems. PS has a great PbP screen showing you where balls fall on the field of play. It also has a fantastic financial coefficient allowing you recreate salaries from every era. Having said that, all of the problems listed in above posts are legitimate complaints, and I am now so immersed in OOTP that I can't imagine playing any other sim.

04-06-2005, 04:10 PM	#19
LeiterFanatic All Star Starter Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Miami, FL Posts: 1,348	ok sir, i wont presume anymore to tell you your business!