My beefs/suggestions re: the OOTP line.

[jpf1001111]

I'll start by saying I'm a huge fan and think this is the best baseball management game on the market, and has been for years. And... that's enough of the brown nosing.

I have been buying this game on and off since around OOTP4 or 5. One thing that has always been a major hassle for me is importing the fan made rosters.

I like to start my leagues with a full draft using the latest fan packs with up-to-date players, stats, etc. (I can't use OOTP's stats, because they are always a year behind; I don't want to use ficitonal players; so my only choice is fan packs.). Given the game creation options that exist, this is impossible (or ridiculously hard to figure out - I think I actually got it once but I haven't been able to repeat my success since - and I'm a successful software engineer and generally know my way around technology).

I'd really like to see an option that lets you take an existing league, import its structure *AND PLAYERS* and then *start a new league from scratch with whatever options you want* using those players. It simply cannot be that hard to do. If you're hard up, I'd even be willing to write the code for you for free (and sign whatever NDA's you want, etc.) - just so I can have the feature.

if (TRUE == bImportPlayers)
{
    for (iterator it = oldPlayers.begin() ; it != oldPlayers.end() ; it++)
    {
        newLeague->AddPlayer(it);
    }
}

I can't be the only guy asking for this. I would imagine any online league that wanted to use real players would want this feature, as well. The closest thing to a solution I've found to this is to take a roster pack (sadly, the last one I got, maybe for 9? was already at opening day with no way to roll it back), sim a year, and then save it while it's still preseason and then dump all the players and hold a draft. This is less than desirable as I now have a "fake" year of stats.

In that vein, there should be a way to roll back the date in commissioner mode. If I could take a fanpack that is at opening day, and roll it back to pre-season, then I could release the players into a draft, and this would also solve the problem.

Finally, in my most humble opinion, the program is way too dependent on the database files. One little glitch, and your entire league is wrecked. With backup/restores of the full game taking *so* long, I don't want to do a save every day I exit out of the program, but without that, I almost never make it to 50 years of sim without at least one random disaster which renders the entire database unusable and the league dead. I've often found this hinges on something stupid, like a missing news article, or some such, which could easily be ignored and the league could move on. Perhaps a transactional database engine, so you could rollback failed transactions and get to a known good state where the game can continue?


Thanks for listening.


PS... if you can already do any of this, then you have my undying gratitude, and I'd love a link to a forum article that describes the process, because I've been asking how for years, also without much success.

[Malleus Dei]

I'd like to see that import feature myself.