Injuries and talent/ratings loss

[geoff]

I'm a bit troubled, and due to the quickly approaching release of OOTP11, I felt the need to speak up. I recently asked the Commissioner of one of my online leagues whether they had seen fit in OOTP11 to fix the "bug" where a player that suffers a "long term" injury can and will get hit with hammering losses to actual and potential talent ratings that can and often do render them completely ineffectual from that point forward. I was quite literally shocked to hear that this "feature" is "working as intended", under the rationale that it is meant to "even out the talent in a league".

As an online GM who has quite literally seen dozens of star hitters, ace hurlers and top prospects completely decimated by month(s)-long thumb and toe injuries with the apparently inevitable (and intended) crushing ratings losses following shortly thereafter, I cant begin to describe how disappointing and frustrating this aspect of the game is. I dont see the validity in the argument that it's intended to "even out talent", as this could reasonably be flipped around to work in a more positive way, I.E. if the game determines a league is lopsided talent-wise in favor of hitting, it might not decay older pitchers as quickly, or it might inject a few fringe AAA pitchers with a ratings/pitch boost that suddenly makes them viable major leaguers. Rather than destroy players, it would seem very easy to instead plus up the shortfall.

I just dont see a reason why season after season, team owners have to watch Spring Training with sheer dread, hoping that star player/prospect X, Y, or Z doesnt get injured and have his career/potential completely ruined. After one such recent spree of player and prospect destruction on my online team, I commented to the league commissioner that if this remained the same in the next release of OOTP, I would not be purchasing any more OOTP products. Hearing that this "feature" remains has me seriously considering saying farewell to the two online leagues I've grown quite fond of, and shelving my online fantasy baseball gaming for the forseeable future. It's an incredibly disappointing prospect, and while I dont intend to sound like the Ugly American Consumer, I guess I wanted to get it out there where the developers might see and realize that their decision to leave this in the game may actually be turning away a long-time OOTP customer and participant.

[Curtis]

I'm pretty sure that 'even out the talent' means that the injury system is intimately tied into the player aging/deterioration curves.

Individual players vary, but for some decades now professional baseball as a whole has had predictable development/deterioration curves for various skills. For example, the ability of pitchers to strike out batters rises and falls at a particular rate , and their ability to control walks rises and falls at a different, but equally predictable rate.

Markus has chosen to use injuries as one of the ways to make the curves of the artificial players in his game approximate the ones Tango Tiger (I think) defined for real players. That won't make you appreciate the injury=ratings hit system any better than you did, but you should know it has nothing to do with balancing out a league that's lopsided pitching vs. batting.

I seem to recall that some poster determined that in real life about a third of long term injuries have a permanent adverse affect on player performance. (I usually attribute anything to do with injuries to Injury Log, but it could've been Syd Thrift or someone else.) So, there actually is a basis in fact for this 'feature', though the game certainly seems to take it to an extreme.

By the way, I can relate to your feeling that this feature seriously damages your enjoyment of the game and endangers your desire to keep supporting the franchise. I've had a couple of those myself, but mine got resolved.

[Getch]

I am going to have to agree with Geoff on this one. I am in two leagues, and in both leagues I spend 5 seasons to build a massive core of young talent. I won the World Series in both, but within 1-2 years, I would say 70% of my 30-or-under year olds had a month-long injury that decimated their talent.

Here is the details of one league:

27 year old with a .320 batting average and 1600 hits already, strains his rib and has knee tendenitis, and is pretty much out of the league at 28 years old.
29 year old with a career .300 average has shoulder inflammation and now can no longer hit the ball
24 year old uber-prospect, bats .312 his rookie year, pinches a nerve in his neck and he's a back up utility man the rest of his career
30 year old also with a .300 average has a strained groin and is no longer playing the next year
31 year old who's won a MVP, usually a .280/35 HR guy, fractured eye socket and he's out of the league within 2 years

31 year old, 4-time Cy Young winner has shoulder inflammation and becomes a #4/#5 type starter
28 year old starter with a 3.20 ERA, torn rotator cuff and is barely a starter now
31 year old 3.30 ERA just dies talent/ratings wise with no injury other than a 3-day one
27 year old stud closer, torn back muscle, had to be converted to my 6th starter to salvage him

So, in one league, 5 of my 6 best hitters, my 3 top SP and my closer ALL took talent/ratings hits in the PRIME of their careers that made them backup-types, or out of the game.

In my other league, my 3 best hitters, a 28 year old and two 27-year olds, all uber-studs hitting .320/30+ HR's suffer a sprained knee, fractured thumb, and a concussion, and become my #7 hitter, my backup OF, and a CEI, respectively.

In both leagues, the injury setting was "Low". Now, tell me how this is realistic at all? Can you picture Tampa Bay in real life, which my two teams most closely resembled with youth/talent, having Longoria, Crawford, Upton, Zobrist, Pena, Shields, Price and Garza all become every-day players/backups in a 2 year span?

The biggest issue, in my mind, is the effect injuries have on batters. I can swallow the injuries to pitchers , where you do see pitchers flame out in their twenties, but it should be a VERY rare occurance where a .320 career 28-year old batter suddenly loses his stroke. 8 of my top 9 batters around that age in 2 leagues had it happen to them.

This must be fixed, and I am shocked to hear that it has not been. This is the most glaring, annoying and frustrating thing about OOTP in my mind. Established major league players in their prime should not all of a sudden 'lose it' due to a month-long injury.

[thomamon]

I have many people in many of my online leagues who feel the same way.

And I'm not sure what your saying is exactly true Curtis because I just look 3 young players to long term injuries, all of whom have been murdered in talent/ratings. All in a matter of the first month of the season too. The ages were between 22-26. I am still bitterly disgusted at that league. Now not only am I competing this year, but I am done as I can not replace the FOUR pitchers I lost.

[sansterre]

I believe Curtis is saying (forgive me for paraphrasing) that injuries in real life very commonly have a negative impact on players' skills and potential. And accordingly, that players getting creamed by harsh injuries is just part of the game of baseball; a part that OOTP attempts to duplicate.

[thomamon]

Getch hit the nail on the head...

You can't argue with his post.

[megamanmatt]

Originally Posted by thomamon

Getch hit the nail on the head...

You can't argue with his post.

I disagree. I could argue very easily. However it doesn't matter as it "works as intended" so there isn't anything to fix anyway.

[Curtis]

I'm not going to argue with his post, or even argue sample size. I'm not claiming the people who don't like the feature are wrong. I'm claiming there is some reason behind it. It's perfectly valid to not agree with the reasoning.

[OldFatGuy]

Originally Posted by Curtis

I'm not going to argue with his post, or even argue sample size. I'm not claiming the people who don't like the feature are wrong. I'm claiming there is some reason behind it. It's perfectly valid to not agree with the reasoning.

There's the post you you can't argue with.

[OldFatGuy]

And by the way, I don't much like it either. I see the reasoning behind it, but don't agree with it's implementation, in that IMO it's overdone quite a bit, especially to hitters.

Just my opinion.

[majorjello]

I think I understand both sides of this but the amount of talent destroying injuries does seem to be a little excessive. Maybe it's an illusion?

[kingcharlesxii]

To me it is a lot less frustrating than guy randomly losing talents and ratings. At least there's a bit of explanation with injuries. A guy who just randomly loses 1 (on a 10 pt scale) in all his main attributes is far more annoying to me.

Guys can't all be superstars and ratings have to go down as well as up for some guys. I don't want to go back to the OOTP 4/5 days where it was predictable when a guy would start to decline.

[geoff]

I never meant to imply that there was no reason behind it, so I'm not entirely sure why that has become a sticking point to the thread. The fact is that the implementation of it is VERY poorly handled to the point where it's hard to fathom that other alternatives might not better replicate the desired intent while maintaining a higher "fun factor". Why cant certain injuries (i.e. knee, shoulder, elbow) be flagged as "severe" enough to warrant adjustments to ratings? Why cant the adjustments be tuned to be less severe, or the entire development model be tuned to where such drops are not absolutely catastrophic but to where the player starts out at a "debilitated" level but is able to rebound and recover to some semblance of those former ratings?

In this same league, when OOTP10 dropped, there was a heated debate over the fact that frequency and severity of injuries had been ramped up and teams lost entire pitching staffs at the same time as they lost two or three of their better hitters. While the commissioner pointed to the New York Mets and said "but this sort of thing actually _happens_", the compelling counter-argument was that when the day ends, this is a game and is intended to be fun. For the life of me, I cant think of one "fun" thing about the scenario Getch describes.

To say "It works as intended, so there isnt anything to fix" is a non sequitur, to be honest, and adds nothing of value to the over-arcing thread. The point is that the fact that it works as intended is even more egregious than if it were a simple bug, because there HAS to be a better way to achieve the desired purpose. The fact that it has not only been left in the game but further justified as an intentional design feature would only seem to further my determination to not support any more OOTP projects, just as I eventually backed away from platforms like FPS:BB and HH when it was determined they were inadequate in one are or another. The difference is that this community is more robust and supportive than any of those, and I felt it worthwhile (and was encouraged by my online league commissioner, quite frankly) to air my issues before simply walking off into the night.

[TribeFanInNC]

This issue is much deeper than just 'injuries make my players suck'. Yes, injuries balance talent within the league and it is a necessary part of the game. Think of 'talent' as more of a commodity. If too much talent is infused into the league (i.e. talent in is greater than talent out), the game becomes Nintendo baseball. Conversely, if more talent leaves than is infused, then everyone sucks and it is no fun. Talent must be relatively zero-sum, otherwise you eventually get one of the two scenarios above.

Point being, the game is balancing the talent coming in with injuries and talent drops. If the league has a lot of new talent coming in through the draft or international player discovery, then talent hits from injury (or otherwise) will be severe. The commish must take this into account.

Also, there is a setting that makes talent changes less severe in general. The commish has control of this too.

Like Curtis, I also do not want to argue the point. It does work as intended and is necessary.

[TribeFanInNC]

As an addendum, the only point that probably still isn't right is the ratio of pitcher/batter injuries. Too many batter injuries in general.

[kingcharlesxii]

Originally Posted by geoff

To say "It works as intended, so there isnt anything to fix" is a non sequitur, to be honest, and adds nothing of value to the over-arcing thread. The point is that the fact that it works as intended is even more egregious than if it were a simple bug, because there HAS to be a better way to achieve the desired purpose. The fact that it has not only been left in the game but further justified as an intentional design feature would only seem to further my determination to not support any more OOTP projects, just as I eventually backed away from platforms like FPS:BB and HH when it was determined they were inadequate in one are or another. The difference is that this community is more robust and supportive than any of those, and I felt it worthwhile (and was encouraged by my online league commissioner, quite frankly) to air my issues before simply walking off into the night.

I guess I'm not sure how you want talent to decline in your leagues then. You could tweak the talent change randomizer feature and adjust the aging curves if you don't want your young guys to flame out early but at some point they're gonna have to decline. If it becomes predictable, the game is boring.

And maybe I'm crazy but I love it when my top guys go down to injury and I have to struggle to find a replacement. Otherwise you may as well just press "sim season" after FA and get a result. It lets me actually manage.

[mbi]

I see nothing wrong with this other then the fact these injuries aren't severe enough. Instead of a rib strain it should be an achilles strain, but there is really nothing wrong otherwise, and isn't a problem to me.

[Getch]

The game is attempting to be as realistic as possible. You seem to be arguing the end's justify the means, even if the means are not realistic. I understand that injuries must happen. I also understand that talent needs to fluctuate. And I understand that injuries can often affect talent.

However, the game, from my observation, seems to have a blanket rule like "All injuries over 3 weeks has a 30% probability of dropping a talent (or more) by 20 or so percent". There seems to be a complete disregard to what type of injury, the age of the player, and the position (batter vs pitcher) of said player.

My beef is not a general issue with the implementation, but a specific problem in that there is an inordinate number of players, specifically batters, in their prime (25-32) that go from perennial All-Stars to backup utility players in one, often minor injury.

The question is, does OOTP take account age/position/injury in determining the long-term affects of an injury? If so, have we done analysis to match up how it handles injuries for players in their primes with real-life data? My suspicion is that it will be way off.

[Getch]

Originally Posted by mbi

I see nothing wrong with this other then the fact these injuries aren't severe enough. Instead of a rib strain it should be an achilles strain, but there is really nothing wrong otherwise, and isn't a problem to me.

I think then you'll find that there are way too many torn ACL's and massive ligament damage than there are in real-life. You're just hiding the inherent problem.

[battists]

I find myself wondering if the phrase "works as intended" has been taken slightly out of context. That's not an accusation, but I suspect that what Markus may have been talking about is the injury system in general. The context above makes it sound like Markus has deliberately coded the game to injure star players, which I absolutely do not think is the case.

I suspect (again, just suspect) that what Markus may have been referring to is that the frequency of injuries in OOTP overall is "working as intended," particularly when looked at with a large sample size, in the sense that statistically the numbers are very similar to those in real-life baseball.

I'm not arguing that there's no issue here worth addressing. I just don't want to give people the impression that the game deliberately penalizes star players as a way to maintain balance in the league. (If someone has seen where Markus has posted something to that effect, please link me!)

If anything, I'm more concerned by the "talent hits ruin the player afterwards" aspect of this conversation. We're about out of time in the beta cycle, but I'll make sure this gets a last look, at any rate...

Thanks,

Steve