Hello, I'm Loving OOTP 11, & Two Questions

[omniart]

Hello! This is my first post on these forums, having just purchased OOTP Baseball last week. I'm quite addicted already & wanted to thank everyone at OOTP for making an awesome game. Thanks!

I had two more technical questions about the game. First, is the outcome of an at-bat based solely on the pure ratings, or are baseball statistics used? In other words, might a .300 & a .305 hitter both be abstracted to, say, a Contact Rating of 15, giving them, in effect, the same chance of getting a hit? Or does the .305 hitter actually have a very slight edge?

Second, how are the market size ratings determined? I see that it's a rating from 1 to 20, but I don't see anything about the basis of these ratings. (Though, it just now occurred to me that perhaps they could be determined by using the population & latitude/longitude information, say by totaling the population of all cities within 10 miles of the team's city.)

[kq76]

1) Unless Markus is doing something that many of us would take great umbrage with, no, the outcome of an at bat is based solely on various ratings, not statistics. He did that once, but thankfully he finally saw the error in the logic.

2) Things like this can change from version to version so I'm not certain this is still the case, but I think you'll find that initial market size depends on payroll (as opposed to population as what most of us would probably figure it'd depend on) and that it's later largely dependent on winning (as most would probably agree with).

[omniart]

Ha! That would explain why in the game that I started, in which I am managing one of the the teams and the AI the other seven, & in the inaugural draft of which I (like a good little student of Moneyball) chose players in their mid-twenties specifically because they would be cheaper—that would explain why I have the smallest market size of the eight teams. Rather outsmarted myself there!

My tight budget to the side, tying initial market size to payroll makes sense, and I definitely like that market size increases with winning: successful teams gain a national fan base.

While I didn't have a dog in the fight between ratings and statistics (asking out of my own curiosity), it did seem to me that statistics would provide a higher degree of resolution. Your response gives me some food for thought!

Thanks, kq76, for the info!

[molarmite]

Originally Posted by omniart

While I didn't have a dog in the fight between ratings and statistics (asking out of my own curiosity), it did seem to me that statistics would provide a higher degree of resolution. Your response gives me some food for thought!

Thanks, kq76, for the info!

While you may be using a 1-20 scale to look at certain ratings, a player's actual ratings range up to 250 in the background. If you go to the player editor while in commissioner mode, you can see these exact ratings. So all 15's aren't the same, there is a high and low 15 that could make the difference between .300 and .305 AVG.

[SteveP]

Originally Posted by omniart

Second, how are the market size ratings determined? I see that it's a rating from 1 to 20, but I don't see anything about the basis of these ratings. (Though, it just now occurred to me that perhaps they could be determined by using the population & latitude/longitude information, say by totaling the population of all cities within 10 miles of the team's city.)

To be a bit more clear on this one: market size is derived entirely from the starting payroll of the team. In fact, the other market related numbers (fan interest, for example) are also derived this way. IOW, the game calculates a starting payroll based on the quality of the players, and then creates a market to support that payroll.

You can adjust market size to produce something more realistic, but you have to take care in doing that. First, don't make the adjustment all at once, but do it in phases over 2-3 seasons. Second, don't try to imitate RL (for example, by making NY 15 and KC 3, for some such thing). You want to limit the overall range (for example, I typically will run them from 2-9). The financial model simply won't support realistic market size relationships.

[omniart]

Originally Posted by molarmite

While you may be using a 1-20 scale to look at certain ratings, a player's actual ratings range up to 250 in the background.

I'm liking this more & more. The naked eye can't tell the difference between a .290 & .300 hitter. ("That means if you get just one extra flare a week, just one . . . you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.") IRL, stats give us a greater degree of precision in our evaluation of players. The same principles are at work here: given more at-bats, we gain statistical differences between players that cannot be seen with the scout's eye. Nicely designed!

[mjj55409]

And this is precisely why I like to play with actual ratings off, and potentials on a 1-10 scale.