Things I learned about OOTP this year

[Orcin]

1. Historical minors don't work for me. Every time that I start a league with this feature I find something that looks wonky to me. I started in 1969 and the expansion teams had only a couple of low level affiliates. Even though this is true in real life, I didn't like playing this way. I want to be able to import the real historical minor leaguers into my own semi-fictional organization structure that is stable from year-to-year. I started a couple of others and ended up with career minor leaguers as stars because they were significantly overrated (recalc makes this much better though if you are not in Challenge Mode and can use it).

2. Challenge Mode is only for players that simulate their games. If you play out your games, or even sim daily and smell the coffee, you can never accumulate the number of seasons played required to appear on the leaderboard. Despite efforts by the developers to keep the leaderboard honest, it is also plagued by cheating. I know the leaderboard doesn't matter, and that is another reason not to bother with this feature. I had high hopes.

3. This is a personal preference only, but I don't like playing historical leagues using the player development engine (as forced by Challenge Mode). I don't like seeing fringe players appear as ready-to-play high-potential rookies and develop into all-stars. I don't mind the player dev engine taking over after a player was supposed to retire, but I want the real stars to be the stars in my game. Again, just my preference.

Having learned these things, I can now enjoy the rest of my summer immersed in a historical league using recalc and reserve rosters while playing as GM/MGR on a day-by-day basis, and ignore both historical minors and Challenge Mode until they are improved.

Feel free to share your highs and lows this year, or disagree with my conclusions. I would love to learn that I am wrong about any of this. (Thanks for the replies, Lukas.)

[Lukas Berger]

On point 1, the real-life Expos had only three low level teams in 1969: http://www.baseball-reference.com/re...=WSN&year=1969, the Padres had only one: http://www.baseball-reference.com/re...=SDP&year=1969

Not sure why you think they had more?

As for the minor leaguers as stars, recalc would definitely fix that. If you're not playing with recalc, the dev engine takes over and anything can happen. That's just the game working as designed. We probably do need to look at some low level guys being initially overrated though, that's definitely not intended, but it's hard to get a formula that works for everyone in every case.

[Lukas Berger]

As for Challenge Mode, it's still new and we're still working things out. The cheating we take seriously and work on stopping, but it's impossible to plug every hole in advance. Any similar modes in other games, cheating is always an issue to be dealt with as well.

We'll keep working on plugging any loopholes though, but to do so we need to have people report suspicious things they see. We can't be everywhere and see everything

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

On point 1, the real-life Expos had only three low level teams in 1969: http://www.baseball-reference.com/re...=WSN&year=1969, the Padres had only one: http://www.baseball-reference.com/re...=SDP&year=1969

Not sure why you think they had more?

Ok, my mistake. I will correct my initial post.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

As for the minor leaguers as stars, recalc would definitely fix that. If you're not playing with recalc, the dev engine takes over and anything can happen. That's just the game working as designed. We probably do need to look at some low level guys being initially overrated though, that's definitely not intended, but it's hard to get a formula that works for everyone in every case.

I tried a league with recalc and it does look much better. I was not able to use recalc in Challenge Mode, so I had yet to try it. Again, I will correct my previous post.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

On point 1, the real-life Expos had only three low level teams in 1969: http://www.baseball-reference.com/re...=WSN&year=1969, the Padres had only one: http://www.baseball-reference.com/re...=SDP&year=1969

Not sure why you think they had more?

As for the minor leaguers as stars, recalc would definitely fix that. If you're not playing with recalc, the dev engine takes over and anything can happen. That's just the game working as designed. We probably do need to look at some low level guys being initially overrated though, that's definitely not intended, but it's hard to get a formula that works for everyone in every case.

I'm sure recalc helps and makes a huge difference compared to simply using the development engine, but I still think the AI needs a lot of improvement when it comes to recognizing career minor league slugs. For example 1971 Detroit Tigers. Kaline goes down with an injury in the 2nd game of the season. Tigers still have Horton, Stanley and Northrup on the roster. The AI promotes some guy that never played a game in the majors and inserts him into the everyday starting lineup. You also see way too many pitching staff populated with guys the never were. But, like you said, the formula is probably extremely complicated in this regard.

[dkgo]

I like challenge mode just as a way to fix settings to what they "should be". been a good experience so far through a couple seasons in mlb quickstart playing out most games. don't even know how I would check whatever leaderboard there is or why I would care what other users are doing

[maximus33]

So to recap the things you learned were all incorrect

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by maximus33

So to recap the things you learned were all incorrect

I don't see it that way. Two of the points haven't changed. The first one is still an issue for me (see David Watts post for another example), but I am willing to take the advice provided by Lukas and give it another shot.