I hate this game...

[BluKing]

I wish all the posts looking for help or asking questions with no responses on the front page got as much attention as this one did. Maybe if I make a post saying I hate the game someone would respond.

[BirdWatcher]

Originally Posted by BluKing

I wish all the posts looking for help or asking questions with no responses on the front page got as much attention as this one did. Maybe if I make a post saying I hate the game someone would respond.

Your frustration is understandable and I'm sorry if you have asked questions for which you have not received answers.
I think, to be fair, that part of the problem is that there are so many variations on how to play this game and many of the more experienced OOTP'ers do tend to settle into a way that works best for them. And for that reason, often people just won't know the answer to specific questions asked here. You have to hope that someone who has experience with the specific question you have sees your question and provides an answer. Sometimes this does require some patience as well.
It probably also isn't a bad idea to try asking in a few places- for instance, instead of just asking here on this official forum maybe also ask on the Reddit OOTP forum. There are also other sources which I will admit I don't use, like Twitch and Discord, and you might find answers there as well.

I know that when I was first learning this game I also used my search engine pretty heavily to find out whether there were discussions in the past about the topic I was looking for help on and that is another good way to gather information.

[actionjackson]

Originally Posted by MathBandit

This isn't an airport. No need to announce your departure.

[USF]

Originally Posted by Jesus Tralfaz

This game is pure adulterated garbage. The AI always manages to find a way to win. For example I noticed how The AI consistently advances their runner at his convenience. Where as my runners never advance. The stolen bases are a massive joke. His catcher throws out my runners (Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey) at his leisure with a rating in the 30's. Yet my catcher (Johnny Bench) has a rating of 80, and cannot throw out a baserunner if his life depended on it.

Doesn't matter what team I play the AI conveniently finds a way to cheat me out of a win. I played the 75 and 76 Reds and I noticed how my team made the opponents scabs look like all-stars. Nobody on my team can hit. (Imagine Pete Rose hitting a paltry .215, or better yet Johnny Bench not hitting a home until sometime in mid-May). I go against a player who didn't hit a home run that season, and somehow he magically hits two against me, or a pitcher with an ERA in the high 5.00's miraculously shuts my team down with an amazing 3 hit shut-out, adding insult to injury striking out 12! These are just a few issues I have with game.

I cannot get halfway through the season without getting so frustrated before I delete my game. The AI reminds me of the casinos in Vegas. By that I mean the House always wins.

I get frustrated by that realization. I have tried to replay the seasons. Only to yet again watch a team of scrubs turn into all-stars when I play them. This is a prime example of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Dear God I cannot understand why I wasted so much time on this awful game.

I would be better off taking the money I spent on this game, and wiping my ass with it. It's a walking integrity problem and a colossal waste of time. I plan on playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball. At least I know the AI is not going to cheat on me.

Not every game will be for everyone.
Even the most popular video games on steam have negative reviews :-)

Regarding some of your points:
Advancing base runners - Do you use your teams overall strategy settings? or do you rely on your manager to control these settings? You might want to take a look at that.
Catchers throwing out runners - Do you have some significant "data" to demonstrate your point? like a full season.
RE: Your Reds team individual performances: Again do you have "data" to demonstrate your point. Over a course of 162 game season there will be ups and downs along the way. A .300 hitter doesn't typically hit .300 every month.
You mention SOM - You cannot compare the two products they are both great in their own individual ways. Even stratomatic will have its frustrating times when the dice gods are not on your side.

Good luck out there!

[Reed]

11 years ago I had Strat but wanted to play historical but no way I could afford the historical seasons on Strat so I bought OOTP. The first thing I wanted to do was to see how accurate OOTP & SOM where compared to real life. So I used default settings for both and simulated the previous season 3 times for both. I then took batters that had (if I remember correctly) over 500 plate appearances and 200 IP on both simulations. I just looked at batting averages and whip stats, throwing out the best/worse season for each player. For each game I then counted how many batters came within 20 points of their real life stat or within .2 of their whip. It was close but in my very unscientific test, stat was closer by 4 or 5 players. It was close enough that I ditched Strat..
Would love for a couple others to run a test comparing the 2. I used 500 PA and 200 IP because I didn’t want a smaller sample size to influence things.

[Syd Thrift]

I feel like I beat this drum a lot but... OOTP's strength is as a mutli-season GM sim. Personally I like to get really, really deep into single (fictional) seasons but for me a big part of the fun factor is not knowing if the 32 year old left fielder who led the league in HRs and RBIs 3 seasons ago but, halfway through the year, has 3 HRs in 42 games (granted, he's already missed a quarter of the year with an injury) has lost it or is just in a slump. Or was he ever really that good when he had the 43 dingers? I don't know the answer to this. I prefer not knowing and having to make a decision. In this case his team is winning anyway and he doesn't seem to be actively hurting them so I'm keeping him in the lineup but there are definitely guys nipping at his heels.

I feel like we see this about this time every year: people come in, want to play the game like Strat, and then when it doesn't behave exactly like SOM they get mad and announce their anger to everyone. It's not Strat. It doesn't intend to be Strat. It's not a cards-and-dice game. It's particularly not going to be Strat when it comes to single-season replays because Strat goes in and hand-curates those seasons (and then charge as much as OOTP does for the entire game, which, let's face it, is the real reason why these people bought OOTP in the first place). It still does a pretty good job with single season replays but it's not really built for that. The more I play OOTP the less I like the idea of the single-season replay - no season is just stuck in time; all baseball seasons are transitioning from the season and era before to the next season and era - but if that's how you want to play, go ahead. Just... don't knock the game because it doesn't do things it wasn't really ever intended to do.

Also, SOM absolutely fudges dice rolls, specifically when it comes to low-chance plays like triples by Cecil Fielder, so let's not pretend otherwise. I think you can still turn that off but it's a thing. Personally I much prefer the OOTP tools-based method of fielding instead of the SOM "1e16" style, although I do get the allure of being able to see first-hand how horrible playing like a 4e27 guy at short is (where in OOTP we had to suss that kind of thing out by doing lots and lots of replays - just to note, though, fielding in OOTP is extremely important, easily as important as it is in SOM). I even prefer the purely-stat-generated approach to fielding with the caveat that I play fictional and so don't have to worry about like Ozzie Smith being a 75/80 fielder in the early 90s or what have you.

OOTP is a very robust game and I encourage everyone to play it their way. I think the game shines in terms of needing the least amount of tinkering to get it to look right when you do modern, non-fictional leagues (although if you start in the current year, after a couple seasons all your draftees are going to be fictional of course, plus by 20 years or so in virtually all of your players will also be fictional), but I have had lots of success over the years playing fictional leagues in various eras (currently I'm in 1970 but I've done leagues in the postwar era, the 30s, the deadball era, and even a pretty big dive into the 19th century a couple years ago). Just remember that the further away you get from the thing the devs build for, the more hurdles you'll probably need to jump through, and if you expect the game to do a tertiary thing as well as other games do their primary thing, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment, much the same as if you tried to use Quake to run a chess tournament.

[Curve Ball Dave]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

I feel like I beat this drum a lot but... OOTP's strength is as a mutli-season GM sim. Personally I like to get really, really deep into single (fictional) seasons but for me a big part of the fun factor is not knowing if the 32 year old left fielder who led the league in HRs and RBIs 3 seasons ago but, halfway through the year, has 3 HRs in 42 games (granted, he's already missed a quarter of the year with an injury) has lost it or is just in a slump. Or was he ever really that good when he had the 43 dingers? I don't know the answer to this. I prefer not knowing and having to make a decision. In this case his team is winning anyway and he doesn't seem to be actively hurting them so I'm keeping him in the lineup but there are definitely guys nipping at his heels.

I feel like we see this about this time every year: people come in, want to play the game like Strat, and then when it doesn't behave exactly like SOM they get mad and announce their anger to everyone. It's not Strat. It doesn't intend to be Strat. It's not a cards-and-dice game. It's particularly not going to be Strat when it comes to single-season replays because Strat goes in and hand-curates those seasons (and then charge as much as OOTP does for the entire game, which, let's face it, is the real reason why these people bought OOTP in the first place). It still does a pretty good job with single season replays but it's not really built for that. The more I play OOTP the less I like the idea of the single-season replay - no season is just stuck in time; all baseball seasons are transitioning from the season and era before to the next season and era - but if that's how you want to play, go ahead. Just... don't knock the game because it doesn't do things it wasn't really ever intended to do.

Also, SOM absolutely fudges dice rolls, specifically when it comes to low-chance plays like triples by Cecil Fielder, so let's not pretend otherwise. I think you can still turn that off but it's a thing. Personally I much prefer the OOTP tools-based method of fielding instead of the SOM "1e16" style, although I do get the allure of being able to see first-hand how horrible playing like a 4e27 guy at short is (where in OOTP we had to suss that kind of thing out by doing lots and lots of replays - just to note, though, fielding in OOTP is extremely important, easily as important as it is in SOM). I even prefer the purely-stat-generated approach to fielding with the caveat that I play fictional and so don't have to worry about like Ozzie Smith being a 75/80 fielder in the early 90s or what have you.

OOTP is a very robust game and I encourage everyone to play it their way. I think the game shines in terms of needing the least amount of tinkering to get it to look right when you do modern, non-fictional leagues (although if you start in the current year, after a couple seasons all your draftees are going to be fictional of course, plus by 20 years or so in virtually all of your players will also be fictional), but I have had lots of success over the years playing fictional leagues in various eras (currently I'm in 1970 but I've done leagues in the postwar era, the 30s, the deadball era, and even a pretty big dive into the 19th century a couple years ago). Just remember that the further away you get from the thing the devs build for, the more hurdles you'll probably need to jump through, and if you expect the game to do a tertiary thing as well as other games do their primary thing, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment, much the same as if you tried to use Quake to run a chess tournament.

Well put

[David Watts]

OOTP plays so great as a historical whatif. That being said, I think the game would really benefit from making the historical db less rigid. Make it easier to create fictional leagues using real players.

For example it needs to be simple to create a league starting in 1921 with fictional teams and a fictional structure with zero history and zero stats. Doing so should not result in a historical leaderboard going into the 1922 season that features Johnny Evers leading every single offensive category due to his stats dating all the way back to 1902.

I love random debut as it's simple to create fictional leagues using real players and start with zero history. I just wish I could do the same thing using a say 1921 or 1947.

[tejdog1]

Originally Posted by Jesus Tralfaz

The limitations is my issue with OOTP. I expect absolute perfection. I cannot play a game when I hold my breath and ask myself, "I wonder what scrub on the other team will look like a Hall of Famer today at my expense?" Or what I refer to is cheating.

I'm done with this sorry excuse for a game. I have already recommended to friends not to play this game. It's not worth the time or investment to play.

Cry me a god damn river
Jeff Suppan


Jeff Weaver


Yes, this still hurts 15+ years later.

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by tejdog1

Cry me a god damn river

I like the cut of your jib!

[brotherblues]

Stolen bases is one of the more easily abused aspects of the game in favor of the player.

[ProfessorT]

Other than that, though, it's a pretty good game, no?

Originally Posted by Jesus Tralfaz

This game is pure adulterated garbage. The AI always manages to find a way to win. For example I noticed how The AI consistently advances their runner at his convenience. Where as my runners never advance. The stolen bases are a massive joke. His catcher throws out my runners (Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey) at his leisure with a rating in the 30's. Yet my catcher (Johnny Bench) has a rating of 80, and cannot throw out a baserunner if his life depended on it.

Doesn't matter what team I play the AI conveniently finds a way to cheat me out of a win. I played the 75 and 76 Reds and I noticed how my team made the opponents scabs look like all-stars. Nobody on my team can hit. (Imagine Pete Rose hitting a paltry .215, or better yet Johnny Bench not hitting a home until sometime in mid-May). I go against a player who didn't hit a home run that season, and somehow he magically hits two against me, or a pitcher with an ERA in the high 5.00's miraculously shuts my team down with an amazing 3 hit shut-out, adding insult to injury striking out 12! These are just a few issues I have with game.

I cannot get halfway through the season without getting so frustrated before I delete my game. The AI reminds me of the casinos in Vegas. By that I mean the House always wins.

I get frustrated by that realization. I have tried to replay the seasons. Only to yet again watch a team of scrubs turn into all-stars when I play them. This is a prime example of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Dear God I cannot understand why I wasted so much time on this awful game.

I would be better off taking the money I spent on this game, and wiping my ass with it. It's a walking integrity problem and a colossal waste of time. I plan on playing Strat-O-Matic Baseball. At least I know the AI is not going to cheat on me.

[curt]

Originally Posted by brotherblues

Stolen bases is one of the more easily abused aspects of the game in favor of the player.

I disagree. I have a lot of speedsters on my fictional team. I get a lot of stolen bases but my guys aren't leading the league in stolen bases. I've played plenty of games and have been beaten by a stolen base.