Historical endings

[Charlie Hough]

Originally Posted by Brad K

I play historical. I play with recal and with Development on I have not experienced the problems described. I can only conclude the problems occur when people disabled development.

Yes, that seems to be why the OP created this thread. It would certainly seem to be the case, based on what he and others have described.

While you or I might play games with development turned on, many other users do not want to use development for a variety of reasons, even in combination with recalc. So, suggesting that they turn on development is effectively asking them to accept other unwanted trade-offs in exchange for solving a specific issue.

This is why a permanent fix for recalc-only games has been requested for over 10 years. While there's been progress, and the code has been updated to try and enable a fix, it's still not the full solution that these users have asked to see. So, I'm not going to ask them to change the settings they prefer to use. I'd rather see their request get fully implemented, so they can play the game under the conditions they prefer.

[uruguru]

Originally Posted by David Watts

As the screenshots show above, if you use a combination of recalc and development it's perfectly fine as well.

Yes, this is a good combination if you are incorporating fictional players in your historical sims.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by Charlie Hough

Yes, that seems to be why the OP created this thread. It would certainly seem to be the case, based on what he and others have described.

While you or I might play games with development turned on, many other users do not want to use development for a variety of reasons, even in combination with recalc. So, suggesting that they turn on development is effectively asking them to accept other unwanted trade-offs in exchange for solving a specific issue.

What trade offs? Development doesn't do anything to historical players until their stats run out. It solves the exact problem without having to use retire according to history and doesn't do anything else.

And OOTP defaults to the settings that solve the problem. If there's an error here by OOTP, it's that disabling development doesn't automatically enable retire according to history. It seems they were counting on the people unchecking box to realize the need for retire according to history.

Both retire according to history and development prevent players from being effective until they die. Two solutions. Both work. What would a third solution be?

[LansdowneSt]

Development does affect historical players during the year when on. That development gets washed away at the next recalc though. When the recalc runs out of stats, then it is just development doing its thing by itself shaping the remainder’s of the player.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by LansdowneSt

Development does affect historical players during the year when on. That development gets washed away at the next recalc though. When the recalc runs out of stats, then it is just development doing its thing by itself shaping the remainder’s of the player.

My understanding is that if TCR is off there is no change during the season. Thus it would be TCR not development causing changes during the season. I don't have any proof of that. It's very difficult to test things in OOTP since there is usually a lot of noise with the signal.

A problem is that the manual and in game selections treat a save with fictional players as subject to the same effects as a save with historical players. But can this really be true? With a goal of plausible performance for historical players, can OOTP really allow development, attitude, playing time, or coaching have a significant effect on a historical players?

[LansdowneSt]

Originally Posted by Brad K

My understanding is that if TCR is off there is no change during the season. Thus it would be TCR not development causing changes during the season. I don't have any proof of that. It's very difficult to test things in OOTP since there is usually a lot of noise with the signal.

A problem is that the manual and in game selections treat a save with fictional players as subject to the same effects as a save with historical players. But can this really be true? With a goal of plausible performance for historical players, can OOTP really allow development, attitude, playing time, or coaching have a significant effect on a historical players?

Ah, I had not seen that you were assuming TCR at zero. That matters but affects how much development there is but not if there is or isn't some because of those other variables you mentioned. To that end, yes, if morale, coaches, etc. is all on in your sim, it will move things during the year before resetting at the next recalc. Recalc is like jersey barriers, it will keep you on the road but all those things you mention (I call it noise) can have you drift a little left or right of true, bare-bones historic replay. It adds something imo. Others may prefer to play it straight. But that is also why you can turn those things off. Depends how much variance and noise you want in season for a change of pace to strict replay.

To see the degrees of development's (or noise's) in-season impact, turn off scouting for 100% ratings view and get scouting reports monthly. The TCR at zero will help a lot though, base development is surely the largest factor vs the noise. If those noise elements don't show as rating changes, it is something that affects results through some other means. I've never dug into the hows of them.

[Brad K]

^^^

Thank you.

[Brad K]

With dev on TCR 100 recalc and psychology turned off I had a LF in his 30s start the season with a def rating of 10 (20 scale) and end it at 2. After the season he was back up to 10. Next year, same thing, dropped all during the season. And afterwards he was back up to 10. Third try he stayed at 2.

Turning either dev or TCR to off would stop this so I guess some people would say TCR causes it and others would say dev causes it. I lean toward saying it's TCR because turning it off affects only this while turning off dev affects other things too. But that's just me and I can see the point of those who say dev causes it. TCR is the key that starts the engine.

[uruguru]

So basically there are two ways to deal with retired players not aging out properly in a historical sim with recalc:

1. Have development on (at least the aging parameters) and watch the player age himself into retirement as there is no recalc to bounce him back to MLB-quality ratings. In this scenario, you might get an extra (or a few extra) years from a veteran player.

2. Turn development off and turn on retire according to history. This will keep ratings stable for the whole league (no TCR or development drift), but player careers will end as abruptly as in the real world. However, I have seen many players not auto-retired when minors are turned on. So this could be buggy.

[Brad K]

Originally Posted by uruguru

So basically there are two ways to deal with retired players not aging out properly in a historical sim with recalc:

1. Have development on (at least the aging parameters) and watch the player age himself into retirement as there is no recalc to bounce him back to MLB-quality ratings. In this scenario, you might get an extra (or a few extra) years from a veteran player.

2. Turn development off and turn on retire according to history. This will keep ratings stable for the whole league (no TCR or development drift), but player careers will end as abruptly as in the real world. However, I have seen many players not auto-retired when minors are turned on. So this could be buggy.

I believe choice 1 is the best one. However, even with injuries set to OOTP Classic it doesn't take out enough players early via career ending injuries to compensate for those with extended careers. And OOTP Classic gives more injuries than default.

Recalc and dev on is the default settings. Default settings should work or mostly work. These settings do with the exception of not taking enough players out of the game to compensate for lengthened careers by others. I suppose this is mostly because the customers don't want to lose players early to career ending injuries, not because of an unwillingness to create a plausible alternate history.