OOTP 25 vs Footballmanager w4

[ayaghmour2]

Originally Posted by OutS|der

No true winter leagues, associations half assed. No Triple-A National Championship Game.
Fake countries is cosmetic when all the underlying rules are the same.
Want a salary floor, ability to loan players, make any other rules then a 9 inning game. Don't think we have true the league that can't be named or KBO roster rules.

Can I edit history, Or records?

There are so many ways we lack the ability to customize the games.

And there are so many other ways we can.

You do make some good points, winter leagues and loans are something I'd love to see. And yes, the International leagues going away really sucks. But you can still do a lot with the fake ones. I am curious what you mean by editing history/records. Like you want to make it so a specific team won the, let's say, 2012 world series, instead of who actually did? Or remove players from the record books?

I just don't see how FM's customization blows out all the different things you can do in OOTP. In FM you can make games less then 90 minutes? That's news to me. Plus you have to pay extra for the more advanced editor. OOTP (excluding GO but touch is similar for FM) lets you have everything on the base version

I guess I also have faith that a lot of the missing customization settings will get added. While it might not be enough for some, there are plenty of new features added with each release

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by ayaghmour2

I am curious what you mean by editing history/records. Like you want to make it so a specific team won the, let's say, 2012 world series, instead of who actually did? Or remove players from the record books?

Yes to all that and add history. Add the full history for the minors, who won and records, Do the same for any and all international leagues.

Reimport award badges and history on the player info page as all that is lost when importing a template.

I also love how in FM we can edit future transactions or edit the ones already in place.

[TheOtherCraig]

Just to throw my two cents into the mix.

I've put a couple thousand hours in to FM over the past 8 years or so. It's great. But there are things that made me fall out of love with it and find more enjoyment from OOTP. But it probably comes down more to the differences in the sport.

When discussing football tactics it is very difficult to isolate anything, everything folds into itself and is dependant on other things. Baseball is comparatively very simple with one on one matchups being the majority of the action.

In the FM community there is a large group of players around the 'tactics sphere'. The trouble comes where there is really no transparency around what is working and what isn't, and any seeking of advice is usually met by suggestions from people of logical things to try, but again, no way of knowing if it would make a difference or not. People share tactics and good results they've had with them, but with no way of knowing if it was their first attempt or just a lucky season. No way of looking under the hood.

Then occasionally you get people posting potentially match engine breaking things like speed being the ultimate game breaker, people having enormous success with teams full of bad players who are just quick. But these sorts of things are shouted down by the loyal fans who don't want to believe that a majority of the time they put into the game is meaningless and comes more down to luck than anything else. I know OOTP has these type of things on occasion, but the FM community is very defensive.

In short, the tactics area of the game is, in my opinion, near impossible to test and incredibly opaque and un-user friendly. You basically rely on team-building and maintaining morale to be successful with a tactic that isn't obviously awful or is the current meta.

The simplicity of OOTP became incredibly appealing, and I could actually see the difference my actions made. It is nearly entirely based around team-building, but without the extra layers of 'fluff' that FM adds you can make progress and see the results so much more clearly.

[jcard]

Originally Posted by TheOtherCraig

Just to throw my two cents into the mix.

I've put a couple thousand hours in to FM over the past 8 years or so. It's great. But there are things that made me fall out of love with it and find more enjoyment from OOTP. But it probably comes down more to the differences in the sport.

When discussing football tactics it is very difficult to isolate anything, everything folds into itself and is dependant on other things. Baseball is comparatively very simple with one on one matchups being the majority of the action.

In the FM community there is a large group of players around the 'tactics sphere'. The trouble comes where there is really no transparency around what is working and what isn't, and any seeking of advice is usually met by suggestions from people of logical things to try, but again, no way of knowing if it would make a difference or not. People share tactics and good results they've had with them, but with no way of knowing if it was their first attempt or just a lucky season. No way of looking under the hood.

Then occasionally you get people posting potentially match engine breaking things like speed being the ultimate game breaker, people having enormous success with teams full of bad players who are just quick. But these sorts of things are shouted down by the loyal fans who don't want to believe that a majority of the time they put into the game is meaningless and comes more down to luck than anything else. I know OOTP has these type of things on occasion, but the FM community is very defensive.

In short, the tactics area of the game is, in my opinion, near impossible to test and incredibly opaque and un-user friendly. You basically rely on team-building and maintaining morale to be successful with a tactic that isn't obviously awful or is the current meta.

The simplicity of OOTP became incredibly appealing, and I could actually see the difference my actions made. It is nearly entirely based around team-building, but without the extra layers of 'fluff' that FM adds you can make progress and see the results so much more clearly.

Very accurate points here. My gradual realization over the past decade is that OOTP is at this point primarily a universe builder, not a baseball simulation. Whereas FM in effect holds you to restrictive covenants in terms of customizing the structure of your save, OOTP gives you an ever-expanding menu of options for setting up your save. The flip side, however, is that the question of implementation and execution of this versatility has been questionable. It often feels a case of subtraction by addition. Similarly, there is always the nagging thought that just a little more tinkering with options will lead to the magic combination. In reality, witnessing the annual relitigation of the same insufficiently resolved questions has me extremely doubtful that the optimal configuration is out there to discover.

On a related note, I would NOT say that OOTP offers a more transparent experience than FM. If anything, I would say that the former leaves the user feeling LESS empowered than does the latter, primarily because OOTP does not provide adequate information as to the mechanics of even purely structural options where there is no competitive advantage to be attained by spreadsheet grinding.

On the whole, OOTP offers seemingly infinite freedom to build your own custom baseball universeÂ… built around an inherently flawed engine.

[OzzieFan]

Originally Posted by ayaghmour2

You're kidding, right? They have accurate minor leagues for standard and a pretty advanced historical minors database too. They have independent leagues for standard as well, though you are right that international for modern day is lacking. Though if I wanted to I could make my own Andoran league or Liechtenstein league. Or fake countries

I love FM, don't get me wrong, but you can only play modern. No historical. OOTP is a sandbox, FM is current play only. Have you played a random debut FM sim?

I have been playing OOTP for near 25 years now. But let's be real. They aren't in the same league. It's just not possible to be in the same league. That being said OOTP is absolutely wonderful, but it's not in any way near the quality of FM.

[ayaghmour2]

Originally Posted by OzzieFan

I have been playing OOTP for near 25 years now. But let's be real. They aren't in the same league. It's just not possible to be in the same league. That being said OOTP is absolutely wonderful, but it's not in any way near the quality of FM.

Well first we were talking strictly customization factors, which I think OOTP has FM beat in. Especially in terms of the base game

In terms of same league, they are quite different games. One is a Manager sim, the other is a GM/Sandbox sim. So it seems subjective that its not near the quality of FM. What isn't near FMs quality? I guess since you quoted my comment I'm curious to hear what you think makes them in different leagues

Are we talking the managerial experience? Because yes, FM definitively has OOTP beat. But customization? I just don't see it. OOTP lets you use any country and any year, and lets you tailor the type of experience (think type of baseball as in deadball, steroid era, modern day, etc.) while FM you have to play current soccer style and current rosters with the base game

Though all this could be moot soon. FM25 is going to have a major engine update that could put it leaps and bounds ahead of OOTP in areas where it is not. I for one am quite excited about this upcoming version

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by JohnCena

To each their own. To me, no other sports games on the text sim market capture their sports like OOTP and FM

If you can point out some other games I would definitely love to know about them. I’m a sucker for sports text sims and always looking for new games to play

I meant the part that said you can’t compare the two because they are apples & oranges. That’s the part I disagree with.

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by OutS|der

No true winter leagues, associations half assed. No Triple-A National Championship Game.
Fake countries is cosmetic when all the underlying rules are the same.
Want a salary floor, ability to loan players, make any other rules then a 9 inning game. Don't think we have true the league that can't be named or KBO roster rules.

Can I edit history, Or records?

There are so many ways we lack the ability to customize the games.

yep, proper winter leagues and the ability to loan players are WAYYY over due. Unfortunately with major scaling back of International Leagues, rules between leagues probably isn't a big priority for the development team at this time.

[Salathor]

I prefer OOTP because I feel like it's a more focused experience. My problem with FM is that the stats are so...subjective. How can I tell if a guy really has 13 or 14 headers? What does that even mean?

But since baseball plays are so atomized, I can know that a shortstop should be fielding .9895 or whatever and hitting .273 and know exactly what that means and compare it against the player and know that the simulation I'm getting is going to replicate real results at a certain level.

Basically, I think the added "depth" of FM makes it more game-y than I'm looking for, while I feel like OOTP gives me a more "on-rails" experience that reproduces the baseball universe in a real way.

FM does have the advantage of football really having a promo/relegation system, which makes it cool to be able to play your team up. Yes, you can set up a promo/relegation OOTP league but it isn't as fun as doing a "real" fantasy play like that.

EDIT: also, I personally prefer baseball to soccer, although I think soccer is fun too. I mostly prefer to play historical replay games as manager in OOTP, so I think the actual play experience is fairly similar (I'm not an OOTP guy who sims dozens of years on one save).

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by PSUColonel

yep, proper winter leagues and the ability to loan players are WAYYY over due. Unfortunately with major scaling back of International Leagues, rules between leagues probably isn't a big priority for the development team at this time.

I just want the ability to edit or make the leagues ourselves.

Expansion of associations would be major as well. Ability to loan players would be an instant buy for me the year they add that in.

[PSUColonel]

Originally Posted by OutS|der

I just want the ability to edit or make the leagues ourselves.

Expansion of associations would be major as well. Ability to loan players would be an instant buy for me the year they add that in.

Technically you can, but unfortunately the league (world) creation process is very difficult to build from scratch, and not really something I’m interested in. For me, OOTP is a great game so long as it can realize its full potential in terms of detail. (Large and robust real-world leagues and rules) the fact that trying to achieve this is so difficult just kills it for me as my interests lie in being a GM, not playing in a sandbox. So my choices seem to be…take a watered down version of OOTP, or spend countless hours “world building”. Neither really interest me, so that’s why FM seems like a better choice…it’s much easier to jump right in with full detail…even though I really don’t like soccer at all.

[Syd Thrift]

I do think that FM and OOTP are reeeeeeeeeeally hard to compare just because the games themselves are different. People mentioned tactics: baseball's tactical manuevers haven't changed in 100 years - you might use the hit and run or the sacrifice bunt more or less frequently at one point or another but they're fundamentally the same (and even "new" stuff like extreme shifts were used as early as the 40s but almost certainly before then as well). European football has gone from the 2-3-5 to slowly "inverting the pyramid" to the 4-4-2 to a point where they're starting to use more forwards again now. That's a whole slew of things that a baseball sim just flat-out doesn't have to worry about.

On the flip side of that, FM does not do historical, period. I'm sure there are historical mods set up but the further back you go, the more fantasy they are. The complaints about not having access to some modern international leagues is fine, although the one in particular is just not going to happen due to the draconian copyright laws in that country, but baseball, very, very much unlike football, is a very American-centric sport where with only a couple of exceptions it just hasn't been played in large, popular leagues outside of North America and parts of South America until relatively recently. Like, no offense, but "lagging behind" on Dutch honkbal is about the same as complaining that FM doesn't properly emulate Kyrgystani summer potassium leagues. And of course baseball has mounds and mounds of statistical data baked into its history and its present that quite frankly football does not have, and with all that data comes the requirement that a game that simulates it has to also behave like actual baseball - not what we think baseball does but what the data actually demonstrates baseball does.

They are apples and oranges, I'm sorry. You can still say you like the taste of Apple A better than Orange B but they are apples and oranges.

[jpeters1734]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

The fact we can even be mentioned together with FM is an honor.

This comment says it all.

FM is clearly the gold standard. However, that doesn't mean that you will enjoy FM more than OOTP. It really comes down to what you want out of the game. If you love to sim a hundred years to see how leagues shake out, OOTP is the clear winner. If you want to drop in any year in history and play from then on, OOTP is again the clear winner. If you want an immersive world where you can dive into the day-to-day grind, well that's where FM really shines.

So again, it depends on what you want out of a sports sim.

[snepp]

Originally Posted by jpeters1734

This comment says it all.

FM is clearly the gold standard. However, that doesn't mean that you will enjoy FM more than OOTP. It really comes down to what you want out of the game. If you love to sim a hundred years to see how leagues shake out, OOTP is the clear winner. If you want to drop in any year in history and play from then on, OOTP is again the clear winner. If you want an immersive world where you can dive into the day-to-day grind, well that's where FM really shines.

So again, it depends on what you want out of a sports sim.

You nailed multiple nails right on the head there.

I love building dozens upon dozens of years worth of league history, and doing it in multiple types of setups. Pro/Rel in one, tiny beer league in another, MLB-style in the next, lots of delegation and high level decision making.

But then I'll go run a single FM save every year, diving into all of the day-to-day grind while I try to take my awful semi-pro team of choice up the ranks if I can, and might make it through 10 years.

OOTP gets the vast majority of my time, but FM can scratch a vastly different itch that OOTP can't, and there's nothing wrong with that, they both excel at what they do.