Fundamental flaws... your chance to vent!

[spitfire]

I'd like to comment on the utility player creation boost that was supposed to have been added in a late OOTP9 patch. I don't really know if it's working properly or not, as there seems to be no general agreement on whether it's working at all! And if it is, no one seems quite sure how. Can't recall ever seeing any clarification on this topic from "upper management". But if it isn't working, it should be fixed!

Interesting in reading through this thread that there are relatively few comments on sound and none I can recall on ball-flight and assorted other whiz-bangs. What most people are focussing on is the guts of OOTP, it's ability to play a game of baseball and to more accurately mimic player development, roster management and other important off-field areas. Guess this gives a pretty good indication of what this portion of the OOTP audience considers important in a text baseball sim. I'm in full agreement.

[Irishray]

I would like to see the fact that the sound thread in the Linux version runs full-bore with as much cpu as it can grab. It should not be necessary to have the use renice on that thread.

This text sim should not be using this much cpu, and will not if this is corrected in the next version.

And I don't even use the sound !

Ray

[Curtis]

When a team is declared to be in rebuilding mode, this should mean something as far as how the AI evaluates players on that team and for trade purposes. The same would be true for 'win now'.

It could be something as simple as nudging the sliders one or two notches closer to 'favor prospects' for a rebuilding team and towards 'favor veterans' for a team where there is no tomorrow.

{This just in — Tomorrow has been cancelled. Film at eleven.}

[Comedian2004]

Having the game save the player locations for the ballparks. As it is now, they are saved, but the settings are not saved for night vs. day. So, unless the ballpark images are exactly the same, you have to change it every time.

In other words, if you start a game and it is a day game and you re-arrange the locations of the players on the field, putting them in proper position, then the next game is a night game, it uses the new position locations for the night ballpark.

[f.montoya]

The AI needs to:

1. Be adjusted so as to appear more patient before promoting and demoting. The AI currently reacts too quickly according to ratings and changes in those ratings.
2. Consider a team's place in the standings and the league date when making trade offers.
3. Know when a team has clinched and manage accordingly...especially the pitching staff in preparation for the post-season.
4. ALWAYS throw home when a potential winning run is attempting to score in the bottom of the 9th
5. Simulate degrees of loyalty when it comes to roster, rotation and lineup decisions. The AI currently will consistently replace a longtime(I don't mean aging), established veteran in the starting lineup with a player who may be slightly better rated at the drop of a dime, even though the established player's stats haven't proven the decline yet.


There are more but most everything has already been mentioned in the 6 pages so far. I sincerely hope Markus spends some time reading this thread as it begins to grow over the next several days. It already is shockingly big and it's been only a day since he opened it.

[myasu]

Some great posts here!
All I wanted to say have been already mentioned here.

I personally do not mind if the release of the new version will be a year from today, if some of these inputs will be reflected positively to the game. (Not that Markus should not release the game every year!)

[JWay]

I want OOTP to read my mind, and create what I want in my fantasy universe, to every detail, even though I haven't even thought about it yet. And do it quickly with great accuracy. Thanks!

[Le Grande Orange]

In the spirit of nitpicky accuracy...

Originally Posted by Matter2003

AAA and AA clubs are allowed to put 24 players on the Active List for the first 30 days of the season, 23 players on the Active List from the 31st day until August 10th and then 24 players again for the rest of the season, including the playoffs.

Actually, that changed in 2007. AAA and AA leagues now carry 24 active list players for the entire season.

Originally Posted by Matter2003

Below A-ball, only 25 players may actually get into a single game.

Actually, in Rookie Advanced and Rookie leagues, 30 players are eligible for use in any given game from the active list of 35 players.

Originally Posted by Matter2003

As in the majors, there are two disabled lists. The normal disabled list only has a 7-day minimum as opposed to the 15 days used as the limit for the majors. The 60-day DL, or Emergency Disabled List, works the same as in the majors; the player doesn't count against any roster limits but cannot be reinstated until either 60 days have passed or the season ends.

Correct. However, this was not always the case. For many years, the minors had only a regular DL which had a minimum 10-day stay. Not sure when the switch was made to the current system, but as of 1983 there was only the regular 10-day DL in the minors. If I had to guess, I'd say the switch was made in 1990, the same year the majors revised their DL rules.

Originally Posted by Matter2003

-This is for the American Association, but the other Indy Leagues use similar rules

The roster limit for a American Association club is 22 players. An additional two players may be on the disabled list during the regular season. Of those 22 players, a maximum of four may be veterans and minimum of five must be rookies. The remaining players will be designated limited service players and of those LS players only four (4) may be LS-4.

Some of the affiliated minor leagues have the same sort of player eligibility service limitations. For example, the Carolina League allows no more than two players and one player/coach with six or more years of prior minor league service on the active roster; the Northwest League allows no more than three players with four or more years of prior service on the active list. There are other leagues which have similar kinds of restrictions.

[Spritze]

Fairly frequently the AI uses staffs of 100% righthanders.

In my current league of 16 teams, 5 staffs are 100% righties (starters and bullpen), plus 1 team has a bullpen where everyone is nicknamed Lefty and all the starters are right-handed. The other 10 teams seem more reasonable.

Perhaps handedness should be a criteria in staff selection?

As a test I crippled all four righthanded starters on one of the all RH teams one at a time and 2 lefties and 2 righties were called up (the first and third callups were the lefties) so it appears the lefties were not a lot worse than the righties and the staff might not have suffered much by their inclusion. A lefty or two adds strategic dimension even for the AI.

How come no righthanded pitcher ever was given the nickname "Righty" anyways? What is up with that?

[Cryomaniac]

Originally Posted by satchel

How someone bats isn't the issue. Plenty of players (although mostly outfielders) throw right and bat left; Ty Cobb and Ted Williams come to mind. So how a lineup stacks up has little to do with whether a team's infielders are throwing lefty.

I know, they were different points.

There shouldn't be left throwing middle infielders (well, there should be maybe one a generation, I'm against making anything impossible) in the major leagues.

[Carplos]

For the same reason we have "southpaw" as a nickname for lefties as well, they're far less common in the population.

[Tony M]

Originally Posted by Tony M

Not meaning to be overly harsh on Markus, but the database structure is full of 'flaws' - but that'll be low on the list because people don't see it. I gave up making suggestions on how to improve the database because it won't happen.

I forgot to give examples...

But corsairs is right. Any time you make a change to league structure at initial league setup all the teams that were in the previous setup get marked as invisible and a whole new batch get created (I think I worked out that if you wanted a 2x50x50 league setup, you would have 250,000+ inactive teams)

That's a ratio of 1 active team to 50 inactive ones.

That's bad enough, but then you also have things like team strategy. As you are aware there are 36 different time/score combinations each with around 23 strategies (only 20 of which are displayed, begs the question what the other 3 are). Because they are sliders they are currently stored as signed 32 bit integers despite having at most a range of -10 to +10 (and most of them are -5 to +5). There are no sliders in the game that extend beyond -127 or +127 so they could be stored as signed bytes rather than signed 32 bit integers.

Roster lists are fixed in the team files. Most people play with 40-tops possible on a roster, but the database insists on holding enough space for 200 people on each of active, secondary, disabled and all (there isn't really need for all as it's an amalgamation of the previous 3 lists). This I think is a hold-over from the OOTP6 days when the database was a fixed size (players were allocated 25 years of database space IIRC), but other areas have been moved away from fixed sizes. It all adds to the bloat of the data that needs to be loaded when you play the game and adds to the size of downloads for online leagues.

Whether this deserves mention as a flaw or just an annoyance to someone like me who gets annoyed at strange database design is something I'll leave to Markus.

[Kelric]

I still miss the old Development Report. I want to be able to see every change my players undergo. It still irritates me to no end that this was removed and replaced with a much inferior system.

[sporr]

Spring Training -

The game should list Spring Training standings and leaders on the HTML during Spring Training and then be able to switch to regular season standings and leaders when the regular season starts. As it is now, in online leagues there is no mention of ST results on the league or team front page.

[Corsairs]

Originally Posted by Tony M

I forgot to give examples...

But corsairs is right. Any time you make a change to league structure at initial league setup all the teams that were in the previous setup get marked as invisible and a whole new batch get created (I think I worked out that if you wanted a 2x50x50 league setup, you would have 250,000+ inactive teams)

That's a ratio of 1 active team to 50 inactive ones.

That's bad enough, but then you also have things like team strategy. As you are aware there are 36 different time/score combinations each with around 23 strategies (only 20 of which are displayed, begs the question what the other 3 are). Because they are sliders they are currently stored as signed 32 bit integers despite having at most a range of -10 to +10 (and most of them are -5 to +5). There are no sliders in the game that extend beyond -127 or +127 so they could be stored as signed bytes rather than signed 32 bit integers.

Roster lists are fixed in the team files. Most people play with 40-tops possible on a roster, but the database insists on holding enough space for 200 people on each of active, secondary, disabled and all (there isn't really need for all as it's an amalgamation of the previous 3 lists). This I think is a hold-over from the OOTP6 days when the database was a fixed size (players were allocated 25 years of database space IIRC), but other areas have been moved away from fixed sizes. It all adds to the bloat of the data that needs to be loaded when you play the game and adds to the size of downloads for online leagues.

Whether this deserves mention as a flaw or just an annoyance to someone like me who gets annoyed at strange database design is something I'll leave to Markus.

You may be right about database issues being a low priority. However, there will never be a better time to catch Markus's attention than right now, so I'm going to take my best shot. A slew of problems result from the current messy database situation. Aside from bloated league files that cause headaches for online leagues, an entire patch had to be created specifically to address a problem where logos were being generated for "ghost teams". So while I imagine this would be a fair amount of work on the front end, I have to believe it would ultimately be a time-saver for Markus once implemented since he wouldn't have to deal with these kinds of problems arising (and possibly turning off less dedicated customers).

Originally Posted by mikev

Please, please, PLEASE look into what happened with generating league files and league reports between OOTP8 and OOTP9.

Without changing any settings, the amount of time it takes to generate the league file and then the league reports has literally tripled. At this point, when I sim the GUBA, I generate the league file, export CSV files, start generating league reports, and then go to bed. When I wake up the next morning I upload and extract the league reports. Seriously.

Allow me to add my voice to this call. Attention to these less "sexy" but more fundamental issues with the game would be most welcome. New features are absolutely critical in bringing in new customers (and I love a great many of the suggestions I'm hearing here). Making sure OOTP is as stable and user-friendly as possible is critical to keeping customers, though, and that's a worthy goal to pursue.

[Solonor]

Originally Posted by RonCo

A few off the top of my head:

- When you move fences in, home runs do not increase. When you move fences out, home runs do not decrease.

- Speed and Steal do not work in logical fashions. Speed does not influence success rate to any statistical degree. Steal does not influence a player's ability to get a jump. If anything I would think these would be reversed, but I would expect success to be a combination of speed and savy, with speed being dominant.

- Velocity does not influence a pitcher's strikeouts.

- The number of pitches a pitcher has does not influence his role.

- Pitcher's Hold rating does not reduce SB success rates (though it does reduce attempts).

- Player creation and growth is strange. Wish I could be more specific.

- Position conversion doesn't work right.

- Defense is also weird, but without more sophisticated tools it's too hard to figure out what's wrong.

- Players peak at 25. Roughly.

- Almost no 19 year-olds created in a draft class.

- AI drafts almost all the pitchers in the later rounds -- generally because pitchers are created with low talents, then develop up. Most pitchers of any value in a draft class are MR, which is obviously wrong.

And what he said, too.

[Solonor]

Originally Posted by f.montoya

The AI needs to:

1. Be adjusted so as to appear more patient before promoting and demoting. The AI currently reacts too quickly according to ratings and changes in those ratings.
2. Consider a team's place in the standings and the league date when making trade offers.
3. Know when a team has clinched and manage accordingly...especially the pitching staff in preparation for the post-season.
4. ALWAYS throw home when a potential winning run is attempting to score in the bottom of the 9th
5. Simulate degrees of loyalty when it comes to roster, rotation and lineup decisions. The AI currently will consistently replace a longtime(I don't mean aging), established veteran in the starting lineup with a player who may be slightly better rated at the drop of a dime, even though the established player's stats haven't proven the decline yet.


There are more but most everything has already been mentioned in the 6 pages so far. I sincerely hope Markus spends some time reading this thread as it begins to grow over the next several days. It already is shockingly big and it's been only a day since he opened it.

These articulate better the "lack of situational awareness" gripe that I was trying to get at.

[dickysty]

Originally Posted by Kelric

I still miss the old Development Report. I want to be able to see every change my players undergo. It still irritates me to no end that this was removed and replaced with a much inferior system.

I agree with that. I like the old report much better!

[ootpFox07]

Thanks to RonCo, f.montoyo and corsairs for your points, which covers a lot for me.

I don't know if this would count as a new features, but I would love to see the stadium import/export feature return from OOTP 6.x. It made importing MLB ballparks other people had setup so much easier.

[Elendil]

The underlying bug here is the default in-game strategy settings. If you look at every AI team, the settings are the same for every game situation/score. The game should, via the in-game strategy settings, make it so that teams basically never give out intentional walks when up or down by 4 runs in the 9th+, and basically never try to take an extra base in those situations either (particularly down by anything more than 1 run).

Originally Posted by PhillieFever

This is awesome news Markus.Here's my list.

In game managing-As of now,AI managers do not call a good game of baseball,here's some of the things I've noticed while playing out(one pitch) my games(over 600 of them)

-the AI needs to play their defense in when the situation calls for it.Way too many times late in games(from the 6th inning on) I was able to take the lead or tie the game on a simple ground ball which would have been avoided had the AI played his defense in(basic example)



-Intentional walks are given out way to frequently,I've even seen the AI inentionally walk the tying or winning run late in the game.

-The AI's baserunning/base stealing is way too aggressive late in games,with a lead or without this needs to be toned down.

-In close games,the AI will pinch hit/run for superstars who should not be taken out as well as for players that they don't have suitable replacements for in the field.

-Another problem is lineup choices.Way too often the AI will start a guy at a position that he has no experience at while there is a suitable player on the bench.I can't tell you how many times that the Dodgers started Jim Lefebvre at SS(rating 2) when Maury Wills was on the bench(16)

-The current injury model seems to me to have not enough short term injuries(two weeks or less,a week or less) and way too many long term ones.Injury log has the evidence to corroborate this(I think)

-Another thing has to do with rain delays,something weird is going on here.In OOTP 8 you would get PBP lines saying still raining... until it stopped letting you know there was a delay.Now in OOTP 9 that dosen't happen and you're never informed of a rain delay which causes you to be unprepared when you pitcher suddenly becomes exhausted out of the blue.

Thats pretty much it for now,if I see anything else,I'll list it as I go.

T