Does OOTP Player Development Needs to Be Fixed?

[RonCo]

In OOTP terms, guys who are "inconsistent" (a term I don't really find appropraite, but I'll take it for what it's worth) are guys whose ratings make them borderline major leaguers, but who occasionally happen to get "lucky rolls" but cannot sustain such performance.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by RonCo

What you can say is that players who progress through the minors in OOTP do not seem to do so in the same fashion as guys in real life. So, while I _can't_ say that the Tango model will perfectly fit minor leaguers, I can say that the Tango model _might_ fit them, and I can say with pretty direct certainty that the model in OOTP _does not_.

That's all definitely true. However, I can say that OOTP _might_ fit minor leaguers too, if it's properly adjusted.



____________


edit- I say that, fully expecting someone to respond by saying that 'properly adjusted' means 'introduce Tango!'. That's not the kind of adjustment I mean.

[royalpj]

I am the owner of Player Report for #36 Sam Rigsby
and I approve this thread

[SittingDuck]

hahaha

OK, let me ask - if you check via the editor, do the potential values for the players ever change? Not the ratings as the scouts analyze, but the actual max values in the right hand column?

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by royalpj

I am the owner of Player Report for #36 Sam Rigsby
and I approve this thread

Cory Snyder Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by EMSoccerCoach

Actually, the development engine shouldn't show you talent at all, only a projection of what the play appears capable of doing. Talent, if you're believing it as pre-ordained ability, is not something definitively measurable. But a scout can see what Player A is doing (i.e. stats, improvement) and say "I think this guy could be a 25 homer guy." But talent, as you define it here, shouldn't be shown, because I don't think it's something you actually see/measure. You don't project on talent, you project on past results extrapolated into future results.

For the most part I agree with you. My only concern is if you play with scouts off, you should see this god given talent and currently you don't.

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by redsoxford

So, it's taken to a CLR level then by the sounds of it. I'm sure that assemblies built in various .net software can be shoehorned into one another, but that'd be looking at maybe OOTP10 or 11 as an option for you to explore...

The CLR is a bloated POS. You don't use the CLR when you want performance. Its the equivalent of using Java. The more critical performance is, the more layers of code management that need to be removed. One could argue that a modern compiler can write better assembly than a human, but that's about the highest level of code management you get to before it starts to affect perfomrance significantly. Just because he uses MS C++ .net doesn't mean he's building using the .Net Libraries or the CLR. I use MS VC++ virtually every day and don't use the CLR, MFC, or ATL.

[jarmenia]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

You're right of course that the whole engine could be done better... but I can comfortably live with the way it works now (OOTP 9). Maybe for OOTP 10 I'll rewrite that thing completely from scratch, and I hope you'll be there for advice.

If you are willing to commit to this I will never start a thread like this again

[injury log]

Originally Posted by SittingDuck

hahaha

OK, let me ask - if you check via the editor, do the potential values for the players ever change? Not the ratings as the scouts analyze, but the actual max values in the right hand column?

Yes, they change quite often, and sometimes by large amounts. If you turn scouts off, you see these 'true' ratings instead of scouted ratings, which makes the changes very obvious. With scouting on, the issues with development are more obscured, but with scouts off, sometimes a prospect rated 20/63 turns into a guy rated 20/21 literally overnight, and this is one of the complaints others have expressed in this thread.

[da commish]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

... but unfortunately we're not EA, so we have to carefully decide where we use our resources. I feel we have done a good job in the past, but you just can't please everybody.

Thank goodness you're not EA or player development would really be dismal. Anyone ever play Madden PC? Almost an entire team will progress to superstars or total failures in one off season. I quit buying it because you couldn't go more than a year without totally unrealistic teams. There may be issues, but OOTP8 player development is heaven compared to that.

[royalpj]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Cory Snyder Statistics - Baseball-Reference.com

Cory Snyder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Snyder was also hampered by injuries. Rigsby has had no major injuries whatsoever.

[NomarHits400]

Originally Posted by RonCo

I respect your respectfully, and I agree you can always look at things from many directions. Unfortunately, some of those directions you can look at things from are just wrong. As someone else commented, (given the OOTP model):

ratings >>> performance

It makes no sense for it to go the other way. A drop in performance should not have any influence on whether ratings go up or down (which is the only purpose that OOTP Talent has ... OOTP Talent/Potential/Etc. is not a physical thing). The fact that a player with a .270 capability hits .250 does not mean he is not a .270 hitter at his core. In fact, a .270 hitter will hit .250 or less in 400 or so at bats quite often by random chance alone. Next year that same batter may well hit .280 or .290 without any change to his base ability. That's the beauty of skill assessment in baseball.

Ratings moving up and down should certainly affect performance. But the fact that a player was unlucky (or lucky) should not have anything to do with whether his skills change. The model is, respectfully, flawed.

This just in....The world is round.

Your argument is completely sound....I think it bothers me more that Markus refuses to acknowledge this than it does that the system is flawed.

I guess if my life's work turned out to be founded on some faulty logic- I'd defend it pretty staunchly as well.....Rock on Markus.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Keep in mind that the current system keeps the average ratings of a league very stable throughout history, which is very important and took a looooong time to get right.

A lot of people in my online league have been complaining lately about talent drops. This happened shortly after 1 player in the league alerted all the others about the extraordinary value of foreign scouting. So, now almost all the teams in the league are foreign scouting. The number of valuable prospects I have obtained from foreign scouting greatly exceeds anything I have been able to obtain from the regular draft. So, now that everyone is reaping the potential of foreign scouting, the above comment by Markus, I think, explains the abundant talent drops.... to keep the league's talent average in line.

[Matches]

The Rigsby and Revet career paths are frustrating, yes, as was mine (his name was Gary Hudek), but as the poster of the Snyder career illustrated, this stuff happens. Guys start to lose their abilities and sometimes it IS sudden.

What bugs me is that my scouts saw it coming. On one hand we hear that performance drives talent development, but what is the deal with these guys?

Hudek hit .279-35-115 at age 25, and .278-34-108 at age 26. At some point late that season he went from 60-70 in overall current and potential ratings to 21s in both. His only injuries were a bruised hand and a bruised cheekbone which caused him to miss about 20 games. Now, maybe I can buy that these bruises did irreparable damage to his hitting abilities and that with scouts off I would see this immediate drop in talent level. But scouts are on - what scout is going to pronounce that Hudek's present and future are as a borderline bench player because of a couple bruises, espeially with the guy finishing the season with no drop-off in production? If his talent has truly tanked for some reason, explained (injuries) or not (randomness), scouts should not be able to identify such things in an instant, especially for hitters. Hitting a baseball is such a complex science and even the best players and coaches often don't know what causes slumps or declines or increases in performance. Pitching talents like stuff and control I can understand. You can tell when Joe Borowski is throwing up 83 mph fastballs that he is going to get creamed, or that when Rick Ankiel is throwing every other ball to the backstop that something is seriously wrong with his control.

Playing with scouts off, again I say is tricky. I can't imagine what kind of pleasing game experience can be obtained if with scouts off you know the "god view" of everyone's ability. I always figured people turned scouts off because they just didn't want to deal with the signing and tasking of them.

Can someone correct me if I am wrong in what I understand to be what is seen by players in these various "views"?

-Commissioner mode, edit player page: You see the exact, "god-given" talents of the player: what is current abilities actually are, and what his actual potential truly is.

-Regular play, scouts off: You see the same thing as in commissioner mode, converted to whatever rating system you use.

-Regular play, scouts on: You see the same thing, filtered by the scouts eyes whose accuracy is varied.

From what I read, with scouts off, players' potential and actual ratings rise and dip as the player develops. It appears that the same thing happen in the edit player view in commissioner mode. If so, this doesn't seem to make sense to me. I understand that potential needs to rise or fall to give players interesting gameplay, but... it seems to me that Edit Player should be the truest source of information. Potential ratings should only change here if a player suffers an injury.

The editor is where a player is "endowed with certain alienable potential", so to speak, that can only altered by physical harm done to his person. Every player is born with potential abilities in each skill/attribute unknown to anyone other than the omnipotent Player Editor. No matter how he performs, that potential exists and will always exist until something physically happens later in his life. So in the case of Hudek and Rigsby, the Player Editor should always show potential ratings at levels that are AT LEAST reasonably equivalent to their top performances. Of course it is possible and even likely that these players' actual potential was higher - but it should impossible for their potential ratings to be lower than what could generate the performances they did. To borrow from the film Gatacca:

Director: No one exceeds his or her potential.
Vincent: And if he does?
Director: It simply means we didn't accurately gauge his potential in the first place.

As I mentioned before, I don't know what makes the majority of users play with scouts off. I had thought it was for simpler gameplay, but some people say they like to know the exact ratings. Could you not have a variable "scouts off" mode in which the user selects the level of accuracy in the displayed ratings. Users who want to know the exact ratings would select "onmiscient", which would deliver the "God-known" ratings on all player screens. Users who simply don't like the hassle of signing scouts, giving them tasks, etc, could select levels like "Great, Good, Average, Poor", which would basically assign a hidden "scout" of the selected level to every team to deliver the ratings. Users then could choose how accurate their delivered ratings are, still play with an element of mystery and chance, but bypass the extra work of hiring the scouts.

[kq76]

I wouldn't at all argue that there's not a problem with player development (so many sudden huge changes without injuries are a problem IMO), but I would vehemently disagree with the notion that a player's potential should be a fixed point. Maybe a fixed range (a short fat guy even with everything else going perfect is probably not going to make the majors), but not a fixed point. There are just too many things that change over time that affect one's potential to believe that we have fixed potential at anything.

As for scouting I think the game should allow an individual scout to completely be off on guys, but the average ratings of scouts should be pretty accurate with the understanding that changes in development could make them look pretty far off over time.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Not, it's not in my opinion. Look at it this way: A player changes his approach, has success with it (better stats), he thinks "cool, that works for me!", so his talent increases. That's what scouting woud do too, and I see the real talent ratings as 'gods' view what the player could become in the future.

How circular logic doesn't bother a computer programmer surprises me.

I wonder: should we view potential as what might happen if everything goes right like if the player learns everything he possibly can; or should it just be what the player will grow into if nothing really changes? I'm much more comfortable with the latter as the former would have far too high of a ceiling for most people and, thankfully, I think the latter is how the game is designed. I think some people see it as the former which complicates the discussion.

The problem, as I see it, is Markus is confusing himself with the order of events. If a player's potential changes then the change in potential happens before the performance, not after. Yes, it may appear to happen after and the player may only have realized it after, but it really happened before. Once the player even accidently changed his approach, the potential changed. The potential did not change after the player accumulated some good stats. The scouting view of potential may change after one's puts up some good numbers too, but the real potential changed well before that. But this is how Markus says he's programmed the game and I fear it leads to a spiral effect. A player somewhat randomly puts up good numbers so his potential rises which in turns leads to a greater chance of even better numbers and even more further potential increases. And of course the opposite is true too which may be why we see so many of these huge bombs of prospects. It's troubling.

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Well, but something has to influence the chance of a bump/increase of talent. If stats are not used, then people would complain that a guy hitting .220 suddenly gets a talent boost. Or a guy hitting .350 in 400 AB gets his talent lowered.

There needs to be change of talent, otherwise you'd never see a 1st round pick busting, or a Mike Piazza.

I know, you will say that Piazza always had the talent for a HoF Career, and that scouts simply missed big-time on him. Well, I think if players would have a fixed talent in OOTP, and the only question is if they reach the potential in the long run or not is not much fun. I prefer the OOTP way, and the results are basically the same. I like it when I see the talents of my players increase, and I hate it when they go down. But that's the fun part IMO.

If something needs to be used, I'd be much more comfortable with it just being a random roll.

[RonCo]

In Markus's defense, I think he added the "stats cause talent changes" in part because a bunch of public board posters suggested this was a great idea. Responding to users is one of Markus's greatest strengths. But this is, unfortunately, what you can get when you listen rabidly to users.

Beyond pure logic, it takes very little effort to gather data that indicates how flawed the idea of stats causing talent changes is:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

I created the following list in 5 minutes of clicking around on BB-ref. I timed it on purpose--that 5 minutes is a real number. Give me 5 more minutes and I would guess I'll double the size of the list.

Mike Schmidt
Sammy Sosa
Rickey Henderson
Reggie Jackson
Craig Biggio
Harmon Killebrew
Roberto Clemente
Pete Rose
Mo Vaughn

All these players struggled in younger years, putting up sub 100 OPS+ numbers (some for several years) without having any issue with retaining their raw ability. In fact, it is a better logical argument to say that THE FACT THAT THEY HAD GREAT ABILITY IS WHY THEY WERE ALLOWED TO POST SUCH CRAPPY NUMBERS TO BEGIN WITH. Willie Mays was 0-22 upon his debut in the majors. No talent hit there I guess. Barry Bonds almost qualified for the list with his .223 rookie batting average, but managed to slug just enough to register a 103 OPS.

I have seen no argument that successfully shows poor stats, all by themselves, lead to future poor performance. It is ill-logical to suggest such a model is "true" even though it can be made to work in a software environment.

[Syd Thrift]

Yeah, and on the other hand you get flashes in the pan like Eric Yelding. I don't mind the idea of stats leading to real talent increases on occasion (this would be a good way, for example, to model the career of a Luis Gonzalez), but I do agree that it should be the exception rather than the rule. If we're going to have lots of ratings bumps and drops, they should be for other things like (I know you're going to not like this, but you're no longer on the beta team anyway) morale or the quality of the coaching staff or the level the player is at compared with his age (a 26 year old who is dominating high A probably shouldn't get a ratings bump because he is way too old for the league - in fact, maybe he should get a ratings drop because he's stagnating) or particular types of injury or heck, just random chance.

That being said, I still think the pitcher endurance/injury system is a much, much larger problem than this.

[SittingDuck]

I totally agree with that. Completely.

What RonCo just said.

[Matt Uk]

I think the biggest difficulty with producing a development engine is the fact that what we are dealing with is largely an intangible thing. It could be argued that potential is something that can be judged (with a margin of error) by somebody with experience (ie a scout). Talent is again largely a subjective matter. Ask two people for an opinion on a player and you'll likely get two different opinions, quite possibly similar, but get them to mark certain abilities out of 10 and you'll have differing scores here and there.

Now as a game OOTP has the knowledge of exactly what the potential and talent (perhaps the use of the word talent is a problem in itself?) of any player is. These are then raised or lowered according to varying factors. I think it's fair to say that it's the factors that are the important thing and how hey are displayed to the gamer.

One thing that I haven't seen discussed on here is experience. The more a player faces a better level of competition the more he will learn and it could be argued that the realisation of potential will only really come once a player has reached the majors. If I could use an example from football (soccer) in England here it may help to explain what I mean.

In the Championship, which is the second tier of football here, there are often a lot of players who will regularly score over 20 goals a season and are deemed to be players of good potential. However the vast majority of them when transferred to a Premiership team (the top tier) do not continue in the same vein. Most struggle to get anywhere near that total. What's changed? The size of the goal is still the same. The ball is still the same. Simple. It's the level of competition. A player who appeared to have good talent and potential floundered once up against the top level of players. This I think could be seen as a 4/5 star potential turning into a 2 star talent. Time and again Managers have bought these players believing they will make the grade but the vast majority don't. So this is the 'subjective' view of a players potential/talent but until that player plays at the elite level you can't be sure that this potential/talent is a true reflection, it is by nature subjective.

All this must make it incredibly hard for Markus to code and he has to have some basis to work from. I do agree with Ronco that the "talent rise" has to come before the stats as they are a bi product of that talent rise. However if that is to be that way in the game then what triggers the talent rise or realisation of potential is the key.

I think many factors are at play here. Markus says the stats in the players make up (work ethic etc) are used and I think that makes perfect sense. Actually work ethic has just made something else spring to mind. There are players who have great potential (and this spreads to all walks of life) but are content to 'get by' and will never realise that potential but could still be good players. Now this is where another problem arises. That player probably has very good talent too but is not using it to full effect. So a low work ethic would probably help to produce players of this kind.

A few things that I think should be used (and this is just a quick of the top of my head brainstorm and there are many more I'm sure)

Work Ethic/application
Coaches abilities at the organisation
Experience of the players they are playing with - advice/encouragment from team leader type playes
Being promoted/demoted too early/late
Morale to a certain extent - an unhappy player will be unlikely to be motivated


One problem the current engine may have (and this was touched on earlier with reference to an online league getting good foreign talent) is that if 10 players get injured badly and have talent decreases then in order to keep the league average constant I'm assuming that means in simplistic terms that 10 other players are going to have some kind of random talent bump. If so that may well be the cause of all the apparent talent bumps/drops that seem to have no reason.


All in all though it must be a hell of a task for Markus to code and I think it's an outstanding game as it is. That's not to say it couldn't be even better though