Historical sim minors being filled with fictional players

[Vida Blue]

Started a historical league in 1901 with 3 levels of minors. After importing the 1901 season the minors are filled with fictional players. This was not the case in previous versions. I think ghost players were used to fill in the gaps in minors. If minors are being filled with fictional players, how can one have a true historical sim with fictional players gumming it up? It seems that the historical aspect of this game has taken a step backwards.

[redmarkYankees]

Don't create minors levels. OOTP2006 requires minimum numbers of players at all levels, and will auto-fill if you don't have them. AAA might be do-able (not sure; seen imports giving 12 or so 'reserves'), but otherwise don't add any minors, and the 'spare' players will go on a 'reserve' roster.

[Gastric ReFlux]

Yeah, you can run a historical league without minors, or even any other leagues. Extra real players will be placed on a reserve roster, where the young ones will continue to develop.

I think eventually someone will come up with a method of running historicals with minor leagues, well it has been done, but it's going to take time and tweaking to find good settings to keep to a minimun the fictional generates making too many appearances in the majors.

[Vida Blue]

Will players still develop properly even though they are on this reserve roster? Can minors not be added to the league structure later on in the sim?

[Gastric ReFlux]

Originally Posted by Vida Blue

Will players still develop properly even though they are on this reserve roster? Can minors not be added to the league structure later on in the sim?

I was able to observe this last evening when I changed Babe Ruth from a pitcher in 1917. He developed just fine, and took over in the field a couple of seasons later.

That's only one observed instance, but it leads me to believe the development is proper and adequate when players are on the reserve rosters.

[Tiger Fan]

Originally Posted by Vida Blue

Will players still develop properly even though they are on this reserve roster?

Yes, they will develop fine. I believe they are coded to be developing as if they were putting up average minor league numbers.

Originally Posted by Vida Blue

Can minors not be added to the league structure later on in the sim?

No, at least not at this time. You must set up the minor leagues upon league creation. You can add and delete teams from each league but you can not add another league.

If you are interested here is a quickstart I made for 1901 that includes a single level of minors. Fictional players are all very low skill level and no more fictional players will enter this league (unless you manually select fill minors).


http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=120806

[BravesSince66]

Vida:
I have been wrestling with this one too. At the moment for historical sims...all minors are dumped into the "reserve roster". They will develop there, you just don't have the added realism of assigning them to a level at the moment (AAA, AA, A) without mucking up everything with fictional players. I'm sure this will be enhanced going forward. Bit of an inconvenience now though.

[Tiger Fan]

Why is it an inconvenience? Or more precisely why do you want to run full in minors in a historical league?

The players will develop fine without the minors.

I am not being confrontational. I am just curious why you feel it is essential to run full minors in a historical replay?

[Vida Blue]

Thanks for the info guys.

Tiger: Special thanks go to you. Your guides and player photos have greatly enhanced my experience with OOTP!

[Tiger Fan]

Originally Posted by Vida Blue

Thanks for the info guys.

Tiger: Special thanks go to you. Your guides and player photos have greatly enhanced my experience with OOTP!

thank you. Glad I could help.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Tiger Fan

I am just curious why you feel it is essential to run full minors in a historical replay?

I think it's because most folks are used to seeing minor leagues as the place for player development, and when there are no minors they wonder how will those players develop?

Of course, from a historical point of view, the minor leagues of 1901 bear absolutely no resemblance to the minor leagues of today in terms of number, structure, or purpose.

[TheBishop]

Originally Posted by Tiger Fan

Why is it an inconvenience? Or more precisely why do you want to run full in minors in a historical league?

The players will develop fine without the minors.

I am not being confrontational. I am just curious why you feel it is essential to run full minors in a historical replay?

I find it to be an inconvience as well. And a it's more than a 'bit'.

Besides being an aesthetic thing, you could actually look who was in your minor league system and where they were developmentally from each level. I find the reserve roster a tad obtuse. One list with every player.......it just steals away from the whole idea of player development/GM minor league watching. You may not really 'need' a minor league system with a historical league, but it keeps it within the bounds of realism, which is what I've always enjoyed about OOTP. No minor leagues just makes it seem like......an arcade game, really. The old ones where you didn't have a minor league, you just had 3-4 players you could choose from to replace people.

I like the UI, honestly. I think the game looks great. But it seems you can't really run true historical leagues without compromising on fictional players or just abandoning the minors altogether.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by TheBishop

But it seems you can't really run true historical leagues without compromising on fictional players or just abandoning the minors altogether.

You simply have to compromise somewhere, there's no way around it.

There's no Lahman Database for minor league players, so you can't use the real thing. That forces some compromises. The minors, as I previously mentioned, were completely different in size, structure, and purpose in earlier years than they are today. That forces a lot of compromises if historical authenticity is a high concern.

The best thing you can do is to try out the different methods available and see which one comes the closest to giving you the experience you're after.

[TheBishop]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

You simply have to compromise somewhere, there's no way around it.

There's no Lahman Database for minor league players, so you can't use the real thing. That forces some compromises. The minors, as I previously mentioned, were completely different in size, structure, and purpose in earlier years than they are today. That forces a lot of compromises if historical authenticity is a high concern.

The best thing you can do is to try out the different methods available and see which one comes the closest to giving you the experience you're after.

Again, historical authenticity is not a 'high' concern, I'm not looking for exactness, if I were I'd be playing Diamond Mind. I'd just like a system where I can have minor leagues without having to destroy the integrity of historical simming with fake players.

'Compromising', as you keep saying with each of my posts, means either playing without a minor league system at all or trying to weed through how many fake players the game is going to generate for however long it needs to, dumbing down everyone so they'll never make it. That's quite a bit of work for a game that seems to have already added a bit more work to it's gameplay. I'd rather have the programmer look into seeing if something else can be worked on to alliviate this than jerry rig it everytime I want to start a new league.

And if it can't be done, I may have to look into a refund, which is sad because I've been a loyal customer for a long time now (4 versions). And I've turned on a lot of people to the game, helped when they needed it, looked into making things more fun, etc. I may not be a main member of this board, but I am at BBSC, so it's not like I'm some noob.

And I'm not saying the game isn't good or that it's unplayable, it's just unplayable by my standards. I hope a whole new crop of people hops aboard, and hope they aren't looking to historical sim anything because, as it is, it can't be truly done with OOTP2006.

[sixto]

I sympathize with those who aren't happy about the historical sim limitation on minor leagues. In time, I believe it will be possible to recreate relatively recent history with a robust minor league setup - though it will take a lot of effort.

However, it would be impossible for any game to simulate the entire history of baseball using full minor leagues in a way that users would find meaningful. Let's take, for example, a player whose career was profiled in the great, great book, The Glory of Their Times. Like Rube Marquard. Marquard was playing for some independent minor-league team when he was bought by the New York Giants. If the entire framework of U.S. baseball from 1908 were recreated in OOTP, Marquard would likely end up somewhere else completely, or more likely, get lost in the shuffle altogether.

For the purposes of recreating real baseball history in a game form, the limitation currently placed on the game is probably the best solution. That's not pleasing, particularly, but for most of history, it's probably necessary.

Now, stats from at least the two top levels of the minors have been available for ten years or more. To properly simulate the major leagues, someone (or some group of someones) will simply have to filter the information and put it into a database. A few other things have to happen as well, but you can probably get a reasonably detailed full-world simulation starting in the Internet era.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by TheBishop

'Compromising', as you keep saying with each of my posts, means either playing without a minor league system...

Other than the immersion factor, does that really matter that much? If the idea of a historical league is to see how actual major leaguers might have fared if history was replayed, then ideally you wouldn't want minor leagues with fictional players anyway. You'd only want the real major league players to appear in your recreation.

The reserve roster system used with no minors functions as a de facto minor league and players do develop there.

Originally Posted by TheBishop

...at all or trying to weed through how many fake players the game is going to generate for however long it needs to, dumbing down everyone so they'll never make it.

Tiger Fan has managed to have minor leagues and avoids having fictional players be of any consequence by toning down the quality of those minor leagues so that the fictional players created are simply too poor in quality to have much chance of making it the majors as compared to real-world lower quality major league players.

I guess I'm just having a bit of trouble understanding the exact nature of your concerns...

[BaseballMan]

Whats the best setting to give you the career minor leaguer?
I dont really care if i use fictional players and maybe a few make it to the majors.
I look at this way, how much data do we really have on the real minor leagues? I dont know of a site that has all the stats of the minor leagues like baseball refernce does with the majors. Until there are stats that can be used i just think of the fictional players as those players in minor league history that most people have never heard of.
As long as very few make it to the majors i dont really have a problem with fictional minor league players. If they start to turn into Ross Gload, well now thats a different story.

[hefalumps]

I have great interest in this well. I think I understand the concern/issues people have with just using the reserve rosters - even though players will develop on the reserves, not being able to see their stats at each level and move them from level to level as they develop is putting people off. I know that's what I'd like to be able to do ideally. I know keeping the minors completely accurate over the years is an insane endeavor, and I don't care about that. But I still like having generic AAA, AA, and A levels like we did in OOTP 6.5. I guess I miss the ghost players too.

TigerFan, I like your idea of filling the minors with "scrubs" and being done with it. Was there an easy way to accomplish that? I'm thinking you can just import the major league players in the normal way, then go to the player creation modifiers and drop em wayyyy low, do the "fill minors with players" thing, and then set the player creation modifiers back to normal for future ML rookie imports. I'm doing this without the documentation or game anywhere nearby, so I'm not even sure what I said is possible - but hopefully TigerFan you can confirm or deny just how easy that process is.

Assuming it's not too much of a pain, I think I'll go with option two - create the generic AAA, AA, and A levels and fill em with scrubs.

[boilermaker]

Originally Posted by TheBishop

Again, historical authenticity is not a 'high' concern, I'm not looking for exactness, if I were I'd be playing Diamond Mind. I'd just like a system where I can have minor leagues without having to destroy the integrity of historical simming with fake players.

'Compromising', as you keep saying with each of my posts, means either playing without a minor league system at all or trying to weed through how many fake players the game is going to generate for however long it needs to, dumbing down everyone so they'll never make it. That's quite a bit of work for a game that seems to have already added a bit more work to it's gameplay. I'd rather have the programmer look into seeing if something else can be worked on to alliviate this than jerry rig it everytime I want to start a new league.

As LGO alluded to and Tiger Fan said in his other post:

I changed the player creation modifiers to .100 across the board. This was done so the fictional players imported to fill the minors will all be terrible.

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=120806


The best way to go about a historical replay with minors is to lower player creation modifiers. I assume (I'm still in my first season--I'm a meticulous manager!) what this will do is that when it comes time to import real historical rookies, they'll be there and accurate, and whatever extra players are "created" will be inconsequential, or at least as consequential as you want them to be (obviously, you don't have to se the player creation modifier THAT low, to 0.100....if you want a few fictional guys to sneak up and into the fold, you can raise some modifiers at your leisure).

I assume that's the solution to your problem.




edit.....and I may have read your initial post wrong, but I guess the value of my above post remains for those who want historical replay AND minors.

[swampdragon]

Originally Posted by hefalumps

I have great interest in this well. I think I understand the concern/issues people have with just using the reserve rosters - even though players will develop on the reserves, not being able to see their stats at each level and move them from level to level as they develop is putting people off. I know that's what I'd like to be able to do ideally. I know keeping the minors completely accurate over the years is an insane endeavor, and I don't care about that. But I still like having generic AAA, AA, and A levels like we did in OOTP 6.5. I guess I miss the ghost players too.

TigerFan, I like your idea of filling the minors with "scrubs" and being done with it. Was there an easy way to accomplish that? I'm thinking you can just import the major league players in the normal way, then go to the player creation modifiers and drop em wayyyy low, do the "fill minors with players" thing, and then set the player creation modifiers back to normal for future ML rookie imports. I'm doing this without the documentation or game anywhere nearby, so I'm not even sure what I said is possible - but hopefully TigerFan you can confirm or deny just how easy that process is.

Assuming it's not too much of a pain, I think I'll go with option two - create the generic AAA, AA, and A levels and fill em with scrubs.

I think I'm going to set the creation modifiers at 80-90% of the era setting. That should essentially, if I understand it right, top the average player out at about a AAA level once he develops. He can get cups of coffee and fill in for injuries while the historical players dominate the game. At least that's the plan. If a few break through and become serviceable major leaguers, I'm not losing any sleep over it.