Is OOTP17 the promised land for fans of historical-fictional playing?

[thbroman]

Hi, Folks --

I've been away from OOTP for about three or four years now. I stopped playing after it became apparent that Markus wasn't going to develop the game toward making a full baseball universe of the 1930s-1960s possible, with independent minor leagues having financials, player contracts you could buy, and so on. However, I was excited to learn that historical minor leagues are in the latest version. So can someone fill me in -- is it possible to create a full baseball universe in an historical era? Or is this mostly just a player database for historical players who want to have every possible player at their disposal?

[joefromchicago]

Independent minors with full financials? No, OOTP17 isn't there quite yet, but it's getting a lot closer.

[thbroman]

That's certainly encouraging to hear. Does it appear that Markus wants to head in that direction? Previously he said that wasn't a priority for him, because he thought the audience was too restricted to justify devoting his effort to it. He clearly felt that the game would get a better return from animation and further development of the contemporary baseball. I get that. But it wasn't going to keep me buying the game every year.

[Bluenoser]

Markus is headed in the "right" direction with OOTP. His "vision" for animation and contemporary baseball, as you put it, has led to an MLB and MiLB license. Pretty impressive steps imo.

[GoBucsGo]

In the update this morning, you can now buy contracts from unaffiliated minor league teams.

[joefromchicago]

Originally Posted by thbroman

That's certainly encouraging to hear. Does it appear that Markus wants to head in that direction? Previously he said that wasn't a priority for him, because he thought the audience was too restricted to justify devoting his effort to it. He clearly felt that the game would get a better return from animation and further development of the contemporary baseball. I get that. But it wasn't going to keep me buying the game every year.

Unaffiliated minors were definitely a low priority before this year, but then OOTP17 incorporated historical minors. That meant OOTP had to deal with the fact that many of those minor-league teams were unaffiliated prior to the 1960s, which suddenly made unaffiliated minors a high priority.

I won't say that the process of integrating unaffiliated minors into the OOTP game system has been flawless, but things are definitely going in the right direction. With the most recent patch, major-league clubs can now buy players from unaffiliated minor-league teams (which is comparable to the way most minor-league players were acquired in the years before farm systems). Furthermore, you can set the price that will be paid for those players at the minor-league level. And major-league clubs without minors now have reserve rosters, so you can have some place to put those players (that wasn't possible in previous OOTP versions).

All of this is new, and it's the result of incorporating historical minors in the game. This still benefits you even if you don't play with historical minors but instead prefer fictional, like I do. And with historical minors getting more attention, and as users start demanding more improvements, I'm confident this aspect of the game will only get better.

[thbroman]

Originally Posted by Bluenoser

Markus is headed in the "right" direction with OOTP. His "vision" for animation and contemporary baseball, as you put it, has led to an MLB and MiLB license. Pretty impressive steps imo.

I have no quarrel at all with this. It's just not what I was interested in, I suppose because contemporary baseball holds little attraction for me.

Originally Posted by joefromchicago

All of this is new, and it's the result of incorporating historical minors in the game. This still benefits you even if you don't play with historical minors but instead prefer fictional, like I do. And with historical minors getting more attention, and as users start demanding more improvements, I'm confident this aspect of the game will only get better.

That's wonderful to hear. Markus, I see that you saw joe's post and thanked him, which I guess means you endorse what he said.

Well, I guess it means I should get back over here and pony up a few $$, eh? I might as well provide a little dose of stimulus-response encouragement to make sure that the contemporary end of the game doesn't get ALL of his attention!