OOTP vs Everyone else

[DustinthePOWERHOUSE]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

Ugh. That hurts!

I can't help but laugh that a guy on "about.sports" is a MLB expert who ranks Baseball Mogul that far ahead of OOTP and only writes a blurb. Clearly the term "expert" is being used loosely here.

[Pineywoods OOTPer]

I have said it before, but it bears to be heard again.

I was on my second deployment in Iraq when my pals and I at one of the team sites were bored and needed a baseball fix. So we went on the hunt and found Baseball Mogul 2008, ordered it and enjoyed it....somewhat.

Then we came home and I was looking for the 2009 version when I stumbled onto OOTP 11. I thought it had more potential then BM ever could, so I bought it, throughly enjoyed it, and preordered 12...and so forth.

What happened to the BM disks, you might ask? Well, we gave them to the old site NCOIC, a Yankees fan as a gift. He used them for 9mm range practice a couple of years later when he found out about OOTP. Needless to say, Baseball Mogul couldn't stand being fired upon....shattered into many pieces.

[Pineywoods OOTPer]

Originally Posted by curt

I used to play a game put out by Avalon Hill, can't remember the name though. Anyone play it?

Nope, never knew of it, but then again, who cares what the name was on it? OOTP is what all the others wish they were.

[jerryb1961]

I played a lot of Diamond Mind 7 back in the DOS days (lost it when my house burned in 2004). Even today, I like to fire up APBA Baseball For Windows and listen to Ernie Harwell call a game while I'm doing something else. No game has come as close to making you feel like you're at the ball park, but gawd, it's expensive. I still play FPS:BB '98 in a W98 virtual machine-- it ain't realistic but it's fun.

OOTP has left them all behind though in every area (realism, customizabilty, features) except graphics, which isn't its focus anyway. For a serious fan, OOTP is really all you need, and it won't break the bank either.

[Reed]

Baseball Mogul website says that it doesn't have all the advanced roster rules and if that bothers you, you might want to check out OOTP. I'll give them credit for directing them to a competitor.

[Griever20]

To give this another angle.

Before I ever even was interested in baseball, I played a TON of Football(Soccer) Manager games, like the EA Managers and some stuff produced by german companies(Anstoß 3 etc.)

The last one I really played was FM 10(EA) I guess, and when I discovered OOTP, and well, the rest is history. One main reason for that, OOTP is much quicker if you want to, no waiting 10 minutes for a week to go through, or 5 minutes for a game to simulate.

No endless details and things to manage that are mechanical after one season(like, telling your ground keeper to take care of the field, or buy merchandise), but more focus on managing the baseball team, transactions, and if you want, in-game strategy.

-----

I went back to finally try out SI's Football Manager 2016 this year(hard to buy in Germany...), and found this game to be between very entertaining and very annoying at the same time...

It still takes ages to load compared to OOTP. Right now, I'm in my 4th season, and on trade deadline day, I know I can push the 'Continue' button and take a shower because it will take the game like 10 minutes to simulate the day.

Speaking of the trade deadline, they do a great job there because they don't only have days as time unit, but hours and minutes, and the trade deadline day therefore feels more like the real deadline as things happen step by step on that day.

Scouting and attibutes are some kind of mess for me, every player has 25 attributes between marking, finishing and mental attributes... Player development, youth development and training... well I don't get those and let my assistants do the work.

You have to constantly take the same interviews with the media over and over again or sent your assistant, and you constantly have unhappy players that demand playing time and are pissed off whatever you do, even if they start every other game for a Champions League team in two game weeks.

The presentation is a mess and in order to get things decent enough, you have to download like 20 mods to get player pictures(!), team logos(!), uniforms, stadium pictures, a decent UI... and if you want an editor to change some things, maybe create some cool scenario... Editor is £3.99...

They did improve the in-game engine and tactics system compared to any other football manager I played before tho, and the 3D games managed by yourself with pregame talk and halftime talk are quite good and entertaining and keep me in the game.

The tranfers and finding young, quality prospects tend to be challenging if you don't have a big budget, and more often than not your best players then get lured to some big club.

For example: I sold my right back for €55M to Real because well, they wanted him and he was grumpy because he wanted to leave to a big club. I then bought a better brazilian right back for €30M right out of Brazil and one of the best right wing talents(21y) in Europe for €20M. Some things never change

Overall, I still prefer OOTP by a mile

[Silfir]

Originally Posted by Griever20

Before I ever even was interested in baseball, I played a TON of Football(Soccer) Manager games, like the EA Managers and some stuff produced by german companies(Anstoß 3 etc.)

Ah, those were the days. Isn't it strange I had to get into baseball just to find something to play that's as much fun as the old Anstoß games were?

[Griever20]

Originally Posted by Silfir

Ah, those were the days. Isn't it strange I had to get into baseball just to find something to play that's as much fun as the old Anstoß games were?

Damn, I still miss my Borussia Dortmund Anstoß 3 save... I was in like 2070 or something like that...

[smiller]

Griever20, I also play Football Manager and agree with you about a major difference between it and OOTP. There is too much discontent in FM with players constantly bellyaching. It really distracts from the game, whereas with OOTP it's not nearly as bad and you have the option of turning off the morale system. I've actually stopped playing FM because of this problem (I can't edit players because I have FM Touch).

[Griever20]

Originally Posted by smiller

Griever20, I also play Football Manager and agree with you about a major difference between it and OOTP. There is too much discontent in FM with players constantly bellyaching. It really distracts from the game, whereas with OOTP it's not nearly as bad and you have the option of turning off the morale system. I've actually stopped playing FM because of this problem (I can't edit players because I have FM Touch).

Especially if you have a club playing international, you HAVE to have some kind of quality depth to play in the league and in the cups succesfully, and whatever you do, somebody is grumpy and wants to get traded or loaned or something because they don't play at all or don't play enough because they get rested... it's simply a bit too much.

PS: A good example why you should not overdo a morale system.

[LeiterFanatic]

"most people" aren't looking for a complex simulator. They are looking for something that makes them feel like managing a baseball game, however shallow that might seem to the crowd here.
I very much enjoyed playing Pursue the Pennant which became Diamond Mind Baseball because it took care of a lot of stuff for you: historical lineups, stats keeping, scheduling, etc. I moved over the OOTP with version 2 but I have discovered that, as I age, the depth of OOTP is more than I really have patience for. It's not the game, it's me. I know I can do everything simply, but the menus and the numbers.....

my OOTP favorite was 6.5 Simple and fun. I still buy every year but rarely play.

[swampdragon]

Originally Posted by curt

I used to play a game put out by Avalon Hill, can't remember the name though. Anyone play it?

Avalon Hill put out a couple of games. One of its earliest games was called Baseball Strategy. It was a two player game, and it did not involve real teams. Much later, Avalon Hill published Statis-Pro Baseball. It was one of the better games out there for a while. That was a few years after Sports Illustrated published a replay game for several seasons. I bought two 1970s seasons from them and played them up until the middle of May or so. That was a good one as well. When Statis-Pro came out, I tried it and liked it but never really did much with it because the real world was taking all of my time. Then I went from board games to computer games in the early 1980s and never went back.

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by Griever20

Damn, I still miss my Borussia Dortmund Anstoß 3 save... I was in like 2070 or something like that...

Oh, I played Anstoss 2 to death back then. Simple times. Fun times.

Originally Posted by Griever20

Especially if you have a club playing international, you HAVE to have some kind of quality depth to play in the league and in the cups succesfully, and whatever you do, somebody is grumpy and wants to get traded or loaned or something because they don't play at all or don't play enough because they get rested... it's simply a bit too much.

PS: A good example why you should not overdo a morale system.

I've only had the game for a bit over two weeks due to a trial-and-error process of acquisition (did I mention that I hate EA and the whole company should just burn down?) and I have only played FM Touch, because I read that the "full" game is constantly bombarding you with scratching somebody-with-hurt-feeling's butt. But Touch is annoying as well on this. I might have a squad in the low 20's, 21 to 23 players, so just a few spares besides the bench, and somebody's ALWAYS bitching and moaning. I'm trying to rotate guys, but sometimes you're the third-best left wingback and it is what it is!

I haven't even played a top notch team yet. Well, I started one with Lazio, who have 87 players and salaries of a billion, and I barely made it through the preseason there before ending up thoroughly confused. I have a Djurgarden save, which goes so-so, and I have a save (actually my first one) where I started with Bradford City, accidentally got promoted to The Championship, and the wheels fell off completely there. Got canned three quarters of the way through that season, sitting in 23rd. Ended up with Chesterfield, playing out the string as they were out of everything, then as the new season started they lost the first seven League One games. Got canned in a hurry, sitting 22nd after 12 games or so. Could not get another job in England except with Lincoln, 19th in the National League ... and now sinking.

And *everywhere* I go, the board always gives me abysmal squad harmony ratings. What am I supposed to do? Go with 16 guys just to keep the peace? That game does have some strange systems...

My Djurgarden game, too. I play with two DM(C) and one M(C) - sometimes the other way round - and have four players to stick into those three slots. It's impossible to maintain a level of happiness for them to not get somebody bitching.

I don't need OOTP 17's morale system, OOTP 16 and FM 16 are giving me hell enough. In my last OOTP season I brought in a utility infielder whose career was going nowhere, who was not promised anything, due to injuries got 300-ish at-bats, and when the team got healthier complained that he was not a role player. Bull****. Soulless players - best players. That's why Anstoss was great.

[Griever20]

Originally Posted by Westheim

I don't need OOTP 17's morale system, OOTP 16 and FM 16 are giving me hell enough. In my last OOTP season I brought in a utility infielder whose career was going nowhere, who was not promised anything, due to injuries got 300-ish at-bats, and when the team got healthier complained that he was not a role player. Bull****. Soulless players - best players. That's why Anstoss was great.

Ok, while I did not want to open that can of worms, I will for once eat it. I avoided talking about this topic... but well, here is my shot.

As a player, I tend to agree with your statement: Soulless players - best players.

And that is mostly because as a developer, however you design and implement a morale system, you can only lose.

If it is too 'simple', it tends to become a self-fullfilling prophecy, especially when things go bad. Lose a bunch of games in a row -> Whole team gets grumpy -> lose more games because the whole team is grumpy.

Most ways to make things more complex usually include the option of talking with your players and you have to put in alot of (pretty annoying and repetitive) work in, with the chance to make things worse.

Problem is here, if you really want to simulate team chemistry and team interaction, the background simulation has to be much more complex. In OOTP's case, you would have to ask in every case, WHY would this player get angry at you and your team?

Would a 23-year old rookie on a rebuilding team get angry at you when your team is 5-20 for a month? Most likely not, he gets his shot at playing at the majors for the first time. (*envisions Byron Buxton telling the new GM that he is mad at everything*)

Would a 35-year old veteran, a great leader, get angry in that case, given the fact that this may just be his last shot to play in the majors and maybe get traded to a contender if he does well?

Would a 28-year old All-Star in his prime get angry? Hell, yes, he has every right to be angry, he wants to win.

Would a 28-year old guy, coming off a year long injury, get angry at the team that gave him a shot at a comeback season? Most likely not?

OR: Given a number of (veteran) leaders and a good manager, should there be a cap for unhappiness, e.g. in OOTP, because of the makeup of the team, something like team chemistry can not sink under -150 because I have a great manager and so on? Why not?

Is stuff like this hard to code? Probably. Would I like to see this, especially with a good explanation on how things work and ways to interfere with it that are not too taxing? Maybe.

Do I trust OOTPD to think about the whole morale system issue and come up with a pretty decent solution in the upcoming OOTP versions.

Yes.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Griever20

Ok, while I did not want to open that can of worms, I will for once eat it. I avoided talking about this topic... but well, here is my shot.

As a player, I tend to agree with your statement: Soulless players - best players.

And that is mostly because as a developer, however you design and implement a morale system, you can only lose.

If it is too 'simple', it tends to become a self-fullfilling prophecy, especially when things go bad. Lose a bunch of games in a row -> Whole team gets grumpy -> lose more games because the whole team is grumpy.

Most ways to make things more complex usually include the option of talking with your players and you have to put in alot of (pretty annoying and repetitive) work in, with the chance to make things worse.

Problem is here, if you really want to simulate team chemistry and team interaction, the background simulation has to be much more complex. In OOTP's case, you would have to ask in every case, WHY would this player get angry at you and your team?

Would a 23-year old rookie on a rebuilding team get angry at you when your team is 5-20 for a month? Most likely not, he gets his shot at playing at the majors for the first time. (*envisions Byron Buxton telling the new GM that he is mad at everything*)

Would a 35-year old veteran, a great leader, get angry in that case, given the fact that this may just be his last shot to play in the majors and maybe get traded to a contender if he does well?

Would a 28-year old All-Star in his prime get angry? Hell, yes, he has every right to be angry, he wants to win.

Would a 28-year old guy, coming off a year long injury, get angry at the team that gave him a shot at a comeback season? Most likely not?

OR: Given a number of (veteran) leaders and a good manager, should there be a cap for unhappiness, e.g. in OOTP, because of the makeup of the team, something like team chemistry can not sink under -150 because I have a great manager and so on? Why not?

Is stuff like this hard to code? Probably. Would I like to see this, especially with a good explanation on how things work and ways to interfere with it that are not too taxing? Maybe.

Do I trust OOTPD to think about the whole morale system issue and come up with a pretty decent solution in the upcoming OOTP versions.

Yes.

And then we have to ask ourselves, would Milton Bradley get angry

[Westheim]

Yeah, if you had a system, in which AI agents would show actually believable reactions in a scenario like OOTP with as many environmental variables as that game can have collide - ...

Let's just take the "soft skills" like greed, leadership, desire to win, etc. There's six of them in 16, and they have like what? Five different states? So there's already 15,625 different "character" combos for a *single* player. There's 25 players on the roster... you do the math. I'm not a programmer, I can make Excel calculate a sum, that's it. But the possibilities are virtually infinite, and I guess that current-era computers are not able to handle the interactions of 25 players on a team (or 750 players in an MLB-size league!), and there is an awful lot that goes into relations between actual human beings, including but not limited to what aftershave they're using, what music they're listening to, and whether they're dragging their stupid kid into the clubhouse every day.

If there was any system which could generate believable, human reactions in these circumstances, and you would have realistic, believable means to influence these players and staff, and that starts with things like

* pat your rookie shortstop on the back for having a 3-for-4 day
* yell at your leftfielder for forgetting how many outs there were
* explain to that lefty specialist why exactly he's not a closer

then I'd be for it, because then there's actually a point to it. You could work with the system. You can tell a guy to change this, and explain a guy why this is and this is not a thing.

But instead you're watching your 11 little blue-clad men take a 2-0 lead over Örebro SK ten minutes into the game, and then blow it in overtime because your central defender chose to have a bout of selective temporary blindness and let some goon slip though and he scored to make it 2-2, and on a whim everybody's pissed and everybody's morale is *literally* "abysmal". And there's no other thing to it. You can't yell at the guy, and you can't say "Well, that was bad luck, we're better than that", because the system is for the very most part going in only one way, and you get slapped in the face with stuff you have no control over.

I haven't played OOTP 17, I'm just reading along and waiting for the patch cycle to end (partly since I only play this one league and after 5,000 hours you don't want it to end on some random stupid error that releases all players and replaces them with dancing broomsticks), but OOTP 16 gives you literally ZERO opportunity to talk to a player. They come after you to bitch and tell you that you suck and don't cherish their existence, but you can't even tell them that they suck too and that's why they're not playing.

FM (Touch) will give you some options to respond when some guy is complaining about not playing, but I find that one sensible option is missing. I can't tell somebody that he's not playing because there's a guy on the team that plays his position better and that he needs to work harder and I need to see results of that even in training. I can either make a promise to play him (and then don't, ramping up the level of bitching) or different variations of telling him to bugger off. And everybody's pissed, all the time, including me, because it's a stupid uphill battle that you can't win. You're just bombarded with complaints, everybody's morale is abysmal, and then the death spiral is in motion, and seven losses later you're fired - again.

These systems have to work in two ways, but even if they do, it will degrade into the same conversations, the same response options, always. Even now FM Touch will always give the five same response options for that interview question where a former player of your team says this and that about the current incarnation of your team, or a player on that team. Always the same. Reflexively click option #2 and move on. It doesn't matter, and it's still tedious.

We can't have a meaningful system right now, because current-era PC's assumingly can't handle it, and the systems that are available are unrealistic or annoying or tedious, or any combo of these, or even worse than that.

[jpeters1734]

I also played baseball mogul for a few years before i discovered ootp. BM does hold a candle to ootp except for one thing, imo. The aging model.

http://www.sportsmogul.com/content/aging.html

I'm sure ootp has something like this behind the scenes, or it's simply random, but i would like the ability to control it. I know that there's an aging modifier in ootp, but BM lets you set it for individual players.

BM also has player deaths, which ootp needs

[BigRed75]

MLBPA will never let that happen. I'm surprised that MLB lets the owners die and not just sell up.

The morale systems in game are lousy, and it's mostly because of the programming limitations mentioned above. I'm glad OOTP lets you turn off the morale system. I wish Football Manager did.

I played FM for years and years. It's what got me back into sports gaming. I haven't played for two years now because it got bigger than Ben-Hur. I didn't even buy the latest iteration. The FM Classic option was good, close to back to the way FM was, but even it started suffering from feature creep.

Strangely, I don't get as much a sense of that from OOTP. Maybe because you can disable certain features.

[jpeters1734]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

MLBPA will never let that happen. I'm surprised that MLB lets the owners die and not just sell up.

You can say that, but how do you know that? I understand certain things not being allowed, such as PEDs and certain news stories.

[deacon2817]

I agree you'll never see player deaths in MLB leagues but what about in fictional leagues? It would certainly add to the realism . teams could honor a player who played for them and has passed.