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Old 04-22-2015, 09:17 PM   #1
conception
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A new and unique OOTP (league) experience

I love OOTP more than I have loved any game in my life, but years of playing it with trading on lead me to search for a new way to play. It's not that OOTP's trading is flawed, it's just that from somewhere I could always acquire a player I needed for players I didn't. And if I had traded pieces I needed on my roster, free agency could usually supply some support. I could always trade an impending free agent and later on find a player with a couple more years of team control left to replace him. Sure, there were house rules and other self-imposed limitations you could make, but isn't it more fun when the game provides a challenge without having to resort to these things?

That search and literal years of experimentation lead me to this creation, a league without any sort of trading where the only two means of talent acquisition are the draft and free agency. The player movement is akin to the NFL, while the strategy is still old fashioned baseball. I have never enjoyed playing OOTP more. The difficulty in acquiring talent makes success in this matter much more rewarding. When you've landed a potential MVP in the draft, or seen the email letting you know that an ace pitcher has signed with you, its a million times more rewarding than trading for a guy. Getting top tier talent is not a matter of throwing together the right couple players for a team to bite, it's a matter of in depth planning and sometimes patience, as the player you are looking for may not be available for several game years.

Beyond the fun of acquiring talent, that you can't simply make adjustments to your finances by moving around contracts means your decisions in regards to extensions, arbitration, and the free agents you sign can be enjoyably agonizing. In years past, I may not have thought twice about resigning an aging veteran. Now I have to worry that if I commit too much money, I'll have a contract I literally can't move if he goes south. He may become a useless player, but with money tied up in him I can't afford his replacement. On the flip side, I may let him walk, end up not seeing a quality replacement in FA, try and resign him only he's getting millions more, and have to deal with all the after effects.

That I can't make trades mid-season to bail me out from injuries forces me to think in the offseason about how my roster is constructed. With trades on, I can trade a surplus of infielders to pick up the starting pitcher I need. Now if a starter goes down, I have to replace him in house which can be tough because I can only afford so many. I may have to resort to career minor leaguers or relievers to get the job done. I have to make soup out of whatever ingredients I've been able to assembled, which may mean a one star center fielder starting for an extended period.

Enough about why I love this setup, let me tell you about my league.

-------------- Game start ------------------
The game starts in 2055, after some 35 years of playing out. You can keep the league history (dominated at times by my Miami Dolphins) or you can choose to release all players and set up a free agent draft, which you should only do after free agency starts. The game starts right after the 2055 playoffs, so whichever team you take over you can start before they begin deciding on arbitration and letting players hit the market.
-------------- Sim speed ------------------
For whatever reason, the game crawls pretty badly in the first couple months of the offseason. Do not be alarmed by the slow sim speed, it goes dramatically faster when the season starts.
-------------- League notes ------------------
Uniforms- all teams have home and away uniforms. You are almost certainly familiar with most team names as they are taken fromlogo and uni sets for the NFL, NHL, and NBA. I wanted to have nice uniforms but I put this league together after several failedattempts to create the no-trade league concept didn't work. I didn't have the heart to keep using the same logo sets, so I grabbed some to start quickly with.
Structure - two subleagues, 3 divisions each, division winners make the playoffs. The top record gets a bye. This makes the regular season mean something, even when your team is dominant in your division, and being the top regular season team is a huge stepping stone towards being the champion. This makes the team that is champion feel less like dumb luck and more because they were the best. Two conferences, a northern and a southern. South has the DH, north doesn't.
Rules - no trading, arbitration after a single year of ML time, and a hard salary cap. Standard option years exist but players cannot refuse minor league assignments if they clear waivers. Free agency occurs after five years instead of six. Because of arbitration years, buying out their years or declining arbitration is an important decision that affects your ability to sign free agencys.
Draft - An 8 round draft occurs in the offseason, December 1st. Free agency usually starts 7-10 days before this, so you get an idea of who is on the market before you draft, but can also draft before you commit big money to a player you may get to draft. Players come from college at age 22 nearly fully developed, much like the NFL draft. This is the lifeblood of every team, but for successful teams picking up starting pitching is as difficult as picking a franchise QB late in the NFL draft. You are going to need to draft pitching high to get it, and its often easier to overspend in FA than draft starters if you are a successful organization. Depending on the draft, useful players can be found throught the draft. Sometimes my 6th rounders are better than my second. There are 4 feeder leagues, why I can't remember, but there is no significance from one to the other.
Rule V Draft - set two days after the draft, as far as I remember pretty standard rules.
Schedules - 162 games in the majors. College leagues and feeder leagues have nearly full schedules as well to give accurate statistical evidence for talent evaluation. Major league schedule has interleague play, but for some reason it plays the same division every year. You can turn it off in preseason if you would like. All teams play during the summer. Generally the two secondary leagues finish their league year and have their FA's hit the market slightly before the PBL.
Financials - Financials are roughly halved so big time players make 10-15 million instead of 30. Second tier FA's will generally sign for between 1-4 million, which is a far more reasonble concept than what real financials offer. The hard salary cap is 110 million. Most teams can easily afford this, a few lower market teams can't. The league mimics the NFL in terms of every team being able to spend a fair amount of money.
Secondary leagues - A small league in Canada and a small league in Latin America exists. These leagues can't sign players for more than 1 year, though they do draft and develop their own talent that will hit the market around 27 years old. Mostly, these leagues exist to give undrafted players a chance to make it, and some players legitimately have gone undrafted and worked their way to the bigs to become great players. These leagues have unis but are not intended to be playable, you can do so at your own risk. Financials are severely curtailed to prevent signing top talent.
Rosters - The major league roster has 26 players, the bonus player is because without trading, you need the ability to keep more people on your active roster. Roster expansion occurs in September, like normal. A single level of minors exists with a limit of 40 players since this is your only level. Since players are nearly fully developed, you don't need more than one.
Personnel - The only personnel I have is the scouting director. I find managing different coaches a tedious process that brings no enjoyment to the game for me. This was designed before OOTP 16's new personnel features though, so you may want to enable it.
Pitching - I simply hate the way modern baseball handles pitchers. They are shut down for a month just for the thought that they may end up getting hurt. They miss more time being babied than they do being actually injured. In this league, pitchers have mid-20th century stamina and they pitch. Good starting pitchers can get 230-250 innings easy.

Anything else not covered, feel free to ask!
Install -
Place the ballpark images in your OOTP ballpark folder. All the major league teams in the game have a park with working ballflights from fictional ballparks released by creators like Teflon, Blueturf, etc. Their minor league affiliates use the same parks for simplicities sake. I spent a lot of time matching fictional ballparks with the look of each city. Also, in many cases the team matches the coloring of the stadium. One word of warning, these ballparks were taken from other fictional leagues I have made, so the file names you are copying to your ballpark folder will rarely match the city or team name.
Place the .lg file in your saved game folder. Since this is a saved game file, not a quickstart, you may want to make a copy, so you can go back to my original file if necessary.

Download
https://www.dropbox.com/s/7e398lo3oc...eague.zip?dl=0

Last edited by conception; 04-22-2015 at 09:30 PM.
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Old 04-22-2015, 09:20 PM   #2
conception
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Thought I'd share a couple screens. The first two show the league structure and the general look of the league.
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Old 04-22-2015, 09:25 PM   #3
conception
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A couple player profiles. One thing to notice is the longevity of one player with one team. It's very refreshing to see players not changing teams midseason very often, and players will generally only play for 2-3 teams in their career, and usually stick with the team that drafted them for a number of years. Its nice to be able to identify teams with players and vice versa, rather than them changing frequently. When you playing Washington, you know you are probably going to have to beat their tough ace Bob Monroe, and when Bob Monroe hits FA after ten or more years with his drafted team, its a big deal that you'll take note of. Will a division rival sign him and become your biggest challenger? Will you sign him and add a big horse to your stable? Do you wish you could have signed him, but didn't have the money in FA and cursed yourself for it?
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Old 04-25-2015, 04:30 AM   #4
Elektranaut
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I love your concept.My fictional league has exactly the same set-up as yours (6x6==36 teams)with the same play-off system!
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Old 04-25-2015, 10:17 AM   #5
Mgomz
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Have you thought about real people?,like the Flyers,Heat are missing. Tampa Bay isn't called Lighting or Bucs.
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Old 04-25-2015, 05:16 PM   #6
conception
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Have you thought about real people?,like the Flyers,Heat are missing. Tampa Bay isn't called Lighting or Bucs.
Nearly all of the teams in there have been real teams before. That wasn't necessarily my goal, as I said in the OP I had made a league like this 3 times before and tested and played it for months to years before realizing something wasn't working. There were some phenomenal full logo and uni sets that people had made for the other major sports leagues so I used those in order to be able to get this one into playable shape without spending weeks compiling the logos. (Though the concept and balance I reached in this league took years to perfect, this actual league was made from scratch to full unis, stadiums and everything in mere days where I also went to work).

I could have made this mirror the NBA, or NFL, like others have done with leagues, but I had an idea of where I wanted teams to be and that didn't match up with what either league offered.

BTW, the Flyers are Philly's AAA affiliate, and the Heat are Miami's. At least 3/4 teams have a different team name in AAA than the majors, but some don't because there wasn't more than one logo set available for that city.
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Old 04-25-2015, 05:17 PM   #7
conception
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I love your concept.My fictional league has exactly the same set-up as yours (6x6==36 teams)with the same play-off system!
It really is a perfect balance between making it hard to make the playoffs, having the regular season mean something, and making teams successful in the regular season still having to earn championships by beating the best in the postseason when it matters.
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Old 04-25-2015, 06:07 PM   #8
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No foreigners allowed? Seems to be a trend
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Old 04-25-2015, 06:19 PM   #9
conception
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No foreigners allowed? Seems to be a trend
Well, players can come from some different nationalities, but I guess what you're really referring to is the lack of international signings and free agencies. Having this type of system in place would undermine the player acquisition model in place which the entirety of the challenge in this case. Every player enters the league through the draft, save for a very select few which come in from the secondary leagues, and that's a very select few since the leagues mostly exist as temporary places for secondary league talent.

If you want talent, you are going to have to draft it (which can be challenging if you tend to be a good team) or you are going to have to overpay in FA or search hard for under the radar guys. I didn't want teams just getting lucky and finding 5 star guys in Venezuela.

I enjoy international players in other leagues, but I haven't bothered to post leagues I've created which have nothing really unique or exceptional to them, I'm only going to share a league that does something different.
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Old 04-25-2015, 06:21 PM   #10
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Well, players can come from some different nationalities, but I guess what you're really referring to is the lack of international signings and free agencies. Having this type of system in place would undermine the player acquisition model in place which the entirety of the challenge in this case. Every player enters the league through the draft, save for a very select few which come in from the secondary leagues, and that's a very select few since the leagues mostly exist as temporary places for secondary league talent.

If you want talent, you are going to have to draft it (which can be challenging if you tend to be a good team) or you are going to have to overpay in FA or search hard for under the radar guys. I didn't want teams just getting lucky and finding 5 star guys in Venezuela.

I enjoy international players in other leagues, but I haven't bothered to post leagues I've created which have nothing really unique or exceptional to them, I'm only going to share a league that does something different.
No I was referring to teams.
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Old 04-25-2015, 07:00 PM   #11
conception
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No I was referring to teams.
All the teams are American yes, if that is what you are referring to. I thought about adding Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal, and maybe Mexico City, but I wanted to add domestic cities first. I considered expanding further (this save has two rounds of 4 teams done) but after going to 36, adding more teams would have spoiled the balance so I abandoned that.
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Old 04-25-2015, 07:54 PM   #12
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Just out of curiosity, why were nearly all the teams renamed to NBA, NFL & NHL team names? Assuming there is a reason other than "B/c I wanted to"
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Old 04-26-2015, 01:21 AM   #13
conception
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Just out of curiosity, why were nearly all the teams renamed to NBA, NFL & NHL team names? Assuming there is a reason other than "B/c I wanted to"
Check a couple posts back.
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Old 04-26-2015, 09:47 AM   #14
Mgomz
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Where's like Tim Duncan,Tobias Harris,Ryan Tannehill,Brian Schinn and so on? Also Las Vegas doesn't have a Pro Team but you gave it one. 76ers,Eagles would be Minor League teams of the Flyers. So would Panthers of Dolphins. How about MLS Teams? WNBA Teams used as Minor League Teams?
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Old 04-27-2015, 09:59 PM   #15
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I really like the idea of this. Going to give it a try.
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Old 08-07-2015, 07:16 PM   #16
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This looks really interesting. Gonna give it a try and see what happens.
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Old 08-14-2015, 10:22 AM   #17
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Gave this a try and while it is very nice, I am wondering if there is a way to start the league back at the beginning.
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Old 08-14-2015, 09:48 PM   #18
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Gave this a try and while it is very nice, I am wondering if there is a way to start the league back at the beginning.
Well, you can dump everyone into a redraft and erase their stats and histories.
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Old 05-01-2016, 03:37 PM   #19
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The NFL draft rekindled my interest in this league. If you like a league that emphasises the draft and has an NFL slant, this is a good one.
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Old 05-01-2016, 10:23 PM   #20
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Has anyone updated it for OOTP 17?
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