historical minors will get better

[Spritze]

generalities in general are never entirely correct but generically they speak to a general consensus as it pertains generally.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by Spritze

I have been told that "nobody cares about the nitty-gritty of the 1959 Eastern League". By nitty-gritty I assume they mean the players. So that league without its real players = what exactly?

Add to that the fact that if you start in 1959 and have no draft so that players do go to their IRL teams the AI horses around with the players before you can even view those rosters, let alone play a game with them.

Not fun even in the funeral sense.

Spritze is pretty much quoting me but I'd like to explain a bit more. I'll add the disclaimer that these are my personal thoughts, not official thoughts.

Basically the game simply isn't designed at any level to load the minor leagues with all players falling onto exactly the right teams in the right years and to keep them there. It never has been designed to do that.

Even if it does so at start, as soon as you play one day the ai will take over and assign the player where it wants to. This happens even with the MLB Quickstart where we painstakingly hand rate the players to get them to start the game at approximately the right level. It's only going to happen all the more so with the historical minors where there's no hand rating going on and everything is sorted through an algorithm.

The game is and always has been ultimately about the major leagues and major league organizations. So the historical minors were added to provide a similar experience for historical play as you get with the MLB Quickstart. A full, rich, realistic baseball universe with lots of real players and teams at every level.

What it wasn't designed to do is allow you to play a replay of the 1959 Eastern League with every player that played in the league on their right team all season long, with as played lineups etc.

That's just beyond the capabilities of OOTP. It'd basically be asking for a whole new game to expect that to happen. I shudder to think of the coding and work that would be needed to make that possible out of the box.

You can make it happen yourself of course, with a lot of work and time by cutting everything out of the game other than the 1959 Eastern League and its players, but we just can't make that happen out of the box, certainly not as part of a full universe. That was never the purpose of adding historical minors.

I totally get that a few folks would love to have that be possible, but it's really just a bridge to far and it would take a TON of effort to make it possible, far more effort than we'd ever come close to making back in sales.

What is historical is the big picture. The game includes the real leagues, real teams, real players for each year.

What's not and I'd guess never will be historical is the exact placement of the exact players on their exact correct teams for the duration of every year.

We can't even make that happen for just one year, for the current season, in 20 or so leagues, with laboriously hand rated players, for more than one day, the day the game loads on, and even for that one day we can't do it perfectly. So how can we make it happen for every single historical year covering countless dozens of leagues some years? Once you hit the play button in any mode of OOTP, the ai is going to take over and it's going to release guys and move guys around without regard to exact historical accuracy.

[mitchkenn]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

....
The game is and always has been ultimately about the major leagues and major league organizations. So the historical minors were added to provide a similar experience for historical play as you get with the MLB Quickstart. A full, rich, realistic baseball universe with lots of real players and teams at every level.

What it wasn't designed to do is allow you to play a replay of the 1959 Eastern League with every player that played in the league on their right team all season long, with as played lineups etc.

What is historical is the big picture. The game includes the real leagues, real teams, real players for each year.

What's not and I'd guess never will be historical is the exact placement of the exact players on their exact correct teams for the duration of every year.

the bold section is my emphasis .....

i can live with that explanation, especially the part i bolded.... in fact, that's pretty much what i thought they were going to be when introduced. The bugs (minor league players from, teams no longer associated not going to ML reserve roster etc.) i'm certain will be addressed and corrected. i'm one of the ones that likes "more is better" on the minors, but i do understand there are limitations. Thanks for the explanation and i'm still looking for 18 to see exactly what is and isn't there. Still is a great game i play daily. (O, my historicals are not actually precise either ..... )

[thehef]

Originally Posted by lukasberger

Basically the game simply isn't designed at any level to load the minor leagues with all players falling onto exactly the right teams in the right years and to keep them there. It never has been designed to do that...

Even if it does so so at start, as soon as you played one day the ai will take over and assign the player where it wants to. This happens even with the MLB Quickstart... It's only going to happen all the more so with the historical minors...

What it wasn't designed to do is allow you to play a replay of the 1959 Eastern League with every player that played in the league on their right team all season long, with as played lineups etc.

That's just beyond the capabilities of OOTP. It'd basically be asking for a whole new game to expect that to happen. I shudder to think of the coding and work that would be needed to make that possible out of the box...

What's not and I'd guess never will be historical is the exact placement of the exact players on their exact correct teams for the duration of every year.

The 1959 Eastern League was an 8-team league where all teams were affiliated with MLB. I agree that it would be asking for a complete re-coding of major elements of the game to where AI would NOT move players up and down in an organization. So what happens - in the example of starting in 1959 and with real minor leagues - is that the 1959 Eastern Leaguers would import to their correct MLB organizations. The bulk of these players would probably be assigned to the EL team, but some might quickly move up or down in the MLB organization, according to AI & development (and/or to human GM, of course).

Sticking with 1959, let's use the Southern Association as an example. It was an 8-team league where all but two teams (Memphis & New Orleans) were affiliated. So, if you start an OOTP game in 1959 with real minor leagues - the Southern League players on the 8 teams that were affiliated with MLB would import like the Eastern Lg players would. As for the 1959 minor-leaguers on Memphis & New O, they would import to those teams, and would essentially/initially stay there since they are not part of an organization with higher/lower minors.

This, then - for both examples above - is where minor-league transactions come in. And before I go into that, I'll note that there shouldn't be that much work for developers to do to introduce this (who am I to say, though?), since it's already in place for MLB organizations; the real work is compiling the historical txns, which expert users/contributors have said can be done (to a degree that would suffice, if not be perfect).

Anyways, for players in 1959 who were part of an MLB organization or who were part of an unaffiliated team, they would be treated just as they currently are in OOTP (if playing with MLB historical transactions): They would be traded, released, signed as per the historical transactions file (or they might retire based upon AI and/or settings). The only difference is that their destination upon leaving an MLB organization could be - in addition to going to another MLB organization or to the free agent pool - an unaffiliated team.

Put another way, every entry in the historical transaction file would have a destination of one of the following:

- another MLB team/organization (trade or signing; and a not-ready-for-MLB player would be assigned to that org's minors)
- an unaffiliated team (if the player was traded to/signed by an independent team that is included in OOTP's minor leagues)
- to the free agent pool if released, or if traded to/signed by an independent team that is NOT included in OOTP's minor leagues)

It's not that complicated, although by the long post it might seem to be...

What this, admittedly, would not solve is the ability for a gamer to play out the 1959 Eastern League with rosters exactly as they were. (For a particular EL team, it could be done with some relatively simple workarounds; for the whole league, though, it would be pretty involved). However, it would go a long way to making minors playable, would add flexibility as to how one could play, and would lay additional foundation for future improvements.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by mitchkenn

the bold section is my emphasis .....

i can live with that explanation, especially the part i bolded.... in fact, that's pretty much what i thought they were going to be when introduced. The bugs (minor league players from, teams no longer associated not going to ML reserve roster etc.) i'm certain will be addressed and corrected. i'm one of the ones that likes "more is better" on the minors, but i do understand there are limitations. Thanks for the explanation and i'm still looking for 18 to see exactly what is and isn't there. Still is a great game i play daily. (O, my historicals are not actually precise either ..... )

The bold section is also my emphasis. Probably the most important line in my post imo.

Most of what's being discussed here and in the other historical thread as issues are bugs. The historical minors process has definitely had its share of bugs, no one would dispute that.

That's probably from trying to do a bit too much too soon and adding too many leagues and too big a feature too quickly and without enough prep and testing.

The immediate solution to that is not to do even more, and thereby introduce more problems, it's to sort out the issues with what's already been done and polish them up.

We're going to do what we can to fix the process and deal with any issues that have been brought up. I'm hopeful/certain Markus will squash most of them for next year's release, especially with all the help all of you have provided and will continue to provide.

But most of the rest of what we've discussed aren't bugs, they're design limitations. I'm not saying there's no possible way around them ever, but working with them is going to take time at best. They're not easy or quick fixes in most cases.

Adding the whole framework of the historical minors and covering as many years as were covered between OOTP16 and OOTP17 was a Herculean task. Honestly, who could ever have expected or dreamed of even that much progress in this one area in one game?

Yes there are issues, yes there's room for improvement. But this is something no one else has even considered trying.

It's a massive project and that there's been so much accomplished so quickly means we owe an enormous amount of thanks to Markus, Spritze and Rod.

Still, even with all they've done, it's going to take some time and some more hard work to get everything looking anywhere close to perfect.

Does anyone think that's an unfair statement?

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by thehef

Sticking with 1959, let's use the Southern Association as an example. It was a 10-team league where all but two teams (Memphis & New Orleans) were affiliated.

[pedantic]

The Southern Association was not a 10-team league in 1959; it had 8 teams, of which 6 were affiliated with MLB teams. (The American Association in 1959 had 10 teams.)

[/pedantic]

[thehef]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

[pedantic]

The Southern Association was not a 10-team league in 1959; it had 8 teams, of which 6 were affiliated with MLB teams. (The American Association in 1959 had 10 teams.)

[/pedantic]

Correct, you are 8 teams, 6 affiliated. I counted too quickly...