Promotion/Relegation?

[GMLoophole]

Originally Posted by professor ape

At the same time, I do understand the challenges of making such a significant change in the coding and I would prioritize things like a 2D graphics engine over promotion/relegation.

In the interest of expressing another view... for me graphics engine rates near 0; I remember High Heat players running through the CF wall and invisible fireworks and worry about the man-hours it takes to produce and maintain. I probably would not use the graphics unless they were unbelievable and would usually just turn them off to save memory as I do with a lot of options in the current game like baseball cards.

I would use promotion/relegation, sometimes. I think it makes for interesting league dynamics and have really had difficulty getting it to work at all the few times I've tried. As to the AI and resources required, I am not the programmer and don't know how hard it is. Would a piece of the puzzle be solved (as to AI strategy anyway) if it were handled like an addition to the playoff structure? First you'd select the teams that make the playoffs (as now). Then you'd select the teams that make the "anti-playoffs", whether or not playoff games are scheduled (say if the bottom two teams in one league are automatically relegated, and the top two in the lower league are automatically promoted). Or if it were easier at first, have the only option be a relegation tournament like the playoff tournaments now, which would allow the user to manually move those teams up and down depending on results. I realize it wouldn't solve all the financial.etc problems nor deal with player loans and such... but it might be a start.

If that worked, it seems like the main effect would be to keep the worst teams in the top league facing relegation from selecting "rebuilding" as a team approach and dumping all their players.

[Who Killed Kenny?]

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but maybe a good way to solve this problem intermediately is by having OOTP support Macros. The idea is that there would be a record button that allows the user to specify a set of changes that can be made when the macro is fired. Then a trigger should be set to allow the game to fire it automatically.

It would also allow for other "supported but not automatic" actions to be done without additional developer coding,

Pipedream though.

[Scruff]

Originally Posted by GMLoophole

In the interest of expressing another view... for me graphics engine rates near 0; I remember High Heat players running through the CF wall and invisible fireworks and worry about the man-hours it takes to produce and maintain. I probably would not use the graphics unless they were unbelievable and would usually just turn them off to save memory as I do with a lot of options in the current game like baseball cards.

You haven't seen the FM series games I assume. The graphics are really, really good, very believable. I play the game constantly, and that's a big reason why. As mentioned earlier, it very much adds to the in game immersion, it's pretty phenomenal actually. We've come a long way from High Heat in the last 10-15 years. I am not a graphics junkie, I would play Madden in franchise mode and just sim the games, I care a lot more about the stats, and in Madden, the graphics weren't just a visual representation of the sim, the game played differently when you 'watched'. I preferred the realistic statistically based sim to the graphics engine any day. But when done well like in FM, it's really great to see.