How Many Years of Real Amateurs Are in the Game?

[jamesbutler2021]

Title asks the question. I'm new to OOTP as a franchise (I've known about it but never got around to playing it until now) and want to make some feeder leagues for my 2021 real-life 32-team MLB save. The only thing is, I don't want to have my fictional feeder players taking up space that real amateurs could. So I guess my question is two-pronged.

1. If I were to create HS/College feeders, would existing amateurs join them? Or is it only populated by fictionals that the feeder leagues generate.

2. Assuming amateurs don't join, how many seasons (if any) would it take for real amateurs to stop being a sizeable chunk of the player pool (in a save with no feeders I mean). I don't want to make a feeder league yet if the amateur pool is 85% real players until 2023, for example, because I don't want to be pushing out draft-worth real guys.

Sorry if this is a stupid question or anything, thanks in advance for the help!

Edit: While I have you here, anyone who uses HS and College feeders in a file that is meant to replicate real-life, what settings do you use for the best results/how many teams for everything? Again as someone who's never used feeders I don't really know much about them so if I'm making myself sound like a moron my aplogies.

[Matt Arnold]

I believe there are real amateurs for the next roughly 3 seasons, although by a couple years down the road there will be some fictional players that mix in by default.

Feeder leagues are separate from the pre-created players (or the players going through the default non-feeder system). If you create a feeder league, you will simply see both players in the draft, and there are settings to control a little bit how they work together.

The best way to guess would be to open up a new standard game, and on the draft page, you can scout the potential draft classes for the next 3-4 years, and see how many players there are in each class. You can likely delay starting up the feeder system until a few years down the road if you want the real players to dominate the draft pool the first few years.

You can add in a feeder system at any time, though. You may need to take some care since when you add the feeder, you may end up with essentially a double-cohort as the game will pre-generate players for future years as it goes through to give them default stats even without a feeder league system. So if you want to run with feeders, you do have to be a little careful in setup - often we would recommend to make sure you have backups, and then experiment with what time is best to add in, as well as experiment with what size of feeder league you will want. It can be very easy to go too big or too small leading to unbalanced draft classes.

[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

I believe there are real amateurs for the next roughly 3 seasons, although by a couple years down the road there will be some fictional players that mix in by default.

Technically three years, yeah as far as more or less full classes, but given that real HS players will end up going to college and real college freshmen might not get taken until they're seniors etc you'll probably end up having at least a handful of real players in drafts for up to 7 years.

[jamesbutler2021]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

Technically three years, yeah as far as more or less full classes, but given that real HS players will end up going to college and real college freshmen might not get taken until they're seniors etc you'll probably end up having at least a handful of real players in drafts for up to 7 years.

Thank you! What I might experiment with is adding the top (real) amateurs to the feeder league teams to take up some roster spots that would otherwise be fictional and then see how that works out draft-class wise.

Thanks both of you!

[ALB123]

It's too bad feeder leagues don't work with Historical sims.