My 20th 'Annual Wishlist for next year's release'

[david limbaugh]

Markus, my annual 'next year' OOTP Wishlist.

We go way back, since OOTP4. Game has come a long way since then!

1. (I have been asking for this since OOTP8 or so?) A way to "gray out" clone and delete option on a player. A button like disabling trades?

I hate accidently cloning a player and really hate cloning a bunch of them at once. I really hate deleting a player and not realizing it.

2. Please don't allow a player to be on one team and in the front office of another one.

3. Managers' Won-Less record needs to be only his record as a manager. Other coaches don't have a won-loss record.

4. A bug - in League History, Awards, some award winners' Stats are not there. Seems to happen if team they are on moved after that season was over. Can I also get avg/slg/ops HR RBI instead of HR WAR, pitching W-L ERA, IP Ks instead of WAR.
I am old school. Strat-o-Matic days.

5. Please add front office firings and hirings in News Feed.

6. When owner sends you their Season Outlook, Mid-Season report and Review of Season Goals can you add the team name? I have no idea what owner owns which team after the owner's name

7. A bug - if game ends on a fielders choice where no out was recorded in the bottom of the inning the pitcher is credited for 1/3 of an inning even though that out was not recorded.

[uruguru]

I have so many ideas of improvements but one thing would be a team fielding register in the history section, something like this:

[OutS|der]

A few things off the top of my head atm are

being able to set the start and end dates of a season
Mass delete owners
Player history pages saved when imported and/or the ability to import player history or edit the awards.
Auto generate player news based on new edited awards or accomplishments

[brigmcneil]

I would love the online manuals to be updated with answers to the questions that arise here.
I would like the manuals to spell out explicitly what can be done in each phase of a season and grey out things or disable "edits" when they cannot be touched (e.g. setting player development budgets).
Some of the newer features are not spelled out in the manuals and since there really is no "undo" feature, I know I am hesitant to try things in fear of burning my save.
Rookie Draft order does not seem to honor the "World Series Winner drafts last" at least during the off-season. It also does not break ties by revenue (which I believe is now done).

[refgewr3]

Here are two off the top of my head.

1) Make coach poaching more common, it's way too easy to lock down great coaches all throughout your minors.

2) Expand player & coaching attributes attributes. Have pitch mixes and shape and stuff. Have coaches who emphasize specific things like Ray Searage and sinkers and the Astros with 4-seamers and Verlander and Cole.

3) Have contract offers that aren't final and don't count against your budget. It's frustrating when you have to commit to a single FA RP or SP from the start and can't extend offers to several guys.

4) Make the menu stuff easier to change in singleplayer. Frustrating having options greyed out and only available at certain times.

[jcard]

Originally Posted by refgewr3

Here are two off the top of my head.

1) Make coach poaching more common, it's way too easy to lock down great coaches all throughout your minors.

2) Expand player & coaching attributes attributes. Have pitch mixes and shape and stuff. Have coaches who emphasize specific things like Ray Searage and sinkers and the Astros with 4-seamers and Verlander and Cole.

3) Have contract offers that aren't final and don't count against your budget. It's frustrating when you have to commit to a single FA RP or SP from the start and can't extend offers to several guys.

4) Make the menu stuff easier to change in singleplayer. Frustrating having options greyed out and only available at certain times.

Promise small, deliver big.

[diesel230]

Umpires with personalities. Some are heavy in favor of pitchers, some are quicker to eject a player

Ability to add jersey retirement night, bobblehead night, fireworks night to home schedule like the older versions used to have. Gave a bump in attendance

When a manager is fired, shouldn't the rest of the coaching staff be fired as well like in real life? Maybe in rare cases, when the pitching coach is Legendary or something similar, they are kept on.

[Supermercado]

Originally Posted by david limbaugh

5. Please add front office firings and hirings in News Feed.

I've posted this on the suggestions forum but can we get a general refresh of the news feed? It's been the same for years and I'd like to option to subscribe to more specific topics. For instance if I'm not playing MLB I'm still interested in who wins the World Series but not in updates about sides eliminated from playoff contention etc...

The Football Manager social feed is the best example of how this can work, but even if you look at the options for almanac generation in OOTP it's split into categories so could work like this.

[Eugene Church]

The News Category in OOTP has stagnated the last 10 years... very little seems to have been done since then... I have offered to be on the Beta Team and I'll willing to expand the News Stories and give them more variety... also to work on the game recaps, which are not very well done at all.

One of the first things I would do would proof read the News and Recaps and correct the many errors in them.

Lukas Berger, if you want me to help out... contact me.

I am computer-illiterate, but I am a pretty good sportswriter... also very productive, too... I could greatly expand the news stories and improve the game recaps.

[Brad K]

How many of these threads are going to get moved to the suggestions forum before people figure out to post them to the suggestions forum?

[jksander]

Originally Posted by Eugene Church

The News Category in OOTP has stagnated the last 10 years... very little seems to have been done since then... I have offered to be on the Beta Team and I'll willing to expand the News Stories and give them more variety... also to work on the game recaps, which are not very well done at all.

One of the first things I would do would proof read the News and Recaps and correct the many errors in them.

Lukas Berger, if you want me to help out... contact me.

I am computer-illiterate, but I am a pretty good sportswriter... also very productive, too... I could greatly expand the news stories and improve the game recaps.

I would be interested in helping with same ... really cool suggestion

[jksander]

Originally Posted by Brad K

How many of these threads are going to get moved to the suggestions forum before people figure out to post them to the suggestions forum?

To be honest, I didn't even see the suggestions forum, since it's buried at the bottom, underneath the folder for what I assume would be posts about Korean leagues in Korean. I bet more people would notice that forum exists if its placement was above, say, the dynasty forums. But I get it, there are a ton of forum subheads, no arrangement of them will be perfect, and people will still post in the wrong areas.

[mgom27]

MILB Settings same as MLB because don't wanted to edit them MILB just copy MLB ones I set to them to be the same.

[boscoJJ]

Negro leagues in Custom saves

[itsmb8]

At some point, I would love MiLB ballparks with the same quality of the MLB parks. Especially if we're going to continue with just the KBO as the other licensed league

[kriscolic]

The AI is pretty bad. Too ambitious for the next release, but eventually a LLM that's been trained on, say, the entire archives of ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, and FanGraphs would be a game-changer. More realistic trades, free agent demands/offers/decisions, roster management, amateur draft negotiations, etc.

[kriscolic]

Stamina doesn't make any sense. Should be dynamic, based on usage. It should be possible to stretch out relievers. Pitchers who move to the bullpen should see their stamina quickly diminish.

[fredbeene]

Originally Posted by kriscolic

Stamina doesn't make any sense. Should be dynamic, based on usage. It should be possible to stretch out relievers. Pitchers who move to the bullpen should see their stamina quickly diminish.

Stamina should be broke in to 2
Starter
Reliever

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by kriscolic

The AI is pretty bad. Too ambitious for the next release, but eventually a LLM that's been trained on, say, the entire archives of ESPN, Baseball Prospectus, and FanGraphs would be a game-changer. More realistic trades, free agent demands/offers/decisions, roster management, amateur draft negotiations, etc.

If you’re talking about training the AI on news articles to produce new ones a la ChatGPT, I think you’re greatly overestimating how large of an operation OOTP is. Also, if I’m being honest, I don’t really want AI generated content in here; the stories, including all of the nested if statements and so on, can be made by humans, thanks.

If you’re talking about training the AI itself… that’s not really how neural networks work and an LLM is going to do basically nothing to make the game make decisions “better”. I think youre maybe confusing LLMs, which basically construct very sophisticated Mad Libs when you enter a prompt, with machine learning, which is a whole different thing (LLMs use machine learning but it’s one very specific application).

Machine learning still needs some human interaction or at least some kind of carrot and stick approach to tell it which decisions work and which ones don’t. You could, conceivably, make it look at standings after a year or 5 years or whatever but I can tell you right now that that will create an AI that’s good at exploiting loopholes in the game, not necessarily making better baseball decisions, and on top of that even if it found some crazy exploit that’s also applicable to actual baseball, it’s based on no accumulated baseball wisdom whatsoever and will look screwy. The thing is, an AI will only really be able to come up with this stuff if you give it thousands and thousands of simulated seasons, and if you have people poring over transactions to sanity check it, much of the bonus you get from machine learning is gone,

[kriscolic]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

If you’re talking about training the AI on news articles to produce new ones a la ChatGPT, I think you’re greatly overestimating how large of an operation OOTP is. Also, if I’m being honest, I don’t really want AI generated content in here; the stories, including all of the nested if statements and so on, can be made by humans, thanks.

If you’re talking about training the AI itself… that’s not really how neural networks work and an LLM is going to do basically nothing to make the game make decisions “better”. I think youre maybe confusing LLMs, which basically construct very sophisticated Mad Libs when you enter a prompt, with machine learning, which is a whole different thing (LLMs use machine learning but it’s one very specific application).

Machine learning still needs some human interaction or at least some kind of carrot and stick approach to tell it which decisions work and which ones don’t. You could, conceivably, make it look at standings after a year or 5 years or whatever but I can tell you right now that that will create an AI that’s good at exploiting loopholes in the game, not necessarily making better baseball decisions, and on top of that even if it found some crazy exploit that’s also applicable to actual baseball, it’s based on no accumulated baseball wisdom whatsoever and will look screwy. The thing is, an AI will only really be able to come up with this stuff if you give it thousands and thousands of simulated seasons, and if you have people poring over transactions to sanity check it, much of the bonus you get from machine learning is gone,

Admittedly, this is not my area of expertise. The AI is pretty lacking, though. If a chatbot can compose a play in the style of Shakespeare, it seems like it should be possible to write software that can propose a trade in the style of Brian Cashman. At some point in the not too distant future.