Quote:
Originally Posted by matttb324
Sorry another question about set up. I have these things unchecked:
*Use real historical transactions
*Players miss seasons according to history
*Retire players according to history
My question is given that those are all unchecked, how different are things like trades and injuries likely to be?
My hope is that they are often quite different. Like maybe still has a tendency to get hurt but that my league won't follow real life terribly exactly. Similarly with how often a player is traded or is drafted for the war, stuff like that.
Am I right to think it will follow similar trends (Mantle's knee is still likely to be injured but not necessarily)?
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This is where the recalc v dev engine argument comes into play.
The dev engine will only give you really broad strokes on a player's career in every aspect of his performance including injuries. Recalc tightens that right up with 1-year being almost pointillist in style if you get my drift.
Take Mantle, seeing as you brought him up.
The dev engine gives you a caricature of the Mick that is clearly him if you squint and close one eye. He'll still mash taters, offer solid but not elite D, be relatively speedy. He might generally be rated as FRAGILE and gradually deteriorate and be super prone in the latter part of his career. The path of said career will usually be slightly more linear, with the POT rating a general guide to how good he'll ever be but certainly not gospel. It will rise toward that point, then descend from it as he ages past his peak.
Recalc tightens that caricature up - more with each iteration, so that say 5-year is a photo of the Mick from relatively far away, 3-year is a mid-range image and 1-year is a portrait headshot. It does this by exactly what it says - recalculating his ratings every year using the range of stats you have it set for. The design here is that 1-year recalc as closely replicates his IRL career season-by-season as it can. So in his age-29 season in the game (1961 historically), he should hit the most HR he ever does, while in his age-31 season (1965) he will have a really high injury proneness to reflect his only having played 65 games because of injury (that doesn't necessarily guarantee he'll miss time with injury that season, only heightens the likelihood exponentially). And so on from season to season.
Does that explain it OK?
Now, with regard to those other settings.
I'm no coder but I am fairly sure OOTP works "regressively". By which I mean, its "control group" is one in which the historical season is exactly replicated - transactions, lineups, injuries - and that the stats generated need to be as close to the IRL as possible (they tinker with the ratings until this is achieved). Then, with every option NOT selected by the player, the game moves ever further away from real to simulated.
So if you play a season with all transactions, lineups, injuries ON using 1-year recalc then it should come out incredibly close to the historical being simulated. But if you turn one or some or all of them OFF the alternate timeline will stray further from the actual one with each toggle.
So, if you turn lineups / trans / injuries OFF but leave the miss seasons and retire as per history ON, Ted Williams will come into the game as a rook in 1939, play until 1942 then disappear for '43 thru '45 then come back in '46 and retire at the end of 1960. With all the settings OFF, he'll play all the way through and retire when the game sees fit for him to do so.
Or, in very rare cases, he might suffer a career-ending injury well before that.
By turning off each of the options, by increasing the period of recalc or doing away with it entirely and using just the dev engine - what you are actually doing is increasing the random factor at both the individual and collective level. Because, with the LTMs deciding the statistical output each in-game season, nowhere is
The Butterfly Effect more prevalent than in OOTP.
The more you understand about this game and how it works and what it has to contend with, the more you will see how it is one of the most stunning achievements in all of gaming. Ever.
In my Bucs save, despite my having integrated the league in 1909 and altered the stat totals used to accommodate the NeLers now in the player pool, despite my having used neither historical transactions, lineups, injuries, missed seasons nor retirements, despite my having used 5-year recalc rather than 1- or 3-year - Ty Cobb finished his career with 4125 hits. That's just 64 (1.5%) off his IRL mark.
Ridiculous.