OK After the last build, How is the Historical Aspect of the Game?
 

No Luck getting an answer to this in the General forum so I'll try here. I will never ever play a fictional league. Only historicals. I tried the demo when it first came out. That was a big mistake as I wasted my demo with a sub-standard version of the game and it seems like thay can't get the demo updated for whatever reason. Anyway, it seems now like they have the game moving in the right direction. I post this here to find out if the historical aspect of the game has improved enough for me to consider buying this game. So here are some questions: Are pitchers still becoming pretty much useless after they turn 30? Does the Lahman import process seem to work properly and give proper ratings? Can you change the reserve roster to hold more than 10 players? Are there any areas that are weak for the historical player? What is the biggest improvement for the historical player? I have owned every version of OOTP since the '99 version and have bought them all as soon as they came out up until this version. I want to continue supporting this series as it has provided me with thousands of hours of enjoyment. Will I get the same enjoyment out of this version?

I'm still working on testing my historical leagues, but I can at least tell you that my crashes from previous historical tests have apparently dissapeared. :)

Let me know what you come up with. If all looks good I may buy next weekend.

I'm a hard-core historical simmer in solo play and got drafted a couple of weeks ago to the dream team. (Guess the complaining, squeaky wheel got his chance to suggest rather than complain :))

I'm very happy to report that Build #12260 has dramatically resolved AI draft problems and AI roster management of leadoff and cleanup hitters. The roster management still isn't perfect, but it's much, much closer.

For some reason, wild pitches aren't fixed, despite claims to the contrary. Still occurring at more than twice the norm and it's a pain in critical games that you're playing out. Can really blow the realism when there are two or three wild pitches in an inning.

Another game-breaking annoyance is surprisingly losing your stars to free agency. The possible free agent screen for your team is still not correctly reporting the list. This has been reported again to Markus and I'm waiting on this fix before proclaiming the overall game a success for historical sims.

I haven't had a chance to test individual games, but failing to pinch hit for the pitcher in the 9th with the game on the line was still a problem up to this version. I'm hoping it's fixed, but can't verify that yet.

I'm really critical and unhappy with the game screens, especially not being able to see the entire pbp screen, catcher arm ratings or be able to read black type on a black background. For some reason, these aren't regarded as bugs and are considered feature requests. If I keep harping on this, it might get fixed with the money I spent for this version. I'm unlikely to buy any more OOTP if the next version is when this finally gets fixed.

On this latter item, OOTP is not currently my game of choice for the first time since Markus hit the scene. PureSim 2007 is better for the in-game, solo play experience.

However, I'd still recommend buying OOTP 2006 and help suggest changes. This game has the greatest promise of anything on the market. I'd also recommend supporting PureSim 2007. Both developers will improve from the competition and both deserve our money in my opinion.

But remember, I'm hard core about solo play and historical sims and the poor graphics, unnecessary clutter and such basics of not having season stats displayed while in post-season are pretty disappointing oversights that don't seem to be a priority for a fix.

You're going to have to turn you picher aging speed down from 1.000 that's for sure or it's 30 and out. I cut mine in half ( .500 ) after noticing this and pitchers are now creeping into their mid thirties at this point. I still have another decade to go to see if this number is too low, ie. pitchers going too far into their 40's.

Lahman's seems to be spot on as long as you set the game to automatically adjust league total modifiers after each season for historical accuracy. (just put a check in that box).

The player reports ie. Hall of famers and retirees continue to age and i'm not too fond of that. Cy Young retired at 38 and his report now reads 54 years old. Maybe these guys eventually die and it stops lol

Also you're going to have to edit Ruth after 1919 as he comes in as a pitcher. I found some good numbers for him that are close. My league homeruns Ruth (actual in bold) 1919- 21 29, 1920- 43 54, 1921- 42 59, 1922- 65 35 total after 4 years 171 177

I followed Tiger Fans idea to start; 22 man roster, 30 man expanded, and 50 man(40 man) roster with player creation modifiers at .100 and checked the create and maintain hidden players box so origional fictional players will suck, and over time will be phased out by all real players.

With the built in CATO like features you're sure to love creating your own historical universe. The rest you're going to have to dive in and get used to it. I'm having a blast !

Or you could wait until the 50's-60's when free agency became a part of the game. Meanwhile turn this feature off, and disable all the other rules that didn't come into play until much later ie. minor league FA's, Rule 5 etc. etc.

The historical aspect is still very weak.

I thought there was a Rule V draft in the deadball era as well. That's what I got out of my reading at:

http://mysite.verizon.net/brak2.0/ml_draft.htm

Thanks guys. Hopefully more will weigh in. I am going out of town for a few days and will make my decision to buy then. Oh and Rasnell, I bought Puresim this time and do enjoy it. I hope as time goes on it will continue to improve. A combination of both games would be the ultimate game, IMO.

I tried to get into Puresim last year, I think it was. It couldn't hold my interest for more than a few weeks. I'm not even sure what it was that turned me off, but I was having to force myself to open it after a few weeks. Not long after, I removed it completely.

I guess I should try the new version since it is getting big hype.

I agree with RWD -- a combo of both games would be the Field of Dreams of text sim baseball.

I always thought OOTP was far better than PureSim, but things have flipped with the newest version of both games. OOTP has a long way to go to get the historical stuff downpat and the in-game view is a mess when you can't see catcher arm, season stats while in post-season, only 6 of the 20-some lines of PBP text at a time, etc.

I have a little more confidence since my complaining got me on the beta testing team a couple of weeks ago and Markus definitely responded to my gripes and fixed the AI draft and the AI roster management issues for leadoff and cleanup hitters.

I just hope he does not treat the in-game issues as feature requests for another year and another $30 and delivers what should have been in this game for this $30.

PureSim sure jumped way ahead in historical simming with this year's version. It was a shock. Affinity mode blew me away.

Unfortunately I agree that Puresim is the better Historical sim this year. (With the exception of CG for Deadball pitchers) OOTP still has so much potential though. I have played every version of OOTP since the first and I actually think this might be one of the worst since they added the ability to import historical players, in terms of generating an enjoyable historical experience in the Deadball era. Granted we don't have to tweak league modifiers as much, but a couple of things really bother me.

The offense is pretty good for the most part, but one thing that really baffles me here is the way Stolen bases fluctuate so wildly. When set to "very often" you will get several players stealing over 100 in the first years of a deadball sim and then it slowly fades to the point that you will only have 3-5 players over 30 by the mid teens, even though you don't touch the settings. (BTW, I am using the Arod/garland DB that adds in CS totals, which should stabilize ths issue, but doesn't)

The big thing for me is the Pitcher aging and more importantly the way the AI handles Pitchers at a certain age, or career IP total is still not very good at all. In my current test I have aging set to 0.100 and I still have pitchers hitting the wall in the 28-30 range on a regular basis and am also finding the AI moves far too many starters to the pen after good Seasons, just because they hit that 28-30 age or have 8-10 years as starters. For this version to ever get Historical completely right this really needs to be addressed and should work with default 1.000 settings.

The final thing here is that this version, more than any other allows far too many marginal or unknown players, or even worse, players that had barely a sniff of the majors to be stars. Even with my settings for adjust batters/pitchers and weaken batters/pitchers fairly high it still happens. I am totally all for a few surprises like this here and there and also enjoy the occassional RL Superstar busting, but it is probably double or triple what it should be. In some cases it is almost like using fictional players there are so many of these types all over the Season leader boards.

I have always loved this game and will always support it, but being a hardcore Historical simmer as well, especially Deadball, this years version is just frustrating. With guys like Tigerfan and Rasnell testing I know we have voices on the inside, so hopefully it is just a matter of time.


A couple of notes about my current test. Leader in victories from 1903 - 1926 so far is 256 (Walter Johnson) and I even had to tweak his ratings back up after he was relegated to the bullpen at the age of 31 to achieve this.

I have yet to have Ty Cobb or Christy Mattewson do anything close to what they accomplished in RL and again I have helped boost their ratings more than once. I know the AI does not know names but it is a wierd coincidence :confused: Addie Joss also falls into this category as does Eddie Plank and Ed Walsh.

Ras please, lobby for us Deadball guys!! :)

I think Markus will respond, as he always has, to take care of his core supporters who really care about the accuracy of historical sims. I still can't believe that wild pitches aren't fixed, I can't see catcher arm ratings in the webcast view, season stats don't appear in the game window during playoffs when you really need that info, so many clicks to get the basic info in-game (compared to being able to see both lineups, get ball flight, sounds and shortcut keys for a graphically gorgeous and easy-to-customize view in PureSim).

I have to agree that it really bugged me about "The Big Train" relegated to the pen at age 31, released at 32, and retiring at age 33. He still made the HOF fortunately although i wish this didn't happen. What i should have done is set the pitcher aging lower before i started my league. That may have solved the issue, going to test in a bit to find out for sure, but i do know that since i lowered it after 15 or so years into the league; currently in 1923, that pitchers that came into the league after i lowered the setting are making into their mid 30's at this point and their ratings are still good -and- they're still SP's.

I too have been flipping back and forth between the two games trying to find the better historical sim (which is 100% the way I play these games). Ive been finding myself coming back to OOTP more, only because in PureSim, in order to have an initial inaugrial draft with historical players you have to rename all of the teams in the league from fictional names and cities, and that drives me insane. If you could do an initial draft from the other mode (historical career I think it is ?) that would be awesome.

Ive also found that the super scrubs are still WAY better than they should be. In my last Puresim 1903 test, the top 8 OPS players were fictional players that should have been "superscrubs". One of them had 88 HR's :) With the player creation modifiers, I think OOTP's fictional players come out much worse (which is good). They are a little easier to manager in PS though, if you add the "year" extension to the name of real players. Superscrubs dont get a year, so they are easy to spot to edit.

All in all I havent tested PS all that much because I keep coming back to OOTP. I wish fictional players in a RL league had a * either before or after teh name, so they more easy to spot. There are enough players in history I dont know, so to have to look up, say, Jimmy Jones in 1964 to see if he is a real player or not is a pain in the butt.

OOTP deadball fielding averages are way to high also. Ive been tinkering with the engine file fielding error frequencies and throwing error frequencies trying to find a good setting for deadball errors.

I guess I have been sucked in by the ability to have built-in indy leagues and custom minor league depths that I am looking past some of these other issues.

I'm a little confused. Why hasn't anybody mentioned Stratomatic Baseball? I played six seasons of it (1996-2001), and it was in many ways better than OOTP, especially as regards actual play of the games. Admittedly it's nowhere as far as scouting, player development, financials, minor leagues, etc., but it does provide you with better lefty/righty matchups, ability to limit the playing time of players who didn't play much in a season (those supersubs).

The support for the deadball era is spotty. Only 1911 and 1920 got the 'deluxe' treatment, five other seasons got 'special' treatment and the other thirteen use some degree of estimated stats. From 1959 to the present, statistical recreation is vastly superior in Stratomatic to what I've found in OOTP, and that's based on the state of the game four years ago; it improved every year that I played it.

If all you're interested in is trading and game day managing, I'd strongly suggest checking out Stratomatic. The only reason I no longer play is that it's not Mac compatible.

EDIT... How did I misread that post so badly? I've revised my statement...and basically removed it.

Strat-O-Matic is still the gold standard for statistical accuracy, but having to pay so much money for season disks and not having career progression are where Puresim and OOTP have passed it by.

Plus, the interface and game setup still seems like an old DOS game and just hasn't kept up with the times IMHO.

Diamond Mind holds the edge for PBP and one-pitch or individual pitch mode, but OOTP 2006 is now giving that a run for the money.

Overall, Puresim has won this year as my favorite historical simming/career progression/solo play game. But I remain very hopeful about the depth, speed of play, the stats and more of OOTP 2006. It still has a long way to go in patches before truly being ready for market in my opinion. But I'm very pleased with the progress of this latest build in fixing AI drafting and lineup management.

I realize this is completely off topic, so feel free to ignore me, but ya'll have got me to reminiscing.

Does anyone remember the old Longball card/board game? It was a contemporary of APBA and Stratomatic but, at least back in the 70s, was superior to both. The fault it had in common with Stratomatic was that, since it was 50/50 whether the results would come from the pitcher's or hitter's card, people who did very little of something (allow homers or walks as a pitcher, or strike out or gdp as a hitter) couldn't be accurately simmed.

Statis-Pro had one neat feature, in that the incidence of when the results came off the pitcher's card varied from 5 in 12 to 10 in 12, depending on how dominant the pitcher was. That accounted for pitchers who did very little of something (and in the most extreme cases, like Bob Gibson's 1.02 ERA year) made the hitters almost irrelevant. In other respects the game was a step down from Longball/Stratomatic. And it made the 'batter's extreme low' situation even worse.

There was a game I saw advertised for a few years (again in the early 70s), but never found for sale, that seemed interesting because you could physically position the fielders. I don't remember what it was called, but as far as I know it was the first game to have park effects.

This is probably the wrong place to post this, but a set of features I'd like to see in OOTP involves more particular placement of fielders. I'd like to be able to shift and guard lines with the outfielders, like you can with the infield. I'd also like the option of playing with five infielders if my pitcher's G/F ratio is 75%, or four outfielders if it's 40%

Apologies to rwd59 for hijacking his thread. :o

Longball in 1978 was really the first game that I had where I was interested in playing out careers and seasons. It also planted the seed for what would become a super stat geek in myself. Id played the Superstar Baseball (SI I think) once in awhile with a friend (I was only 9 years old he was 12) but it was only one game at a time and we didnt keep track of anything. Longball was awesome, but I can honestly say that Ive never talked to anyone that has ever heard of it. Most talk about APBA or Strat-o-Matic (which I graduated up to after Longball).

Longball was the game that me a stat geek, too. We kept track of everything, including fielding percentage.

The game was highly customizable, too. We made adjustments to the error charts to make more of a difference between, say a '2' and a '5' fielder. We toned down the hit-and-run charts so it was still worthwhile, but not a run producing machine. (My Phillies were set up to generate three to six runs in a big inning doing nothing but the hit and run.) We came up with fatigue ratings for pitchers based on batters faced vs. their S/MR/R rating.

When I say it was superior to Stratomatic, I mean after we were done tinkering with it. The only real problems were lack of ballpark effects, no righty/lefty interaction and no position player fatigue. That last meant that Manny Mota, who was a .400 pinch hitter, played outfield for me every day and led off. (Just to punish me, he barely hit .300 in our league.)

One of the best things about it was that we could play twelve games in six hours (there were three of us, and whoever wasn't playing would keep score), and that included the time neccesary to beg for a double zero, deliberate substitutions, do the "Kong" chant for Dave Kingman, scream at Kingman for striking out again, run around the table when a home run was hit, kiss Tug McGraw when he closed out another one, etc. :happy:

Good times. We each ran four teams, and if you wanted to trade between your own clubs you needed the permission of one of the other two players. My Phillies, who won the regular season and playoff championships in 77 and 78, were well balanced, with great pitching, great defense, high on base percentage and excellent hit-and-run abilities. My Dodgers, who finished third and fourth and went out in the first round of the playoffs both years, were solid pitching with extreme power and speed. My Rangers just managed to nose above .500 both years and didn't make the playoffs. They were scrappy and relied on a catcher with a '10' arm, Nolan Ryan and a relief staff that was accustomed to making its appearance in the first inning. The Royals finished eighth or ninth each year, and I have no clear memory of them.

Uhm. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread. (Oops!)

APBA did it for me. My first interest came in 1977 when i bought the football game, then the baseball game in 1978. I had seasons from 1978-1991 when i stopped playing it. By 1991 i did manage to get my hands on roughly 20 great seasons from the past, ones of great value i might add :) Where's it all now ? Sold on e-bay :( sadly i needed the cash. Favorite season to play was 1956 incl. the mighty Milwaukee Braves, Brooklyn Dodgers, and New York Yankees; in fact i still have the score sheets from that season lol. Anyway thanks for the memory !

I've imported the Lahman DB (as well as the Arod23 DB, Gambo DB, etc.). Here's what I've noticed so far:

Pitching Rotation - I've seen too many solid SPs relegated to MR status. Because of their age (30+), maybe? So, I'll see one pitcher made a MR, even though he started 38 games the previous year and won 19. In his place will be a SP who pitched in 37 games the previous year, but only started 4 of them.

Lineups - I think the AI for lineups has gotten better. Sometimes, I'll see something unusual with the batting order. More often, though, I'll see players assigned to unusual positions. Hank Aaron, for example, will play 2B against RHP, and CF against LHP, even though his primary position is RF.

Defensive Ratings - Often, these ratings baffle me. They seem randomly assigned in some cases.

Speed/Baserunning Ratings - Again, I don't understand these ratings. Eddie Mathews averaged 4 SB per year. He is assigned a 74 rating for base stealing. As a result, he will steal 10-15 bases in a simmed season.

If I were to play through one of these seasons, I think I'd have to manually adjust the rotation, lineups, defensive position, defensive ratings, speed ratings, etc., before I got started. That's a lot of work. I suppose I could also adjust the managerial strategies for each team, not to mention some of the strategies for individual players. Is anyone obsessive-compulsive enough to do that?

One other observation: I see fewer problems when I import a "career average" database. That kind of database has its disadvantages, of course, too.

I appreciate threads like these, I too only play historical sims, always starting in deadball, and have held off buying 2006 because of the posted shortcomings. I have purchased every OOTP since version 2 and commish the longest running online league in OOTP history (MLBC) but from what I have read here it just isnt worth it to me (yet).

Puresim 2007 question??? Do you still have to go to a different screen to make strategic moves like stealing and hit and run??? This was a major problem for me in playing deadball Puresim. Not having a keystroke command from the main game screen for ingame strategy really made deadball play tedious.

Would love to use full minors but I am sick of Illegal player messages, I used to like the ghost players which allowed you to not to have to use fictional players in the minors, the reserve roster is ok but I used to like seeing the minor league stats. I am so tired of filling the minors with fictional players every year and yes the problem still exists, since the last patch I got a message that said that there were an illegal amount of players on my active roster and I swear i could not find the error any where. It seems that this new version has one big problem, a lack of any support for historical simmers, a lack of any one at SI that wants to take care of the large core of historical simmers. There are so many problems that still exist after the new patch and yes it is getting better but all we keep hearing is that there may not be another patch and that we just may have to wait till the next version. Every patch that has come out seems to address all the problems with fictional leagues and online leagues and the historical simmer gets put on the back burner. I wish there was a poll that could tell them how many historical simmers there are out there. I have given kudos to Markus many times and am a stong supporter of this game which has been far and away the best baseball sim on the market. I played Diamond Mind before it became a computer game and was called Persue the Pennant and used Fast Action Cards, played Strat-O-Matic when it was a board game, Tried Pure Sim when it first came out, played APBA with friends, Never liked Baseball Mogul. Then came OOTP1 and it was over for me. I bought every version of OOTP up to 6.5 and now own this version and will still wait because Markus has always fixed the game

Markus, please pay more attention to us historical simmers, we are out here and we are stong

Targy, you will get your answer soon enough:

http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/boar...d.php?t=128359

I, too, continually run into the error of not enough players on minor league rosters. It's incredibly frustrating that something this simple hasn't been addressed.

A similar issue also has popped up in a 'major' league I'm running that has a 3-man rotation and a 17 person roster. Somehow the game doesn't realize it needs to keep at least 2 pitchers on the roster. It winds up with 1 pitcher and 16 position players. Brilliant.

I have no idea if this is fixed in the final version of the 1.02 patch or not.

Thanks, the score is 3-3 tie game. Again thank you for setting up the poll, now it is off to play my sim with reserve rosters, no weather, bad pbp and news reports, illegal player messages. But again i will keep playing this game because i know they will get it right, they always do

Well, if it was a simple fix, it would have been corrected already. So obviously the problem is not simple to resolve.

Keep your filthy logic away from my posts! :p

You're kidding right? Strat-O-Matic is still based on a dice game with separate batter and pitcher cards. I've got a Bill James article from the 80s that's more sophisticated than that.

The best historical replay sim I know is DM. The best career sim for historical accuracy is the most recent patch of Mogul -- with 6.51 in second place. PureSim and 2006 have too many wacky results to even be close.

This is for fictionals, I know, but it *should* translate to OOTP... if you go into the engine file in the config folder, you can edit the frequency of errors, double plays, wild pitches, and passed balls. I've found that for errors at least you can get *really* realistic totals just by dividing the error rate (1 minus FA) by the 2005 error rate and applying that to the game. I've been doing this with both throwing and catching errors, and they mostly look good. Too many errors by 1Bmen, maybe too few for some middle infielders, the right amount for catchers (though they'll look like way too much - keep in mind that Monte Ward broke the century mark IRL).

It's a bit of extra work, unfortunately, but still less than what I had to do to get 6.51 to work right (even then, fielding was horrible).

Strat (i use to play) & APBA (Im still in a few leagues...some since 1976) both only play a season at a time (unless strat has changed).

Each player will perform somewhat like he did during the season. No chance for change. If he leaves baseball (injury/retirement) he's out of the set. No 15 year career for Mark Fidrych. Maybe you want Dale Murphy to be a catcher, and Pete Rose at 2nd, but in those games, only what they did during the season you're playing is used.

I enjoy having Geroge Ruth getting 200+ wins & Babe Ruth hitting 400+ homeruns.
Nothing is finer then Joe DiMaggio & Ted Williams playing without military interuption.
I dont even mind, losing Norm Cash after 2 years to Injury. (The next replay he could make the Hall of Fame)


For recreating seasons i'd rather use ReplayBB (a card & dice game). It's slow but on target with stats.

I am still loving OOTP5 (and 6.5 too) with Catobase & the latest (or any) Arod/Garlon DB (with 30 or so Japan All Stars thrown in)

I think the first game to have park effects was Sher-Co, which I believe was a late seventies game.

The first baseball sim I ever played was "Be a Manager" probably in the mid seventies.

Ah, I can see that. Of course, house rules can compensate for some of that. In our Stratomatic league we allowed players who changed position to play at their previous position(s) for three years after after they made the switch in real life. We had a formula based on real life likelihoods of errors at different positions to convert a (say) range 1 error 23 guy at short back into a third baseman.

We mostly used this for guys like Edgardo Alfonso who used to be utility players but settled into one spot later in their careers. (Edgardo was my supersub for six seasons, filling in at third, short or second as needed.) It worked equally well when the Braves converted Chipper Jones into an outfielder and old what's-his-name moved from short to third for the Orioles.

There are now keystroke commands for all the basic strategic options. Download and try the demo. It's free.

As for OOTP2006, I elected not to purchase the game after reading about several issues that really disappointed me. Reading this topic has only discouraged me further. It sounds like OOTP has taken a major step backwards in historical replay. I would really love to have a baseball sim that would provide statistically accurate and realistic historical replays, especially with the online league capabilities that you see with OOTP.

But every game seems to have a fatal flaw. Diamond Mind requires expensive season disks and does not have career mode. The same can be said for Strat-O-Matic. The current version of OOTP sounds like absolute crap for historical replays, and PureSim still lacks the most basic features, like requiring pitchers to be warmed up in the bullpen and online league functionality.

Is there any hope for me in any product on the market? Or is there a complete lack of a game that combines accurate historical replay, the Lahman database, full strategic options, and online league functionality?

Wow! I don't think I've ever seen anyone else mention "Be a Manager." It was the first game I ever owned too. It was 1972, I think, and I had the '71 season. I was 11. My buddy had Strat, and I loved it, but for some reason the first game I bought was Be a Manager. I don't remember why, probably because it was cheaper.

I can't remember much about game play, only that it was more complicated and frustrating than Strat because you had to read the three dice off a chart then go to the player cards. I think you may have even had to roll twice, once for the pitcher and once for the batter, but I may be confusing it with Sports Illustrated.

One thing I do remember vividly, however, was Willie Stargell striking out in a key situation and being so pissed off (I was a Pirates fan) that I scrawled "dick" across his card in big dark letters with my scoresheet pencil, and always referred to him as "K-gell" from that point on.

Hard to believe I'm playing baseball games 35 years later....

hmm..fond memories of diamond Mind. easily the best of the dice-based baseball sims. I remember my brother and I doing player progression (we had some randomized algorithims) and rookie generation. Good times!

Onnel

What's the status on player aging and such at this point? Is it still broken with no apparent fixes available?

Last I saw it was much better. There are a couple threads in the GenDis forum which discuss this at length, using both ARod/Garlon databases and Lahman's.