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.