Quote:
Originally Posted by revmcgator
This week has only confirmed my feeling that the PT game engine just does what it does, without much relationship to the specifics of what we do.
The Hatchets continue their slide to Diamond this week, despite my best efforts to coax them to victory.
Meanwhile, the Truckers, having been exiled to non-OL Perfect land have thrived, despite the same less-than-perfect lineup that barely avoided relegation the past two seasons. The Truckers continue to get better, all despite *no* intervention from me this week...or perhaps *because* no intervention? Who knows.
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Based on my teams' results, I would agree. The "stuck in silver" Rustlers seemed poised to finally move up after three seasons in which they won 96, 89, and 96 games. The only change was bringing in a higher rated, across the board, Troy Tulowitzki part way through last season.
I'm guessing that OOTP's engine is more geared toward the universe than the individual results a player's card describes. For me, at least, it explains why players with similar ratings can end up with widely divergent results. It seems rather top down to me, where the results that this seasons are calculated and the pie is baked and put on the table. Your Willie Stargell can grab a 35 HR piece while mine gets 12. I realize there are other factors that contribute to the spread, but I'm fairly convinced that they might explain a difference of say, 35-25. The extremes in PT are quite ubiquitous and seem to be the norm. The ability to direct the AI's actions also seems rather quirky to me as well. You have to coax and cajole the AI, but your directions are treated as suggestions. I really dislike the "sliders" approach, because while they seem to be telling the AI to pull your pitcher slowly, the AI is still gonna yank a guy at around 100 pitches because that is the overall model that the game plays to.
In ESSOM, a play by mail league I played in many years ago, we used a pretty straight forward approach. As an example, say you have Goose Gossage as your closer, his "bring in" instruction might read:
9th inning or later
3:0
This tells the AI that if you're winning by 3 or less, or tied, he comes into the game. As for pulling a pitcher, since stamina is so ill-defined in OOTP they would need to allow you to define a pitch count that the pitcher would be allowed to reach before he gets pulled. It really sucks to look at a box score and see that your starter was cruising along, only to be pulled for a gas can who blows the game.
I should say that those instructions were based on A Strat-O-Matic league using the Point of Weakness (POW) system they developed, which I'm sure OOTP couldn't implement. They could however use this system to allow you to keep a pitcher in as follows.
Nolan Ryan
Remove in 7th (or 8th, etc) if
2:0:L
which translates as winning by two or less, tied, or losing. What's nice abut this is that you could have him "take one for the team" and rest your bullpen by leaving him in to absorb a loss. Any abuse could be prevented by making an absolute pitch count of say 130 pitches where he gets yanked. Strat handled it by having a pitcher immediate reach his POW if he was in the third inning past his POW stamina inning. Starters were rated at 5, 6, 7, 8, and very rarely 9. Relievers were 0, 1, 2, 3, and rarely 4.
I've gone on too long. If anybody's interested in shooting the breeze about it, PM me or e-mail to
kidheckett@gmail.com. Our instructions used to cover everything and were pretty easy and also pretty simple to adapt if you were a hands-off type.