[Charlie Hough]

Potential ratings are a huge factor in a player's development, along with age, player usage, and coaching (if you use coaching). Player performance can also have an effect on development, and so can a player's work ethic, personality and morale (if you're using those options in your game).

A player who has been created or imported with really high potential is going to have a much better chance of becoming a star than someone who starts off with an average potential. That's because the development engine is already working with a high potential that could be realized, even if the player's ratings are currently low. In the other case, a player's potential would have to increase dramatically, and not just his current ratings, for him to have a good chance to become a star.

When historical players are created, OOTP gives them very detailed potential ratings in all of their batting, pitching and fielding categories, and those potential ratings are based on the settings you determine. It's all based on real life stats, and, if you turn on commissioner mode and look at a player in the editor, you can see the exact potential ratings it has calculated for all categories.

For player potential, I always use remaining peak seasons because I want players to have the potential to reach the absolute best performance they ever achieved in their future real life historical stats, and I want to be sure that this is only possible moving forward.

Historical games in OOTP are much different from regular modern MLB or fictional games because potential ratings are based on real life stats. But, with development, once those potentials are created, it's all up to the development engine and all the other factors after that. Real life stats are no longer a factor. However, since it all starts with real life stats, historical games have a full range of visible potentials of all varieties, right from the start.

In non-historical games, player ratings and potentials often seem to be identical or much closer to each other, unless players are newly created rookies or younger players with a lot of their future ahead of them. But even those rookies and young players may not have the full range of potentials that we typically see in a historical game. That's because everything is going to be based on the development engine, where both their long-term potential and their future ratings are yet to be determined. It's similar to the real life draft, where there are hundreds of high school or college players where there is very little to help scouts and GMs determine which ones will develop into future stars or at least good or average MLB players. I don't play a lot of non-historical games, but that seems to be the case from my limited experience.

I will run some more long-term historical sims during the coming days, and I'll take a closer look at all of this, to better evaluate how the development engine works with historical players with really high potential. I'm curious to see how things play out with more players such as Mays, Aaron, etc.