Quote:
Originally Posted by BaseballATeam
I haven't kept data on it or anything, but I used to write for FanGraphs and had an eye on just about every game for the better part of a decade. I know exactly how many games *should* change leads in the ninth inning (roughly 5%, rising to 8% for leads of 3 or less), and it sure feels like more than 8% in-game. Not enough to complain about, mind you, I just take it as one of those things that's more video-gamey than reality.
I think where it's most noticeable is with large leads. The number of eight+ run leads that change in the ninth inning in a given season can usually be counted on one finger, and that's leaguewide. Run a 10-year sim, and most teams should experience between 0-1 instances of a lead change of this magnitude. My experience with OOTP is it's more like 2-3 times a year per (human) team.
I do think it probably has to do with gaming mechanics like Sparkplug. I don't know if there's a momentum mechanic in there somewhere, but maybe that can run away sometimes.
This is all an observation, not a criticism.
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Appreciate the observations.
We don't use Sparkplug or any sort of momentum mechanics in the least, so certainly that would not come into play at all here.
EDIT: Just to expand on this a bit, it's always super hard with things in-game where you cannot necessarily get a sufficient sample size to know if there's a possible issue or not. Anecdotal evidence is worth considering but only to a certain point. We've made changes based on it in the past and really messed things up as a result. So we're much more careful not to do this now.
As an example, lots of folks have always sworn that there are too many pb's and wp's while playing out games, and yet the in-game simulation is the same as regular simulation in OOTP (obviously excepting for the user inupt) and then season numbers come out perfectly fine and we can never find any verifiable issues here in our in-game testing. So it becomes pretty difficult to even know if there's even a problem in cases like this, much less any possible causes or fixes or if it's just a case of things 'feeling' off but being perfectly fine.