Park factor calculation

[LoneRhino]

I've been downloading a bunch of ballparks and I've been using the pre-loaded park factors. I've also checked them using the auto calculate in the game and the OOTP Park generator and I'm getting very different results.

Which of these are most accurate?

[Sweed]

Probably depends on who made the parks you are importing. They may have done the research to do "real" park factors, or they may have had OOTP autocalc them at the time they were made. You could be seeing a difference because of "dice rolls" or OOTP has over time changed/fine tuned how it calculates the factors? Or because they were set by the modder that made the park outside of OOTP.

FWIW I think Silvam said that he had OOTP generate factors for his historical parks mod. I think that's fine as doing all of those by hand would be a BIG JOB when covering a hundred plus seasons. If that's wrong hopefully he sees this and corrects me.

I do look through some of the other modders threads but don't recall any of them saying how they do the factors. Keep in mind the only mod parks I use are Silvams' historical so could easily miss that information if provided.

[Garlon]

For all historical ballparks since 1871 we have 3yr ballpark factors in the era_ballparks file.

[LoneRhino]

Originally Posted by Garlon

For all historical ballparks since 1871 we have 3yr ballpark factors in the era_ballparks file.

Where is the era ballparks file?

[Garlon]

You will find the file Local Disk/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/Out of the Park Baseball 25/data/database

Regarding ballpark factors, there are no absolute factors, only relative factors since ballparks are only compared to the other ballparks in the same league and they change yearly.

In the file there are two sets of factors. The first set is in columns H/I/J/K and these are quadratic runs scoring factors. They are designed to replicate the scoring environment of the ballpark by adjusting the factors for BA and HR (2B and 3B are set at 1.000 but are actually still being modified by the BA factor since the game uses those values as a subset). These values do not get loaded by OOTP but they are there for reference and you can use them manually by using them for RHB and LHB.

The set the game will load can be found in columns AF though AM and have discrete factors for BA/2B/3B/HR each for RHB and LHB. From 1871 to about 1905 though the quadratic factors are copied over though. From about 1905-2023 though there are discrete factors.

If you are using ballparks from different seasons though the factors really do not mean anything out of the context of a given season when used with all of the other ballparks though.

[LoneRhino]

Thanks Garlon. I'm playing a fictional league with a lot of parks from other people's mods. I don't know if you've used the OOTP Park Generator. Most of the parks that I've run through both are fine but a few will have crazy readings like one will say the park favors LHB and the other will favor RHB. Luckily those are rarities.