Baseball Sims - Fictional

[pure]

I am wondering how important playing with purely fictional players vs recreating/rewriting history with real players is to folks here?

Telemetry data from the days of PureSim leads me to believe people are like 90/10 real players vs fictional, but I am curious.

[Toddzilla]

what better?

[SirFozzie]

I actually prefer about a 50/50 mix. Baseball is a game of stories, and generating a fictional universe and letting it run is like adding a whole new bunch of stories. We've all had the story of the player who was destined for greatness, but the injury gods were cruel... Or the player who hit 900 HR..

[spleen1015]

I only play with fictional.

[Ramzavail]

I'm a big fictional guy and if I can't get fictional with history, I just fast sim until all the real guys are retired.

[Native Son]

I play about 98% fictional, but following the path of real baseball (team names, city relocation, expansion, era appropriate stats, etc.)

[JonInMiddleGA]

Real world starting point is my preference generally speaking, with a long enough run that it becomes either fictional or alt-reality.

Aside from FOF:TCY, I don't think I've ever gotten into a purely fictional universe in any sports game.

[cuervo72]

It's been a while, but I guess it depends on what kind of mood I'm in and what "mode" I'm looking for. I can, and have, wanted to be immersed in the past - I had a MicroLeague goal WAY back of simming the entire 1962 season¹, for instance. I obviously wasn't around then, and very few players were still active from that era when I first became aware of baseball. But just maybe I could transport myself back to that time, imagine I'm witnessing those players in a "what if?" scenario. Or, taking a team and trying to manage them game-by-game to see if I could do any better (or, just get luckier). Or seeing what would have happened had Finley broken up the A's, or Ruth stayed on the Red Sox, etc.

I could see myself doing that still, if I got back into simming. One thing that always bothered me about OOTP's "historical" implementation though was that it was driven by ratings rather than raw stats. So I never attempted anything of the sort with OOTP.

Now, for an ongoing "dynasty," I rather like the idea of playing with fake players. Of course, that's what I know.


¹ I didn't get very far. When games take 45 minutes to sim - even on auto - there just isn't time. I did sim a season opener between LA and SF though (no internet, so I did not know what the actual schedule had been). Drysdale threw a no-no, but by time I got home to save the stats the computer had frozen.

[rjolley]

I like to start with a year in history, like 1901, and let things happen however the sim says they happen. I also like to inject Negro League stars into MLB to add an extra dimension of players. If the league makes it to the current year, then I'm fine with fictional players.

I also enjoy OOTP's feature of starting players in random years. Decided I like to start that kind of season in 1915 or so because the sim isn't as enjoyable with McGwire or Bonds starting their career in 1901.

[LastWhiteSoxFanStanding]

Prefer fictional with a caveat.

I like OOTP's random debut feature which gives a mix of all the different historical players. However, it seems to me, historical worked a lot better in OOTP's older versions. The new versions require a lot more tinkering to get historical stats believable.

I think I might like historical better if I could trust the numbers generated by the sim without too much tweaking.