OOTP9 Preview--Discussion Thread.
 

Have at it!

with finances in my world being so tight, I wish I had SOME idea of when ddsb will be coming out, because I don't really want to buy more than one baseball game...

Have playoff customization options been tweaked? Can we create different playoff structures (e.g. tournament style knockout, promotion/relegation, top 6 teams qualify with #1 and #2 getting a bye in the first round)?

SkyDog, you're such a WOOB.

Hey, I am not REMOTELY creative. :p I figured the easiest way to set up and showcase the national affiliations would be to use something I'm familiar with. Plus, since I have logos, I'm going to try to use those for facegen stuff.

I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say, but I love the fact you can set nationalities for teams. I loved having a Euro league in v6.5 and I could use the name switcher to get names from several countries. In 2007, you had to do some pretty silly stuff to get names from France, Germany, Finland, Russia, etc. But like I said, since SD already showed that, I don't think I'm saying too much other than it rocks.

There will be more customizable playoff options, but they are not yet available in the beta build SkyDog has right now...

The delay here is because there was a new build. I am installing it now, and will re-create the league and run 20 seasons soon. I'll probably be asleep before it's done and the HTML is up, but look for it tomorrow morning.

How are you using that feature? Are you setting up national teams with all players being from that nation? Are you disabling trading / free agency?

I just don't quite get how a league that uses that feature would play out, but it sounds interesting.

The way I set it up is to have one league with teams all across Europe. In v2007, the players were only created with names from the league home. If I set up 10 teams in France, 5 in Russia, and 5 in Germany, I get a nice mix of players from all those countries.

I haven't played too much with keeping people of the same nationality on a team from their home country, I reckon that would be difficult.

This 32-team league (all features turned on, very high stats detail) is simming at roughly 11 minutes per season right now on a medium-grade system by today's standards. Not bad at all there.

Can anyone sim a season with the MLB rosters that are coming with the game? I think a strong percent of former OOTP used the MLB rosters (myself included) and are curious to see if it's worth getting.

the game looks very very crisp and sharp. lovely interface.

I have not been following this release, but what does this mean exactly? Does this imply that there is a way to have very low stats detail (which would be ideal for historical careers)?

There are several stats tracking settings:
- Very high: all stats + all splits & double splits + career pitcher vs. hitter stats
- High: all normal stats + all splits & double splits
- Normal: all normal stats + all splits
- Low: all normal stats + L/R splits

The lower the level, the faster the sim engine and the less memory & disk space is used.

This feature is in the game since OOTP 2006 :)

The real rosters are not 100% ready and tested yet.

I don't know the exact breakpoints between Very High, High, Normal, and Low (which are the four options). But in my own fictional league with OOTP2007/8, Low was plenty for me. Low included L/R splits, OPS, and VORP. I don't know off the top of my head everything that's in Very High, but I know it has more splits than the vast majority of users will ever need, and is probably a bit on the busy side for a good number of people. (It is for me personally.) I'm just including everything for the purposes of the preview. It's uploading now, though, so once that's done, you can see for yourself. (Although that will be a while. In a bit, I'll calculate a projected completion time, and post it in the main thread, but it looks like we're talking this evening. 20 years of information for 32 teams x 6 levels is a lot. :p

Dola...

I started that post before Markus posted. :p

Thank you both.

6 levels of what? i thought in baseball there was like 3 minor league teams and one major league team? are you saying there's 5 minor league teams? that's a bit excessive. i'm sure we can modify that, though.

i plan on using Low stats. i don't ever look at those sabermetric stats. i'm more of an AVG, HR, STEALS, OBSP type of guy, i don't get into anything more than that. nice to see we can the option to use less stats.

Real baseball even has 7 levels: Majors, AAA, AA, High-A, Low-A, Short-Season A, Rookie Ball :)

I'm with you.

I only use 4 levels in my organization and I think for my next league I'll pare down the stats too. I don't need all those stats and splits - I never look at them as it is.

And not all teams use them all. I know Milwaukee doesn't have a Short-Season A ball squad but they carry two Rookie League squads. I think most teams are pretty uniform down through Low-A but there are many different combinations of options teams use below that.

I have to say upon first glance that things look good from a statistical point of view.

Lowcountry pitcher Raymond Herman looks to be an interesting case - wins a Cy Young at the end of his career and looks to be fighting off Mother Time quite well, something you likely wouldn't have seen in previous versions of the game.

Also interesting to see how the scouts view of the player has changed over the years and how scouting error comes into play (look at his control potential go up and down through the early years). Very, very cool.

I pulled up the league history and went to look at one of the teams. When I pulled up Des Moines' 2020 season to look at the individual player stats, I realized that I wasn't able to sort the stats columns. I know I could do that in the 2007 version of the game. As it stands, the players are just listed alphabetically and it's very difficult to read. I usually sort the hitters by ABs and pitchers by IP to get an idea of who played the most.

Is this something caused by the HTML upload (since I usually view these screens in my game, not on a website), or if not, can this be added back into the game?

Speaking of the league history/team pages, it appears the handedness of the pitchers is again left out. This works fine for batters, but lefty pitchers continue to not be noted by an asterisk on this page. It's been this way since the modern OOTP almanac has been in existence. Just a note.

This works inside the game... to have it work in your external browser you need a plugin, there is one available for Firefox for free :)

OK, good. I rarely if ever look at this stuff online, so I was hoping that was the issue, not the game itself.

damn, I'm not a huge baseball fan but I did purchase OOTP4 oooooh so long ago and I may have to give it another shot if the talks in here go well.

Plus, I've seen my first Iron Pigs game and I had a good time (though there was much drinking and eating... might have had something to do with it).

I like it, an 11 inning no hitter thrown by a pitcher. Looks like the default settings for offense and pitching are pretty in line with modern baseball from quick glance.

A techie geek question:

Is the new OOTP multi-processor aware? ie. Will it take full advantage of dual and quad core CPUs?

...

This might just be a settings adjustment, but no-hitters look a bit high - 41 in 20 years good for just over 2/yr. And of the 41 no hitters, only 1 was perfect

There have been 236 no-hitters in Major League Baseball history, 17 have been perfect games. So this ratio sounds pretty good to me. :) Perfect games are so rare that sample size issues apply...

nm :)

The Mac version does... under Windoes this is not that easy to code unfortunately.

Bone,

I've been there too, I'm from Easton. Coca-Cola Park is beautiful.

That makes me feel better. It was just weird to see like 4 no hitters in the first season... and take into account with this current era i don't think the ratio is quite 2/yr... but it's not a dealbreaker. :)

I see your point. But no-hitters are very rare, so the absolute number can vary quite a bit. With just a bit of luck the MLB 2008 season would have had 3 no-nos already.

It's not too bad. Since 1988 there have been 44 no hitters in MLB with 6 perfect games.

There were several seasons in that time without a no-hitter, but there were 7 no-hitters in both 1990 and '91.

Which plugin might this be? Sounds snazzy.

Yes, very nice. My tax dollars at work :)

I am at least one thing that concerns me. First, just a quick glance reveals that there are some guys who are closers, or were for part of a season getting a handful of starts during the season. Such as Leonard Pace, who won the Cy Young one season, then saves 28 and gets 10 starts the next. His endurance is 32, so he really shouldn't be starting at all. I saw at least one other as well.

Second, on the player card, when a player plays for multiple teams in a season, it makes sense that it be sorted chronologically instead of alphabetically. Here is my example:

Career Batting Stats

Year/Team/League Age G AB H 2B 3B HR RBI R BB HP SF K SB CS AVG OBP SLG OPS VORP 2020 Leavenworth - WOOB 23 65 66 12 1 1 0 8 9 10 2 1 12 0 0 .182 .304 .227 .531 -9.2 2021 Havana - WOOB 24 52 221 67 10 0 11 33 26 15 0 2 33 0 0 .303 .345 .498 .842 6.8 2021 Leavenworth - WOOB 24 7 30 10 1 0 1 3 4 1 0 0 2 0 0 .333 .355 .467 .822 0.7 2021 Total - WOOB 24 59 251 77 11 0 12 36 30 16 0 2 35 0 0 .307 .346 .494 .840 7.5 2022 Havana - WOOB 25 156 669 233 36 3 33 122 102 47 4 9 76 0 3 .348 .390 .559 .949 50.1 2023 Havana - WOOB 26 157 653 210 21 2 36 115 99 42 1 6 89 3 0 .322 .360 .525 .886 29.9

It's a lot easier to read if the Leavenworth and Havana were reversed. This is one thing that has always bugged me about 8.

Next, why are there so many guys hitting for the cycle? The incidence always seems much higher in the game than in real life. I'll see if I can find any others.

Thanks

dola

Angel Garcia, 25, has been a pro for 9 years, he was drafted in the second round, and has been traded 7 times! Four times within two years. I guess he looks really good on paper, but maybe not in the clubhouse?

No comment, but I bet it sucks to be him.

Actually, a friend of mine is the former Mayor of Easton, and he wanted to build it in Williams Township.(where I live) They actually started construction, and then stopped midway through, only to tear down what they had built (a half stadium) and start all over in the current location.(the old Agere site) Talk about a waste of tax dollars!!!

Tabletools

In addition to a lot of cycles, another "accomplishment" stat that seems to always be off to me is strikeouts in a game. It seems that after simming 100 years of history, I'd still have a fair number of 15 and 16 strikeout games dominating the leader list, and rarely if ever would someone get 17 or 18. And I don't think I've ever seen 19 or 20 that I can recall. I haven't seen a comprehensive list of the top 50 individual game strikeout performances in MLB, but I bet there are a few more 17 and 18 strikeout games than I've seen in OOTP - and certainly a few 19 and 20 that I never see in the game.

I haven't studied this in-depth, though. Maybe I'm missing it, or the averages are right on, or it's pretty much impossible to "force" a number of high strikeout games.

See here for strikeouts in 9 inning games and others here.

The strikeout thing is a tough call when you're trying to mimic today's game (default settings,which I used, are meant to mimic the game in 2008). Keep in mind that 18+ has only been done three times in the last 10 years.