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Originally Posted by Huckleberry
I agree with your perception of the situation. I also agree it's never wise to exclusively listen to requests.
However, given that this appears to be the way Clay makes his decisions, I can live with it. But I would also think that when he begins to think about the next BBM version, it would seem Manager Firings/Signings and L/R Splits would be the first two features to be added based on the same feedback decision-making criterion.
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Hey guys, we had a BIG poll among our users about which features to add:
http://www.sportsmogul.com/vbulletin...threadid=55470
The top 6 features made the game, along with a few others from lower on the list (like Drag-and-Drop).
Lefty/Righty and Hiring/Firing managers were #8 and #9.
If I had trusted my instincts and knowledge about baseball, I probably wouldn't have added Player Personalities to this year's game. I have yet to see any research showing that happy baseball players perform better.
But the requests for this feature were overwhelming. And now that I have the system working, I find that it's a total blast to try to make trades and shuffle rosters to build the right clubhouse atmosphere. The addition of No Trade Clauses and Player Options creates a game where it matters how happy players are, how much they like their teammates, and how much they want to be on a winning team.
Anyway, despite the poll, I was still tempted to add Lefty-Righty stats along with multiple lineups. I'm a lifelong baseball fan, SABR member for 10 years, and I've been writing baseball games literally since I was 5 years old. I even programmed the four different lineup screens in Tony La Russa Baseball 3.
I chose to leave Lefty/Righty stats out of BB2K6 for a few reasons.
1. THE HASSLE OF SETTING LINEUPS.
2. STAT AVAILABILITY. We license the Lahman Baseball Database and it doesn't have Lefty-Righty stats. This leaves us with a few options. We can pay STATS Inc. $10,000+ for the stats we want (not a realistic option). Or we can assign platoon differentials to each player. These could either be random, or "league average" (e.g. all Lefty hitters in the game would bat 6% better against Righty pitchers, with 11% more power).
I'm not too happy with either of these options. What's the point in recording megabytes of lefty-righty data if it doesn't actually tell you anything useful about the player (for example, by revealing that the player actually has a much larger platoon differential than the average).
With a few exceptions, like the fact that the Lahman Database doesn't have blown saves, the Historical and Simulated stats blend seamlessly into each other in Baseball Mogul. I'd rather you didn't start a game in 1961 only to find that the Scouting Report for Roger Maris has no Historical Lefty-Righty data, and that the Simulated data wasn't based in any way on his real-life performance.
3. DESIGN PHILOSOPHY -- to be an addictive and realistic game that is accessible to EVERYONE. There are 30 million fantasy baseball players in the United States. Between OOTP, Diamond Mind, PureSim and Baseball Mogul, we probably have less than 500,000 customers. Those other 29.5 million fantasy baseball fans SHOULD be buying sims. They certainly spend time and money on their hobby. But it's a lot easier to set your lineups in Yahoo Fantasy Basbeall than in OOTP.
I think you will find with BM2K6 that it creates a totally deep, authentic, baseball world that you cannot pull yourself away from. If I'm wrong, I'm really glad there are other games out there like OOTP that might fit you better.
We were both working at Midway last year, so BM2K5 was only a minor upgrade. BM2K6 on the other hand, is without a doubt the most-improved Baseball Mogul ever. We should have the demo ready this month so I hope you guys at least give it a try.
Thanks!
Clay