Quote:
Originally Posted by RainMaker
The "leages in Zimbabwe" line is more or less a knock at how over-the-top and complicated you can setup the game. I said it when this idea was thrown out for the first version at SI, there is simply no way you can develop a game that will flow right with that amount of customization. It's just impossible to expect a MLB like setup will work as well as a 42 team league with 6 minor leagues and 4 feeder leagues with their own minor leagues. These past two versions showed that with an insane amount of issues from duplicating players, a free agency system completely screwed up, bad CPU AI team management issues.
My biggest issue is that they went away from any semblance of an MLB setup. The game doesn't play well with an MLB type league. There are too many issues with roster management and the minors to make it play as well as 6.5. They made the rosters impossible to build and didn't work with them in any acceptable fashion. OOTP had it's customize league players, but the bulk of their buyers were those playing MLB style leagues or using the Lahman database to play a historical league. These past two versions are not catered to those gamers at all. They simply spit on those buyers to appease a few vocal forum members who wanted 10 league, 43 minor league, 8 feeder leagues from 12 country universes.
And the game simply became too complicated. On 6.5 I could spend a few hours setting up my league and be happy for the whole season. The new interface might be friendly to some, but it just made minor things extremely time consuming. You have to create GMs, "act as manager", play as commissioner, etc. It took me forever to figure out how to just want to play as the GM for a team and manage their major league team. Reading the board at that time, I wasn't the only one who had this issue. Adjusting lineups, moving players around, etc were just tasks that became more time consuming.
So don't give me this "all he did was add some fictional league functionality" to the game. He changed everything. He made it a game that a casual gamer couldn't pick up on and turned it into a game only a select few could really get into. He destroyed the most important aspect of the game (playing historical and MLB style leagues). But don't take my word for it, just see how many people buy this game still. How active the boards are. How many leagues are running. It's a sad situation. So while it made a few hardcore text simmers happy, it destroyed a franchise.
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Well, some others have posted on how it's not really hard to set up a league so I won't comment further.
In your situation trying to use a current MLB roster set is bad. My point though was using Ghana (as was the thing last year) or Zimbabwe doesn't really address any of your issues nor get your message across. It's complaining about something that has no effect on your situation at all. I mean if you can't create a league in Zimbabwe than you can't create a MLB league either, they both use the same setup screens. So it does come across as silly. Simply stating "I can't seem to be able to set up a current MLB game that works the way I want it to" would have been much more informative.
I agree that the roster making ability of the "new" ootp needs to be changed and sooner rather than later. It's not that rosters can't be made it's just that it's too complicated. You can't simply enter stats and personality traits and then have the cpu generate a player based on that. Instead you have to build your player with ratings to do what you want him to do. This becomes hard because what ratings do you give ARod? What ratings do you give a scrub? I don't think you know until you try and test. Hardly a fast way to get things done. I'm not a programmer but if one can import stats from Lehman and get a roster made why can't one enter stats and get the same?
Until this is changed I think all roster makers are going to have a hard time.
Your original post doesn't say but have you played v2007? Or are all of your opinions based on v2006? As others have stated v2007, which for all intents and purposes, is the same as OOTP8 is leaps and bounds ahead of 2006 in ease of use. However 2007\v8 have the same current roster making issues.
One more thing about current rosters and their makers. They get so much pressure to include all of the real players from rookie A to the Majors and this complicates and adds thousands of hours to the development. IMHO they should make either a MLB 40 man roster set or preferably a MLB set with teams top 5-10 prospects first and release that allowing users to fill their minors with fictional or ghost\fictional players then move on to the full minors. This would get things to a manageable 800-1200 players instead of trying make the 5000(?) plus players it takes to do the minors. Not to mention the time it takes to research all of the nobodies in the minors that will never have even a remote chance of getting anywhere near the majors.