Interest in an a fast-sim OOTP league?

[Young Drachma]

If so, you should consider joining the Front Office Offseason League or FOOL for short.

We got started one afternoon in the FOBL chat room and we're now finishing up our third season. There are 16 teams, but there are openings for human owners throughout the league.

We are finishing up our third season right now and began with the 1961 season. The idea is to provide a league for players who want to play online, but with a pace of a solo league. It's fun, addictive and really low commitment necessary.

A typical FOOL season runs like this: (all exports are due at 9pm central time)

Monday: Playoffs simmed
Tuesday: Season review,resign your own players and rookie FAs
Wednesday-Thursday: Free Agency
Thursday night to Friday at 9pm: Setup your lineups, depth charts and export your season file
Saturday-Sunday: Season simmed.

Unless there is a holiday or some other event, we sim the entire season in a week, meaning that we'll accumulate a history fast. Player fatigue is currently on (as of the '63 season) and trading is allowed from Tuesday to Thursdays before 9pm.

All exports and other stuff is done in-game.

Some of other notable rules include:

- No injuries
- No coaches and scouts
- No in-season trading
- 154-game season, with no inter-league play
- Top two teams in each league play a best-of-seven LCS

If you're interested or have questions, feel free to post here and I'll answer whatever questions you might have.

[Young Drachma]

Oh and the league forum is currently hosted over at FOBL right now, but we'll be moving to the FOFC after the move to Operation Sports goes down. So if you join, you won't have to go far to hit the forums up or anything like that.

[Ben E Lou]

It's probably also worth pointing out that we're going to be one of the first leagues to make the switch to OOTP9 after it's released.

[KWhit]

Who's in the league?

(I need to judge how elite it is before I consider it).

[Young Drachma]

MrIllini, SkyDog, Dark Cloud, LintyFresh85, TRO was in the league but left at the end of this season because he's too busy.

[Philliesfan980]

Wow, I've never seen a league run so quickly, which is cool in its own right. It's kinda fast paced though, anyway you can spread the stuff out to possibly encompass 2 weeks?

[Ben E Lou]

Your call, DC, but my opinion is that we find people who want to go with the pace we've set, not change the pace.

[marcmoustache]

Maybe a silly question, but if you set your lineup for the season, if a player gets injured, he goes out of the lineup, when he's fit again, does the AI put him back? If not, doesn't that mess up the whole season?

Do you not worry about signings during the season? Or are you running it as a GM only game and not worrying about day-to-day during the season?

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by marcmoustache

Maybe a silly question, but if you set your lineup for the season, if a player gets injured, he goes out of the lineup, when he's fit again, does the AI put him back? If not, doesn't that mess up the whole season?

Do you not worry about signings during the season? Or are you running it as a GM only game and not worrying about day-to-day during the season?

Hi there!

Injuries are off. So this is a non-issue. Fatigue is on, so it's a matter of setting your depth charts for endurance and the right balance of players, etc. But injuries aren't on, precisely to ensure this isn't an issue and that the game doesn't stop during the ismmed season.

The idea is that it's an 'off-season' league, in that, you're concerned mostly with 1) building a team and 2) seeing how the team does the entire year.

It's a fast-paced model, intentionally done to see 3) how good you are at building a team with very little time to stew over things and 4) is done mostly to ensure that we can play lots of seasons relatively quickly.

We've tested it for three seasons now and it's worked well and is geared towards the player who has 5) limited time and 6) would essentially like to play solo, but wants more of a challenge than just the computer and desires the human component. The one season a week model works great

It's perfect for folks who want to play online and don't have a ton of time to devote to it or the person who sims 25 years to get a history before they spend time to really get immersed. We'll have cycled through our history fast enough to where your team can get a history before you know it.

Hopefully that helps give some context to what we're doing.

[Young Drachma]

Home sweet home..

[DanGarion]

So what teams are open?

[Chief Rum]

I would like to give this a shot, but I haven't bought OOTP since 2006. I am planning on getting OOTP9, so I could join up after the switch over. It would seem silly to get OOTP8, though, to join up, just to then get OOTP9. When would you guys switch to 9? In the short term or long?

[Young Drachma]

I think I'll make the official decision now for us to start the week after OOTP9 is released. That way, we can jump in with the new game. I didn't think about all of the folks who don't have the old versions of the game..make sense to start fresh and we always planned to switch as soon as the new version came out anyway.

[SirFozzie]

I'd be interest in an OOTP9 league, but such a fast sim league, I'm not sure.

[Cringer]

I just claimed a team in the league sub-forum.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by SirFozzie

I'd be interest in an OOTP9 league, but such a fast sim league, I'm not sure.

Oh c'mon. You can join us at the gateway drug and if you need another OOTP9 league after that, you can find another. Seriously, it'll be a blast. You have no idea. If you hate it, you can always quit.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Dark Cloud

I think I'll make the official decision now for us to start the week after OOTP9 is released. That way, we can jump in with the new game. I didn't think about all of the folks who don't have the old versions of the game..make sense to start fresh and we always planned to switch as soon as the new version came out anyway.

Totally with you there.

[gstelmack]

How is the draft going to work?

[Anthony]

too quick of a league for me. if it was at least 1 week offseason, 1 week regular/postseason i'd be interested. trading at the trade deadline is one of the better features of baseball. with a new champion every week it kinda takes away from the thrill of winning, as probably at one point or another everyone in this league will have won. the journey is half as fun as the destination. this will be a great league for obtaining a good league history rather quick though.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Hell Atlantic

too quick of a league for me. if it was at least 1 week offseason, 1 week regular/postseason i'd be interested. trading at the trade deadline is one of the better features of baseball. with a new champion every week it kinda takes away from the thrill of winning, as probably at one point or another everyone in this league will have won. the journey is half as fun as the destination. this will be a great league for obtaining a good league history rather quick though.

True. The league history thing is a big asset. And the goal of this particular league is really to give otherwise solo players, the thrill of playing online without the commitment/time investment of a league where you spend more time talking than actually going through seasons. In FOOL, you can get through at least 30-40 seasons a year, whereas in other leagues, you might not even get through half of that. It's fine, I guess. But for those of us who are fast-sim crazies, this presents a whole different challenge.

It's about endurance, about building a team and coming up with a strategy and sticking with it, not tweaking and not spending more time on finances.

I think basically the idea is to burnish our credentials as the premier fast sim leagues and leaving the other experiences to what you can get by participating in other leagues.

All good points, though.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by gstelmack

How is the draft going to work?

No draft. The feeder leagues deposit the kids into the free agency pool. You sign them just like you sign ordinary free agents. With the salary cap and going forward it'll make it a challenge to decide whether you want to spend a lot of money on a kid who might bust over an established player, etc.

The idea is basically to ensure that we don't waste a lot of time or get bogged down.

[Cringer]

Originally Posted by Dark Cloud

No draft. The feeder leagues deposit the kids into the free agency pool. You sign them just like you sign ordinary free agents. With the salary cap and going forward it'll make it a challenge to decide whether you want to spend a lot of money on a kid who might bust over an established player, etc.

The idea is basically to ensure that we don't waste a lot of time or get bogged down.

I was waiting to see the answer to this question. I like it, sounds great to me.

[Huckleberry]

I would be interested, but what are the penalties for non-submittal of files? Just your team struggling?

I have a 6-month-old and two other kids, so I don't want to hold the league up, but there will be times I'm out of pocket. I already know I'll be sans Internet from 8/2-8/6, for example. So that's a whole season in this league.

Let me know.

[Young Drachma]

Originally Posted by Huckleberry

I would be interested, but what are the penalties for non-submittal of files? Just your team struggling?

I have a 6-month-old and two other kids, so I don't want to hold the league up, but there will be times I'm out of pocket. I already know I'll be sans Internet from 8/2-8/6, for example. So that's a whole season in this league.

Let me know.

No tank penalties or just plain missing sim penalties. The whole point of a fast-sim league like this is it basically assumes that there might be an entire MONTH where you won't be able to get to the game like you'd want to or whatever. That's understandable. Think of this game as solo plus play. It's all the beauty of solo play, but with people who actually care when you win.

It's not the hard slog of other leagues where you spend a month or longer waiting to grind out a crappy season and where immersion is hard, because you don't feel like you know your team, because here you cycle through players fast enough to where you can really make the franchise your own and have a history and a legacy to build on.

So in short, the rules are minimal right now. We're just worried about the big things, the basics and letting the rest take care of itself, you know? As we get further in, if we all feel the need to add other things, we can discuss that and vote and go from there.

But in this case, simplicity = fun.

[muns]

Originally Posted by Dark Cloud

No draft. The feeder leagues deposit the kids into the free agency pool. You sign them just like you sign ordinary free agents. With the salary cap and going forward it'll make it a challenge to decide whether you want to spend a lot of money on a kid who might bust over an established player, etc.

The idea is basically to ensure that we don't waste a lot of time or get bogged down.

This is going to be interesting and a new dynamic ive never played with before. Really looking forward to it. So my next question is are we doing waivers, 40 man rosters and a rule 5 draft? I suspect no's on the rule 5 and waivers, but figured id ask anyway.

[Young Drachma]

No Rule 5 draft. I think we need to consider playing with a roster beyond 25 man that we've played with previously and maybe higher position player fatigue, since OOTP9 will be improved to the degree that doing so might be worthwhile. But in the past, we've played with 25 man rosters, no injuries and no DH will take effect this season. No waivers, DFA is 30 days, no waivers.

The idea is really to create a marathon baseball experience, to create the team that can have the most success over a marathon year where you get no do-overs or tweaks or whatever. But we're constantly evolving the process, so after we run our first OOTP9 season, it'll be stuff we can tweak in regards to the daily ins and outs of league gameplay I think.

[Cringer]

No DH, I like that.

[muns]

Originally Posted by Dark Cloud

No Rule 5 draft. I think we need to consider playing with a roster beyond 25 man that we've played with previously and maybe higher position player fatigue, since OOTP9 will be improved to the degree that doing so might be worthwhile. But in the past, we've played with 25 man rosters, no injuries and no DH will take effect this season. No waivers, DFA is 30 days, no waivers.

The idea is really to create a marathon baseball experience, to create the team that can have the most success over a marathon year where you get no do-overs or tweaks or whatever. But we're constantly evolving the process, so after we run our first OOTP9 season, it'll be stuff we can tweak in regards to the daily ins and outs of league gameplay I think.

sounds good to me

[muns]

wow pretty sweet we filled up quickly, only one more opening?

[Young Drachma]

Just two teams left. LBI and Brooklyn.