FOOL: Upgrade to OOTP12 is coming soon!

[Alan T]

Despite numerous roadblocks along the way with testing, thanks in great part to hyde for helping me test stuff, the OOTP development team (especially Andreas) have been great in quickly fixing each of the 20+ bugs that I encountered to the point where OOTP12 is ready for FOOL to upgrade. I know many of you have been very eager to get moved to OOTP12 from the various PMs that I have received, so I want to give you the official time table for our upgrade, and what our plan is.

Even though eventually I plan on putting us into the OOOL (Official online league directory), which has a bunch of great features and should hopefully make life easier on back-end league functions for each of you I am not going to do that full integration just from the start. We will be upgrading to OOTP12, but initially running it as the traditional online league where you ftp to/from my server.

- We will upgrade in exactly one week on August 3rd/4th!!


Immediately following this upcoming season's FOOL Classic, the league file will be upgraded and I will piece back in all of the various photos/messages/etc in a huge initial file and upload it at some point next Wednesday, once the entire process is done. (Will take me many hours of modifying things). We will have no sim on Thursday next week and instead use all of that day to verify that everyone has OOTP12 upgraded, the new league file installed and can export successfully to the server. That means we will have Friday/Saturday/Sunday morning sims that week instead.

Some new or different changes to be aware of in OOTP12 from OOTPX:

- OOTP12 comes with playoff roster rules. We will not be using them as it requires 40 man rosters to be enabled and that causes our league problems. We will continue our traditional "gentleman's agreement" to not sign Free Agents for the playoffs.

- There is a new player development budget screen that you can modify during the offseason -ONLY-. It allows you to use a portion of your money to better develop young players in your organization if you want to focus more on that. The league "average" player development budget will be set to 4.25million which fits in perfectly to allow all teams be at the average without eating any money from the salary cap. If you want to spend more than the average, you'll have to absorb money from somewhere else (including possibly having less money to sign players). The game only allows this to be set in the offseason, for us that will mean the Spring training/Amateur draft sim is the only sim that you can set this. So you'll have to make this decision prior to being able to grab last minute free agents which will make it an extra challenging decision for teams on which way they want to lean.

- When negotiating with contract extensions in OOTP12, the game will now allow you to get instantaneous feedback from the player prior to submitting your export. You can try to lowball the player and work your way to a mutually agreeable contract prior to submitting your export. Be warned though, if you low ball them too much, they might refuse to talk to you any more. This will be helpful especially during our arbitration sim as you get one last chance to try to sign potential free agents. We still will have the traditional "gentleman's agreement" to not abuse options/bonuses/incentives in offering contracts. Even though I don't actively police it, if I find one that is out of line, I'll not be happy.

- In ootp12, the media contract is split out to national and local media contracts. In order to keep FOOL's balances in check all teams will continue to have the same national media contract of $65mil. All local media contracts will be set at $0.

- In ootp12 draft picks have the option for signing bonuses (same as ootp11). We will be turning that feature off for the same reasons we did so in FOOL-X.

- We will increase pitcher development speed to match FOOL-X's as the development curves in this appears to be similar to that of OOTP11 from my limited testing thus far.

- There will be 3 international free agents automatically added by the game each season to the free agent pool.

Three other issues to be aware of:

1) There is currently a bug where the game is not paying attention to the salary cap or team budgets in-game when you offer money for free agents. The game will let you spend past your $65mil cap when looking for free agents. So be careful when spending your money, as ignorance will be no excuse for violating the cap! I will do the same thing as always on the regular season sim morning and manually make sure that any team over the cap has to get under it one way or another before I continue.

2) A few of the various financial items allows you to put absurd numbers into it. (Ticket prices can be set as negatives, or something incredibly high. Player development budget can be set as a negative, etc). Don't monkey around with those flaws before the bugs get fixed. As commissioner if I see any entries that look like "gaming the system", I'll manually change them and likely incur some form of punishment. It has been a long time since I've had to do anything like that (several years), so this warning is just more of a reminder/deterrent than my actual thinking that anyone would do something like this.

3) I still am seeing problems with hitting the button to let the AI automatically arrange your organization will cut talented prospects. This appears to be an issue due to this league file being so old and from an old old version (initially fool was in OOTP8 when it started), which is why we don't have this problem in FOOL-X. I've asked Markus for more help on getting something in ootp12 fixed to resolve this issue hopefully once and for all. So for the time being, continue to not use that button!

---------------------------------


Next steps:

We will upgrade next week, and work through any additional issues that come up. Once we have settled in for a few weeks, I still plan on doing an expansion of two teams for many many reasons. One I have tons of names on the waiting list, and two I really hate the 14 team schedules that I have to manually mess around with every season. 16 teams works much better and I can have the game handle that automatically. We can talk more about the expansion and how it will work once we are done with this upgrade.

So if anyone has any questions or comments, post them now!

[ekcut]

Cool beans!

[TeachEnEspanol]

If I posted all of the questions I ALWAYS have when we upgrade, people would just laugh at me.

[Tasan]

Don't worry Teach, we'll still laugh at you.

;- )

[Johnny93g]

exciting stuff, looking forward to next week!!

[TeachEnEspanol]

Originally Posted by Tasan

Don't worry Teach, we'll still laugh at you.

;- )

At least I have a little consistency in my life.

[Alan T]

Hyde reminded me of one other change in OOTP12 that I forgot to mention. I added it to the first post, but also mentioning it here to make sure everyone sees it:

- There will be 3 international free agents automatically added by the game each season to the free agent pool.


OOTP12 allows the game to automatically add international free agents to your FA pool each season. It can range from none (zero) to extreme/large amounts. For FOOL, we will have it set to 3 to begin with, and will re-evaluate it after several seasons. Thus far in testing, we have found that the majority of the international free agents end up fitting into the ordinary Major league talent curve. I don't recall seeing any superstar free agents at all, but not saying there won't be at least some, just it likely seems rare if ever.

A little FOOL history.. we used to do something similar a long long time ago (well over 100 seasons ago) where a few international free agents were added to the FOOL FA pool. So this is kind of a throw back to olden FOOL days, but this time automatically handled by the game.

[Tasan]

I MISS the Vulture League. You guys that remember the old days know why.

[CrimsonFox]

alleluia!

[hyde4us11]

Originally Posted by Tasan

I MISS the Vulture League. You guys that remember the old days know why.

Well give us new guys the old days stories at least.

[Tasan]

Originally Posted by hyde4us11

Well give us new guys the old days stories at least.

Well this is one of the more heated battles for an old Vulture League player:

1982 FOOL Offseason Thread! - Front Office Football Central

There was so much more great conversation in those days. Its was fun.

[hyde4us11]

Originally Posted by Tasan

There was so much more great conversation in those days. Its was fun.

Reading the thread now. I would think there is less discussion now because you guys had all those talks and figured it out to the point that is as close to perfect league setup wise as you can get. Is that a fair assumption on my part?

[Alan T]

Originally Posted by hyde4us11

Reading the thread now. I would think there is less discussion now because you guys had all those talks and figured it out to the point that is as close to perfect league setup wise as you can get. Is that a fair assumption on my part?

Nah.. usually the threads were about:

Damn Hartford signing everyone to MLCs
I'm rooting for anyone other than Valdosta
Dc is moving his team where?
My shortstop is the best player to ever play this game
Ahhh my Centerfielder just got Harmon'ed

[hyde4us11]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Nah.. usually the threads were about:

Damn Hartford signing everyone to MLCs
I'm rooting for anyone other than Valdosta
Dc is moving his team where?
My shortstop is the best player to ever play this game
Ahhh my Centerfielder just got Harmon'ed

I laugh because of the few threads I read I've seen a few of those comments.

[TeachEnEspanol]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Nah.. usually the threads were about:

Damn Hartford signing everyone to MLCs
I'm rooting for anyone other than Valdosta
Dc is moving his team where?
My shortstop is the best player to ever play this game
Ahhh my Centerfielder just got Harmon'ed

This made my night.

[ekcut]

Originally Posted by Alan T

Nah.. usually the threads were about:

Damn Hartford signing everyone to MLCs
I'm rooting for anyone other than Valdosta
Dc is moving his team where?
My shortstop is the best player to ever play this game
Ahhh my Centerfielder just got Harmon'ed

Ahh the good ol days!