My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

[tabarnes19_SDS]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I believe so. Those stats are wiped after the season is over.

You can see what stats are kept year to year by looking at the player card and looking at the page where it begins with year 2013.

Online saves a few more stats year to year.

[BrianU]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

What I really want besides expanded player card tracked year to year stats is full career stats not just the year 2013, as well as a career averages row that updates as you play The Show.

Also a game log section of the play card showing the box score stats from every game played in the season. MLB 2k actually had this.

[piffbernd]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

Ramone has mentioned that many of the things we wanted they couldn't do because they had totally maxed out the PS3. The PS4 opens up all these doors and many, many more that we never even thought of. I've learned to keep track of stats and other notable info on my laptop.

I don't believe that they totally maxed out the ps3. Maybe graphic, all other is lame excuse.

[timmermac]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I want High Heat's stat tracking.

[dave724]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

yea, I am hopeful with the Ps4 capabilities that this will be an expanded upon later on, but I wouldn't expect it to be highly touted, as it will just make us stat crazed folks happy.

[econoodle]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I can't wait for the day when Sony adds the stat tracking of 2k baseball.

do like a lot of the stats Sony uses [all those road/road stats that 2k doesn't have], but they are only year to year.

[RedSoxFox7]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

What I really want besides expanded player card tracked year to year stats is full career stats not just the year 2013, as well as a career averages row that updates as you play The Show.

Also a game log section of the play card showing the box score stats from every game played in the season. MLB 2k actually had this.

I've been saying it for years, SCEA needs to take a look at what 2K did for stat tracking/viewing and clone it.

At a minimum, that means:

• Full year-to-year player cards - no more only tracking 5 largely meaningless stats.
• Better SABR coverage - first and foremost, give me a SABR leader board; either let me sort the Player Statistics page by division/league/MLB or make it a separate League Leaders section (preferably the former if not both). Second give us some WAR-like summation of numbers (Total Runs would be fine, even if it's not above replacement). That means either coming up with their own spin on Fielding Runs and/or converting Range Factor to runs. Lastly, nobody has ever heard of Hoban Efficiency Quotient, and nobody gives a damn about it.
• Much deepers splits - AVE vs. L/R is nice but it doesn't cut it in 2014, and counting stats vs. L/R aren't at all useful. Give me OBP/SLG/OPS vs. L/R at a bare minimum. Ideally, give me last 2 weeks, last 30 days, last 3 seasons splits for all the L/R and everything else. If I make a lineup change, I want to be able to check out the last 2 weeks numbers and see if it's appeared to actually change anything for the better.

Yes, this means overhauling a lot of the UI and coding to save the additional stats, but it's never been about the PS3 being unable to handle the work - it's been about throwing out a lot of legacy code that only a small minority of MLBTS players care about. Linear weights makes this a lot easier to code, and would be fine for now, if the presentation of all that info wasn't so bad.

SCEA knocks it out of the park when it comes to most things presentation-wise, and definitely in gameplay, but it's always failed hard at presenting stats. The most surprising thing is that they've got so much of the minutiae of Major League Baseball, like when players are arbitration eligible, Super Twos, the Rule 5 draft, etc. but they're all thumbs in giving us the performance data to make informed decisions about who to pay and how much.

[BrianU]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I've been saying it for years, SCEA needs to take a look at what 2K did for stat tracking/viewing and clone it.

At a minimum, that means:

• Full year-to-year player cards - no more only tracking 5 largely meaningless stats.
• Better SABR coverage - first and foremost, give me a SABR leader board; either let me sort the Player Statistics page by division/league/MLB or make it a separate League Leaders section (preferably the former if not both). Second give us some WAR-like summation of numbers (Total Runs would be fine, even if it's not above replacement). That means either coming up with their own spin on Fielding Runs and/or converting Range Factor to runs. Lastly, nobody has ever heard of Hoban Efficiency Quotient, and nobody gives a damn about it.
• Much deepers splits - AVE vs. L/R is nice but it doesn't cut it in 2014, and counting stats vs. L/R aren't at all useful. Give me OBP/SLG/OPS vs. L/R at a bare minimum. Ideally, give me last 2 weeks, last 30 days, last 3 seasons splits for all the L/R and everything else. If I make a lineup change, I want to be able to check out the last 2 weeks numbers and see if it's appeared to actually change anything for the better.

Yes, this means overhauling a lot of the UI and coding to save the additional stats, but it's never been about the PS3 being unable to handle the work - it's been about throwing out a lot of legacy code that only a small minority of MLBTS players care about. Linear weights makes this a lot easier to code, and would be fine for now, if the presentation of all that info wasn't so bad.

SCEA knocks it out of the park when it comes to most things presentation-wise, and definitely in gameplay, but it's always failed hard at presenting stats. The most surprising thing is that they've got so much of the minutiae of Major League Baseball, like when players are arbitration eligible, Super Twos, the Rule 5 draft, etc. but they're all thumbs in giving us the performance data to make informed decisions about who to pay and how much.

I actually believe it isn't a legacy code issue but it IS about PS3's memory capabilities. They really maxed the crap out of the PS3 to the point they couldn't add all the jerseys they wanted for example. I expect the stats and the jerseys to be much better on PS4 next year and onwards. I imagine it would cost a lot of memory to hold all of the career stats for 3000+ players.

I want to see the CPU manager AI use the franchise stats in making decisions of how to make their batting lineup, rotation, and bullpen decisions.

I agree all of those intricate details of contracts and drafts being in the game is awesome, but they are relatively pointless when the CPU teams don't really follow what is going on. I want to see CPU teams keep studs in the minors to avoid the Free Agent and Super Two dates. I want to see CPU teams use the waivers all year long effectively, including the trade waiver in August. I want to see contracts being more realistic and the team budgets being more realistic. These last two issues seem to be making progress but there is still much to be left desired. Right now all of these arbitration/draft/service time rules affect your team and how you manage but the CPU teams are pretty oblivious.

[Bobhead]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

The problem with the "maxed out PS3" excuse is that they also have plenty of really useless statistics that they could easily take out without anyone caring or noticing. I don't have a game available to post specific examples, but if you check the stats within franchise mode (not the player card), you'll definitely see some obvious ones, ones that require a history book to understand.

So they can definitely improve the stats without increasing the number of them.

[RedSoxFox7]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I actually believe it isn't a legacy code issue but it IS about PS3's memory capabilities. They really maxed the crap out of the PS3 to the point they couldn't add all the jerseys they wanted for example. I expect the stats and the jerseys to be much better on PS4 next year and onwards. I imagine it would cost a lot of memory to hold all of the career stats for 3000+ players.

I want to see the CPU manager AI use the franchise stats in making decisions of how to make their batting lineup, rotation, and bullpen decisions.

I agree all of those intricate details of contracts and drafts being in the game is awesome, but they are relatively pointless when the CPU teams don't really follow what is going on. I want to see CPU teams keep studs in the minors to avoid the Free Agent and Super Two dates. I want to see CPU teams use the waivers all year long effectively, including the trade waiver in August. I want to see contracts being more realistic and the team budgets being more realistic. These last two issues seem to be making progress but there is still much to be left desired. Right now all of these arbitration/draft/service time rules affect your team and how you manage but the CPU teams are pretty oblivious.

It's got absolutely nothing to do with PS3 limitations. Memory has nothing to do with it (memory != disk storage). It's not something that will be inherently or magically fixed by running on PS4. Not that you've suggested the latter, but I see a lot of people praying PS4 will fix X, Y, or Z when it's something totally unrelated to more processing power/memory.

Uniforms take up storage space on the discs the game ships on. These files are a good bit larger than any stats being saved, and they're very much limited to the storage capacity of the discs. Still, I don't think the discs are maxed out - adding all these extra uniforms becomes an issue of available resources (time/people) at SCEA to get them done.

Storage capacity on the PS3 itself largely isn't an issue in the first place but the amount of space it would take to store all these stats is minuscule, and that's the storage space that matters here. We're talking about a matter of a few megabytes to store all these stats, when a single jersey is likely taking up 2 or 3 times the storage space.

Otherwise, I totally agree with you on the CPU AI and player contracts. The sometimes random and inaccurate contract money really bugs the crap out of me, especially with no way to modify it for franchises.

[seanjeezy]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

With larger (and replaceable) hard drives, wouldn't HDD installs be a viable solution? It can even be optional like the 5 GB and 10 GB installs. I vaguely remember an argument against was the size of franchise files becoming too large.

And to expand on Bobhead's post, some of the "advanced" stats are really primitive versions of the more common ones you see on Fangraphs and the like. The only place I can find them is ESPN's glossary page.

[RedSoxFox7]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

With larger (and replaceable) hard drives, wouldn't HDD installs be a viable solution? It can even be optional like the 5 GB and 10 GB installs. I vaguely remember an argument against was the size of franchise files becoming too large.

And to expand on Bobhead's post, some of the "advanced" stats are really primitive versions of the more common ones you see on Fangraphs and the like. The only place I can find them is ESPN's glossary page.

Well the franchise files are already being saved to the HDD anyway (or a thumb drive, which isn't terribly relevant), but they're tiny. There is the possibility a poorly designed database would take noticeably longer to load if it were larger, but I don't buy the PS3 hardware is incapable of doing it quickly when 2K was capable of maintaining extensive historical records.

As far as the advanced stats, my biggest problem is that they're not easily accessible to compare more than just your team. You can't look at league leaders in basestealing runs, or how all CFs compare in Range Factor, or anything else that might be of interest to see how your players compare to to scope out potential trade targets.

Beyond that, I think the reasoning behind which advanced stats we have is twofold:

1) Getting anything like OPS+, ERA+, WAR, true FIP/xFIP, etc. would be very processor intensive to cross reference the entire league, correct for park/league factors, and spit out stats relative to the rest of the league. I think all of the stats in the game are linear weights stats, which cuts down on that processing significantly. This might actually be something that's fixable with PS4, but I suspect is a bear to code and probably not worth the man-hours required to SCEA.

2) I think SCEA might have some copyright concerns in using statistics created by others, and even if there aren't legitimate copyright claims, it's not worth the potential exposure and/or negotiations. That's why we see basestealing runs, a linear weights formula (+0.3*SB, -0.6*CS), that doesn't use weights anything close to what's been found by Pete Palmer (+0.22*SB, -0.38*CS) or Jim Furtado (+0.18*SB, -0.32*CS). I still have no idea what the Hoban Efficiency Quotient is, if it's statistically meaningful at all, or how they tracked down Hoban to license it (if they had to).

Understanding the platform limitations, I'd be OK with linear weights for everything if they just weren't presented in such an un-useful manner - and I still want a Total Runs metric, which means something other than Range Factor to evaluate fielding.

[Heroesandvillains]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I don't mind TOO much about the lack of stats, but I'll be damned if my notebook still doesn't get some love from the game not storing doubles/triples allowed with pitchers.

[tabarnes19_SDS]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I do agree, that this is the area I hope gets alot of attention next year. I have been asking for more detailed stat tracking for years. My belief is the player card should store awards, ALL major stats year-to-year, team played on at the bare minimum.

I would also like an almanac. Past award winners, standings, prior years league leaders etc... I really like the way NBA2k has it set up.

I see a movement towards it by looking at how online stats are now kept.

[seanjeezy]

Re: My views on the importance of detailed stat tracking

I do agree, that this is the area I hope gets alot of attention next year. I have been asking for more detailed stat tracking for years. My belief is the player card should store awards, ALL major stats year-to-year, team played on at the bare minimum.

I would also like an almanac. Past award winners, standings, prior years league leaders etc... I really like the way NBA2k has it set up.

I see a movement towards it by looking at how online stats are now kept.

Yeah 2K's is pretty much perfect, both the player card and the general stats screen.