Fictional Rosters

[MR.RANDOM]

Re: Fictional Rosters

Mo' money mo' problems!

GAMER yep the more money part is all fun

[ksig24]

Re: Fictional Rosters

I noticed that a lot of change ups and splitters have no bite. Does anyone else notice this?

[sluggbugg]

Re: Fictional Rosters

Hmm...is it due to a low break rating or too high of a speed rating? Both can cause this problem.

[TripleThreat1973]

Re: Fictional Rosters

I noticed that a lot of change ups and splitters have no bite. Does anyone else notice this?

PitchFX data reveals the same thing. Changeups and splits don't break all that much compared to other pitches. They also aren't thrown for strikes as often due to be thrown "down in the zone" (only).

The game doesn't handle these two pitches well. In terms of API, the catcher call for inside corner changeups sometimes, which is the opposite of what you're trying to do. Splits above the belt are also problematic.

Even a "max break" change and/or split would not have a ton of break.

[TripleThreat1973]

Re: Fictional Rosters

After playing with these rosters for about 20 games, I'm convinced that the results are not due to sliders or my skill.

Offense needs a bump.

I went through and compared the top 30 players at each position versus the top 30 players in Knight's 2010 rosters, and here are the adjustments that tyhe fictional rosters would need (by position) in order to have the exact same "average per ratings" as Knight's 2010.

In terms of gameplay, it is most notable in [1] the size of PCI window, [2] the number of times the PCI window is in the "right spot" (timing hitting), [3] How fast the players tire (everyone needs a +10 for durability), and [4] how often the runners steal (Base Aggressiveness is high all the way around).

I take responsibility for the differences. The good news is that it takes about 1.5 hours to edit the top 30 at each position, so the editing of players could take place within an already started franchise without it being a big hassle. I'm almost done with mine. Started at 10, and it's 11:30.

Use common sense in some cases ... you don;t want to bump up many 90 power guys to 99 power. 1st basemen, 3rd basemen and left fielders will see their offensive production jump the most. 1B's will see some defense uptake as well.

Here it is ...



I highlighted any increase of 5 or more in green, any reduction of 5 or more in red, and black represents +/- any change that is less than 5 points. I only edited the red and green in my franchise rosters.

[sluggbugg]

Re: Fictional Rosters

That is some very interesting work there triplethreat.

[MR.RANDOM]

Re: Fictional Rosters

i just joined a baseball academy so one day i can grace the games cover!! this however will eliminate any possibility of a change to my fict roster

[sluggbugg]

Re: Fictional Rosters

WAKE UP PEOPLE!!!!! Don't let this thread die!! Give us some feedback. V2 is being worked on.

[leoalure]

Re: Fictional Rosters

Sorry,

I have been busy playing with these rosters in franchise mode. What changes are being done?

[sluggbugg]

Re: Fictional Rosters

Yay, its alive! lol

I went through and did some appearance tweaks. Got rid of the randomness of pine tar on helmets. Now if they have pine tar on their bats, they have it on their helmets. If not, then they don't. Small thing, i know, but it bugged me.

I went through and made sure that all the minor league guys at least had some detail to their faces. No one should be just a straight up default face. Hopefully no dopple-gangers out there. Most of the major leaguer's were ok already. I probably adjusted a few of those too.

Some other tweaks here and there to accessories and equipment.

I sent the files to RM who has been working on editing ratings via spreadsheets to make the rosters more in-line with SCEA rosters. Over the next month or so he will transfer those ratings changes to the file.

RM is a busy man with a job and a new baby and all so it will take some time to get those changes done. So, if you are like me and have been playing a franchise for a while now with these rosters, keep playing!

[TripleThreat1973]

Re: Fictional Rosters

I think it's a good sign that the thread is less active.

Rather than "complaining" about the rosters and making all sorts of requests, people are using/modifying the rosters.

[raleigh mcclure]

Re: Fictional Rosters

Sorry,

I have been busy playing with these rosters in franchise mode. What changes are being done?

Like SluggBugg indicated, I'm working on edits. For the pitchers, I'm going to leave the top 5 or top 10 mostly alone, then find a way to scale some of the others down a bit. As I've noted before, the ratings aren't necessarily off for any individual pitcher since TT's spreadsheet was originally pretty good and I went through a pretty thorough edit before releasing it. There are probably three things I'll look at, the ages of pitchers over 30 (I might bring them down just a bit as I did for position players); the number of pitchers at certain talent levels (there are just more aces, more minor aces, more elite relievers, more elite closers, than there are on an SCEA roster); and, finally, TripleThreat mentioned that the biggest difference between OOTP and SCEA was in how they value pitch velocity. In making my edits, I'll focus on lowering velocity the right amount for the right number of pitchers, especially keeping in mind that in-game pitch speed is up to as much as three mph higher (and sometimes consistently so) than the rated velocity would indicate. TripleThreat, do you have any suggestions for how you would tweak the pitchers, given the things I've outlined above? How many pitchers at the MLB level throw fastballs in excess of 95 mph? 97 mph? That would be a good thing to know.

The edits that I've spent a lot of time on already are for the position players. The first thing I did was to create a spreadsheet from Knight's OSFM roster. I listed all of the starters at each position for the AL plus a few extra starters at every position. I listed back ups and pinch hitters and DH types. I also listed the ratings for prospects as found on OSFM. Those numbers gave me a great comparison tool.

I'm done editing C's, 1b, 2b, 3b, LF's and CF's. I just have RF's and SS's to go. I've gone almost player by player in many cases, along with making broader changes in order to raise or lower ratings averages for an entire pool of players of certain types at certain positions. Here's how I've proceeded:

1. I separated both the SCEA spreadsheet and the fictional spreadsheet into three groups and calculated averages at every attribute. The first group includes all starters. The second group includes back-ups. This group includes pinch-hitter types, defensive replacement types, baserunners, DH types, and in cases where the starter is average or below average, in some cases I made the back up into the other half of a "platoon" situation, where players will alternate depending on the handedness of the opposing SP. The third group includes prospects.

2. Then I ranked the top 25 to 30 best players at their respective positions as found on the player selection screen for a "Fantasy Draft". I did this for both the SCEA roster and the fictional roster.

3. The first changes I made were to ages. The age averages were actually pretty close to MLB. I did lower the ages for many players 30 and over. I found far fewer players 36 and up on the SCEA roster. One way I solved problems for age and our shortage of prospects was to move some younger players into the prospect pool and replaced them in the starter pool with one of the other players on that team at the same position.

4. I also went through the second pool of back up players and moved some of those players into the prospect pool until there were about 15 prospects at each position. That ought to get our spreadsheet close enough. Plus, the amateur draft ought to replenish some of the minor league ranks within a few seasons. Also, if the MLB roster for any team is short on a back-up because I moved them to the prospect pool, I'll simply increase the ratings of a generic player lower down.

5. After this I began the edits for the starters. For some ratings that needed large increases or decreases, I made changes across the league. Bunting, for instance, was lowered quite a bit for most players. While I associated bunt ratings with player type, especially speed and low power ratings, I also just lowered bunt ratings for most players across the board. For the top 10 to 15 players, I looked at the MLB counterpart to the fictional player. For instance, when editing the #1 LF in our league, William Griffin, I looked at Josh Hamilton for an idea what changes to make. I didn't copy Hamilton's ratings, I simply determined how much to increase Griffin's ratings by looking at Hamilton's ratings generally. It also helped that I made an overall grade for each player. It didn't quite match the formula that SCEA uses (I don't think I weighted power as heavily as they do, for one thing) but it gave me an idea of how much a player might be raised overall.

These changes to the starters fixed most of the problems people noticed with our roster. In fact, after I had been at this for a couple of weeks, TripleThreat posted his chart of changes to make which only corroborated my conclusions.

I didn't make the same changes to every player. I tried to use the players original ratings as a guide. I also tried to play into certain player "types". I emphasized the strikeout ratio of some power hitters, lowered the speed for some heavier set older players, etc.

6. I also kept the size of "splits" in mind in the difference between hitters' contact vs. righties and contact vs. lefties, and same for the power ratings. Our spreadsheet was low in this regard. So when I'm done, it will make a much bigger difference (or the same amount of difference as it does with a standard SCEA roster) which reliever you bring in to face certain hitters.

7. For average and below average players with big splits, it was easy to form "platoon" situations at certain bases. I didn't do this will all teams, but I did this with some.

8. For back-ups, I looked at the starter first in order to determine what type of player a team would likely have in a back-up role. Of course, it doesn't always work out like this, but often a team with a starter that hits for good contact but low power and that also plays consistent defense might have a player with some pop, or maybe a veteran pinch hitter, etc. Some teams with a top 10 player at a given position might just have a lower rated utility player to fill in during days off. I made changes such as these to the back-ups in order to create a better sense of player identity.

9. For the prospects, I made them between the ages (mostly) of 20 and 25. Anything older than 25 and most players aren't prospects anymore. They're either MLB players or minor league lifers. I didn't make players much lower than 22 or 21 since the amateur draft ought to fill in those age groups. So, the average for each pool of prospects is 23. I tried to spread the A and B potentials (and in some case C's) across the ages, as well as to vary up player type and eventual talent level, across the ages as well. That should fill the void as older players retire so that there won't be much of a gap between our spreadsheet players and the amateur draft players.

That's quite a bit to read, I know. Anyways, I'm pretty happy with the edits thus far.

I wasn't able to make any edits (well, I was able to make just a few) to the Rangers, Angels, A's, Mariners, Astros, or Giants. Most of those players weren't made according to the spreadsheet, so I had no way of making spreadsheet edits for them. I'm going to leave them as they are and let anyone that downloads this roster (if anyone is still interested by the time I finish) to make whatever changes suit them.

It will take another week before I'll finish the spreadsheet edits. Then it will take some more time to put the edits into the game. Then I'll make the pitcher edits. Then I'll gauge interest. If people want me to release it with the edits, then this could be completed in another two to three weeks. Otherwise, I wanted to make some more changes to the faces. I'm a bit picky about the player faces myself, and I wanted to make changes to at least the top players at each position. After that, I might just make changes in my franchise as I face each team.

So, there's a rundown of what I've been up to. What I hope to have accomplished is to get our roster close enough to an SCEA roster that you don't have to make slider edits in order to play with them. They also have quite a bit more character. I'm liking the platoon situations some teams have. Also, the Cardinals are Effin awesome. They have the best CF, the best 2b, a top 10 1b, and they aren't too shabby elsewhere.

OK, that's it for now. I'm fitting this in between newborn baby time, a job search (one interview scheduled for Monday!) and finishing some papers. So I appreciate the patience. I hope to have this done before everyone starts playing Madden and then buys MLB 12 The Show where my roster will be useless. I might not even buy the next Show just so I can keep going with my franchise. Of course, I've said that the last three years and I always start salivating every spring and start a new franchise with the new year's game.

RM

[TripleThreat1973]

Re: Fictional Rosters

2 Things I've noticed ....

[1] Too many SP's throwing 88-90. They should be 90-93.

The fastest averaged fastball velocity for SPs are Strasberg (96), Jiminez and Verlander (95) ... so I wouldn't have many throwing over 94mph.

[2] There are some guys that have changeups ~20mph slower than fastball. Average is around 10-12 difference. 20mph difference is simply unhittable in the game. It's almost a gimmick or exploit. I don;t know if I had it that way in the spreadhseet, for whatever reason, or if it happened during data entry.

I faced a starter that was throwing 97mph fastballs and 77mph changeups. Absolute nightmare.

I went through and edited players as well (just in my franchise), and I did the same thing you did ... bunt ratings based on player types, and I looked at "role players". If a guy was on the major league roster and had poor batting ratings, then I made him have decent/good fielding ratings ... to mimic his role ... "utility fielder" with no bat. If he had a bat, he'd be a starter. For example, a guy that can't hit or field, isn't on an MLB roster ... Yuneisky Betancourt aside.

The baserunning ratings also seemed a bit high. There were guys with medium speed that had high ability and aggressiveness. Again, it's probably how the games rate things differently. In SCEA, if a guy doesn't steal or have speed their Ability/Aggressiveness ratings are almost nonexistent.

[sluggbugg]

Re: Fictional Rosters

I think where you are seeing those 97-77 guys may be from the guys that got ported over as generic SCEA guys. That is kinda common for SCEA roster pitchers. Originally those guys were just gonna be roster fillers, but we needed SOOO many of them some of those guys squeaked their way into the line-ups.

The guys I input from the spreadsheets should be around 10mph difference. I don't believe i would have made a mistake like that, but I guess its possible with the sheer number of guys I did in a short time.

[TripleThreat1973]

Re: Fictional Rosters

I think where you are seeing those 97-77 guys may be from the guys that got ported over as generic SCEA guys. That is kinda common for SCEA roster pitchers. Originally those guys were just gonna be roster fillers, but we needed SOOO many of them some of those guys squeaked their way into the line-ups.

The guys I input from the spreadsheets should be around 10mph difference. I don't believe i would have made a mistake like that, but I guess its possible with the sheer number of guys I did in a short time.

It's also possible that it was in the spreadhseet, I used a modifer (% of max velocity + another factor -- like half the number of wild pitches, and the highest number of WP I saw was "4"). So, the max difference should be 90% of max velocity + 4 ... so, basically 14mph shoulda/coulda been the max difference in FB and CU velocities. But that doesn't mean something did not occur where I didn't see. Looking at 40 columns of 2000 rows ... and it can be difficult to pick up abnormalities.

I'm also not looking to pin blame on anyone, just trying to figure out where the hiccup might have been .... so, if we ever do this again, we don;t make the same mistake twice (not that I want us to make new mistakes either. *big grin*)