Amaroq
Posts: 1100
Joined: 8/3/2005 From: San Diego, California Status: offline
|
quote:
ORIGINAL: Marsh511 I completely agree with Rowech here. There needs to be a setting to prevent fake players (LOL - I'm not even going to call them "fantasy" players!) from being created. When doing a draft from a pool of real players, I'd like to see a toggle to either just END THE DRAFT at the point the player pool is exhausted...or to continue filling rosters with "fantasy" players. It seems like the Puresim, OOTP, and Baseball Mogul developers all originally tried not to cater too much to the replay or historical simmers...and were slow to let go of the need for Fantasy players. Fortunately, they've each let it go a bit, though I'm surprised that Shaun (of the 3) seems to have hung on to this notion the longest. I just tried to draft from a pool of 1946 major leaguers, was up to around the 27th or 28th round in the draft...and when I scrolled through the Draft Log, I was dismayed to find that a few fake players were starting to appear. And then on the completed rosters, I also saw one or two fake pitchers had cracked the starting rotation for a few teams. Marshall I can explain a bit of how we got to this point: I was one of the beta testers, and in the early life of the beta, a PureSim historical league would provide only '10-point scrubs' when the real players ran out. They certainly weren't good enough to crack the starting rotation but would fill out the roster. There were a couple problems with that: First, there were problems with the AI, which didn't "look ahead" to realize what areas were going to get short-changed (often pitching, with a 1901 league for example), so a human player who did that could get a large advantage. Second, most of the ten-point scrubs signed one-year contracts, so the following free agency you'd see the AI teams averaging 20 spots to fill. The problem was, they would all settle on the same 10-point scrubs to sign, so the process of filling those 300-odd empty slots took *forever*, even on a really fast computer. Third, you could configure a league where the real players really weren't enough, say, importing the 1901 players into a 30-team association, which would spread them thin enough that there are only about 10 'real' players on each team. The most expedient fix was simply putting in 'quality' fake players; that addressed all three of the major issues plus a number of minor ones I haven't listed. Shaun and I argued about it - as a dedicated historical-players player, this was not the solution I wanted to see! - but this was the best compromise in the time allowed. In the long term, what I'd like to see is this: 1. For a 1901 real-players league with minor leagues, have the game automatically import all players who debuted in 1901-1904, 'weakening' the ones from 1902, 1903, and 1904 so that they are appropriate minor-leaguers who need to develop to reach their appropriate debut year. This *should* just about remove the need for fake players, as well as prevent the 'all my guys make their debut three years later than they did in real life' phenomenon. In the short term, perhaps we could get this: 2. On league startup, make 'fictional players' behavior a toggle, with perhaps four levels: - "Full quality" (as though you were playing a fictional-players league) - "Young quality" (current style: players are in the 17-22 range, but can develop) - "Minor-leaguers only" (fictional players are all 17-22, and scaled to develop between 1-50, leaving the 'top' part of the range for 'real' players) - "Scrubs only" (all fictional players are in the 'ten-point-scrub' range). If Shaun decides to go the 'roster limits are a maximum, not a requirement' route, you could add a fifth tag - "None" (Only real players will be generated)
|