Phase 2 Complete

Here are the lessons learned so far from our transition to Out of the Park Baseball 2006 (in no particular order of importance):

(1) Make sure to confirm that every owner has installed the game and your league file correctly. This will take some time, but many owners will probably overestimate how easy it is to install OOTPB 2006.

(2) Upload the full league file through the game AND make it available on your website. Some owners will have no problem loading the league file through the game. Others may be behind firewalls (or whatever) that won’t let OOTPB 2006 connect with an FTP site.

(3) Turn off waivers when importing your OOTP 6.5 league. The OOTPB 2006 AI will make a number of roster moves when importing a league. Turning off waivers stops the AI from putting players on the waiver wire that the human owners probably don’t want to happen. The AI will still make silly moves like releasing players the human owner still wants on his team, but those are easier to fix.

(4) Make quick start games often. I made quick start games for every major change that was made when I imported our league. We did a league contraction, so every time I made a structure change, I created a quick start game.

(5) Get to know the Anderson Utilities. I used the AU65History utility to import the individual player histories that were lost during the league conversion. I haven’t fully explored all of the neat utilities that are available.

(6) Think about when you want to run your draft. OOTPB 2006 executes the draft differently. Players are “revealed” 30 days prior to the draft. We decided to move our draft to March 1st instead of June so that we could do the draft before the season started and not suffer any delays.

(7) Get FaceTool and use it. In the pantheon of OOTP utilities, FaceTool joins BOSI as one of the greatest pieces of text-gaming add-on goodness ever written. I almost spent $375 to buy Facegen to do what FaceTool does much better. It not only creates color coordinated uniforms and player pictures for each team, it will update pictures to refelect trades when players move from team to team.

That’s the list for now. We will do a team import/export test on Friday.

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