The Recycle Bin

Apparently there is a major glitch in the running game, which pretty much makes this a null and void purchase for me. One of the main joys I get from NCAA Football is establishing a fine-tuned running game, especially focusing on run first offenses (option, wishbone, etc). I have read that the game makes you down where contact is first initiated, instead of where your knees touch the ground. This would seem like a major, major oversight on the part of EA. I am going to have to take a pass on this one until an updated game or patch is released.

I have not been around much lately because there has been so much going on around me. Work always seems overly important – like this weekend’s major project that we have been digging out of the ditch since last Friday. Important? Not so much.

Two weeks ago Tonya’s doctor told us that Tonya had a 50-50 chance of miscarriage. Needless to say, we have been extremely stressed, but prayer and faith pulled us through. Today the doctor told Tonya she was out of the miscarriage danger zone, but my joy was tempered after learning that a friend and colleague’s wife had a miscarriage just before Tonya’s appointment. Life is so fragile. Prayers of healing go out to this person, his wife, and family; while prayers of thanks go out for my wife and “Calvert No. 3” � for those wondering, Tonya is 12-weeks pregnant.

My dad, Ollie, is pretty sick – he has been fighting the good fight against lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) for six or so years now – I am really not sure how much fight he has left in him. While we have never been close (my parents split up when I was very young), we have grown closer as I have grown older. Talking about sports and the grandkids always helps.

Last March dad was in the hospital, and things were not looking very bright, so I made the 12+ hour car trip from Columbus to Little Rock because I wanted to see my dad one last time (you just never know). Dad did recovered enough to leave the hospital, but the best I can tell is that he never feels very well � good days and bad; I cannot imagine what it like to fight this terrible stuff. When I spoke to him last Sunday, he seemed like he was hanging in there, but then he spent the rest of the week in the hospital. He gets to go home this weekend, but his immunity system is not so good, which means no visitors. Tough stuff all around, but I am proud (if that is the right word) that he is putting up a hell of a fight. Please pray that he has it in him to recover once again.

Count your blessings, and be grateful for the time you have with your loved ones, because life is also so very short and fragile. Life is sweet.

I finally finished my 30 season sim. I noticed that during the 2047 season, teams had ticket prices of $10, $11, or $12.10. I have no idea how these prices were set by the owners because good teams, bad teams, teams with big markets, teams with small markets, any of them could have these ticket prices.

This will make online teams a bit more difficult to manage. Setting ticket prices was a strategy for revenue generation that is now no longer in the human GM’s control. Given that promotion days are also gone, market/fan strategies are also in the toilet. Online GMs are very much slaves to their won/loss records in OOTPB 2006.

Unless I am missing something, the salary cap doesn’t seem to be working. I will have to search through the game guide, but I set the cap at $90 million. The Jacksonville Sharks’ payroll was at a low of $58 million to a high of $116 million, with plenty of payrolls over $90 million. Now, I am not sure if the salary cap is just an opening day cap. If so, that might explain the amounts over the cap.

Otherwise, something else is going on here.

If you haven’t played OOTB 2006 using patch 12260, then please shut up about the problems in the game. Please. Go ahead and complain that version 12260 should have been the release version, or that rain outs no longer occur, or that you (still) don’t like the interface.

Otherwise, be quiet. Stop posting nonsense in various forums. And enjoy the game.

I did a quick check of the player development before starting an additional ten year sim and a second round pitcher was in the top five in ERA in 2037. There were still a majority high first rounders, but one low first rounder was in the top five. Hitters were all over the place. A sixth round pick was in the top five in average.

So before you take into account the various moans and groans, be sure to find out whether the person who seems so insightful about OOTPB 2006 is playing patch 12260. I don’t know yet if the game is 100% perfect, but it is much closer today than it was yesterday.

A new OOTPB 2006 patch has been released that addresses the pinch hitter, crashes, and other issues. Very nice work Sports Interactive!

My 20 year sim is complete and the stats are much, much better. Al batting averages ranged from a low of .261 to a high of .284. The most frequent league average over the course of the sim was in the middle .270s. AL ERAs. ranged from 4.19 to 5.31, but the most consistent ERAs were in the mid to upper 4.00s.

Individual stats produce only one weird result. A player hit .410 to set a new average record. A new HR record was also established during the sim as a player hit 81 Hrs. Most individual HR leaders were in the lower to middle 50s at the top, with high 40s starting at the number 3 and below ont he leader boards. Pitcher ERAs were consistent with OOTP 6.5 on the leaderboards.

So no more major complaints about the stats at this point.

At some point today I’ll look at player development and see if there is more variability in success. Might try and sim another 10 seasons just to make sure I am getting OOTPB 2006 produced prospects as major league players. If player development looks good, we’re in business.

There are reports about a pinch hit bug caused by the new patch. I haven’t seen it, nor do I know if it impacts simulated games. Some folks are also complaining about new crashes. Fortunately a new (and final) patch is due on Tuesday.

Simmed seven seasons so far and things look very, very good. I re-imported the OOTP 6.5 league file, zeroed out all modifiers to default (1.000) settings, and added our $90 million salary cap. We just might be able to look at more detailed issues like team markets, ticket prices, and other issues by tomorrow. I’ll continue with a 20 season sim overnight.

We may finally have a game folks!

The new beta patch was released earlier today. I’m running a ten season sim as I type this – results at some point tomorrow.

Markus “Raging Bull” Heinsohn is still frothing at the mouth over the PC gamer review. I do give Marc Duffy credit for being restrained in his responses (except for the “mad as hell” incident) to criticisms, but I guess that is why he’s a marketeer or whatever Sports Interactive calls such fellows. Mr. Heinsohn seems to lack such social graces and is living in the fantasy land where the initial release of OOTPB 2006 was just fine, although it needed a few tweaks here and there.

Let’s recap the initial release. The AI by even fan boy measures was broken in many areas. Online league play was confusing at best and broken in other areas. Stats were inflated and OOTP 6.5 league imports were missing ratings.

HOWEVER (to borrow the “Raging Bull”‘s forum emphasis), one thing I will agree with that a poster in the OOTPB 2006 forum points out. While SI’s game was reviewed as initial code (or so it seems), Baseball Mogul and Puresim were not (or so it seems). Baseball Mogul was as broken as OOTPB 2006 when it was initially released, so I cannot believe the initial release code received an 81%.

Fair to OOTPB 2006 that BM 2006 (hehe, “BM” always cracks me up) was released in like November last year and had time to patch things? Probably not. HOWEVER, this wouldn’t be a problem if the initial release wasn’t – yes – broken.

My initial reaction seems to be confirmed – the PC Gamer baseball roundup has been sighted by multiple sources. Now, I have not actually seen it yet, but people that I trust are telling me it’s true.

Let me be very clear about something. Low score or not, I am only playing OOTPB 2006. Actually, I am playing OOTP 6.5 much more since none of my leagues are using OOTPB 2006, but I am still playing the latest version. I am NOT playing Baseball Mogul or Puresim. And I would play OOTP 6.5 before I played Baseball Mogul. Puresim is probably more interesting as a solo player game than OOTP 6.5, but I don’t do solo play much these days.

So I do understand some of Markus “Raging Bull” Heinsohn’s disgust with the review process. He is trying to solve a complex mathematics equation while the competition puts forth their nice solution to 1+1 and 2+2. Is it fair that the other developers are answering “2” and “4” while his equation remains unsolved? Yes it is because Mr. Heinsohn (or maybe more accurately Sports Interactive) could have waited until he had a correct answer before releasing the game.

I ran a 20 year sim after importing my online league file under OOTPB 2006’s patch number 2. League averages and ERA are way too high. The same trends I saw before the new patch still are present in the new patch. Averages start low and then balloon after six or seven seasons. There was at least one team that had a .313 team batting average one season. League ERAs above 5.00 were the norm for 12 seasons in the AL.

One of my online owners suggested that we try checking the adjust to historical averages box and see if that doesn’t keep the league average and ERA in line, but I am assuming that left unchecked, the game should produce modern day results. We may have no choice other than to manipulate the settings to get more realistic statistics.

It seems that the whole PC Gamer baseball review roundup may be a hoax. At least one poster in the thread linked below claims that PC Gamer has published no such baseball comparison. Yet another in the long line of weird attacks on OOTB 2006.

I do agree with one poster’s observation that the fact that everyone believed it (the rankings) speaks volumes about the state of the game when it was released…

I went to check the thread I linked in the post below and it seems that things continue to heat up as Markus “Raging Bull” Heinsohn expresses his displeasure with the (I am assuming) rhetorical question:

“So if I code tic-tac-toe I get a score of 100%? Nice”

No you don’t. But if you code tic-tac-toe, add a bunch of features that don’t work very well or have awkward interfaces, you get a 47%. And people will be asking why the hell Heinsohn messed up the perfectly nice game of tic-tac-toe.

This is what I like to call the .400 Software Studios effect. When they were around, they made some very, very nice games…eventually. The release code was horrendous (possible exception being their pro basketball titles), but they were patched up over weeks and months.

Should reviewers give these types of games high scores based on what they could become, or on what they currently are? I am probably in the camp that wants to hold publishers’ feet to the fire and hold them accountable for what they release to the public. There’s too much of this paying beta testing going on and I’m a bit tired of it.

On the other hand, you don’t want to kill a game if there’s hope that the developer will fix it.

Of all the reviewers on the planet, Brett Todd’s opinions probably most closely match my views on most text games. He has a long resume in this genre. He was my sports editor at Games Domain Review (originally a UK site by the way) many years ago and knows Championship Manager, Diamond Mind, and all that good old text gaming stuff. He knows what he is talking about, more than any text-gaming reviewer out there as far as I am concerned.

I am not sure if he actually came up with the 47% score himself, but I certainly understand why it got that score. Maybe he and many others are getting tired of the .400 Software Studios effect.

The good news? Fix the game and OOTPB 2007 will get great scores next year!

For those that missed all of the whoopla, PC Gamer slammed OOTPB 2006 with a 47% score, while scoring Baseball Mogul and Puresim higher. Brett Todd wrote the review comparison and I have to regretfully agree with the score. Let me explain. Many review sites/magazines only take a look at the released product. As is. OOTPB 2006 was not a playable game on many different levels – online play was confusing (broken for some), solo play had very bad AI, and many things simply didn’t work or were coded badly. These are all things that a reviewer like Mr. Todd will jump on and he has consistently over the years been highly critical of games for exactly these same reasons. I actually applaud his objectivity since I know he is a big fan of the series.

Baseball Mogul seems to work and PureSim is more refined, so yes, they deserved higher scores. Heck, even OOTP 6.5 deserved a higher score than OOTPB 2006 based on release code.

On the other hand, reviews like the 9 out of 10 at Operation Sports are nonsense. I don’t think reviews should be based on game potential, but I am not sure if the OS reviewer actually played the game enough to judge that potential anyhow.

So don’t shoot the messenger. If you release a game with the long list of problems that OOTPB 2006 had, this is what you reap from objective reviewers. They will always score bug ridden games low.

Just be happy I don’t review anymore!

I just read Bill Harris’ lengthy discussion about OOTPB 2006. He makes some good points, but comparing OOTPB 2006 in its first (well, not even first yet since it doesn’t quite work) iteration to Football Manager really isn’t a fair comparison. FM has been around a long, long time. It is one of the longest developed text sims in the history of text sims. Heck Eastside Hockey Manager isn’t nearly as good as Football Manager for the same reasons, if we’re keeping score.

Even with that longevity, Football Manager only recently added its 2D match engine. Eastside Hockey Manager doesn’t have this fully functional yet.

Look, there are plenty of people out there like my brother who like Budweiser and Coors Light. It’s their beer, they swear by it, and don’t want to taste anything else. In fact, anything else actually tastes bad or “bitter” to them. Others, like myself, would rather drink water than ever again be forced to drink a Budweiser or Coors Light. The beer we drink is an acquired taste. There will always be folks like me that prefer a nice porter in a tulip glass and there will be people perfectly happy drinking Coors from a “cold sealed” can.

Out of the Park Baseball 2006 is the first badly tasting batch of what could be a fine porter. It doesn’t aspire to be an easy drinking Budweiser. Lots of people out there want it watered down or brewed as something else, but that’s not happening. It is what it is.

But yea, a walkthrough would be nice for the game…