Puresim Online Leagues?

[legendsport2k]

I'm considering a move to Puresim for my online leagues, which have been in OOTP for years.

I've been running OOTP online leagues since back in version 2 (1997 or 98 I think), but the move to SI and 2006 has basically killed historical online leagues. One of my leagues died an ugly death because of the new sim - it's a great step forward, but at the same time a step back - at least in historical play, online or solo.

So my question for the community here (I've been lurking for a long time, but haven't posted) is how many Puresim leagues are running? I don't see many posts about them, but the sim is solid and has the capability. The OOTP community is huge, but I think an influx of frustrated historical players may be heading towards Puresim, as Shaun seems to be moving Puresim in the direction OOTP had been heading before the SI conversion.

I basically am wondering if there's a market out there yet for a historical Puresim league, or if I should play the waiting game, stick with OOTP 6.5 and continue to play Puresim solo.

If anyone's interested in seeing the kind of league I'm talking about, you can visit my website at http://legendsport.com

Thanks!

[dneely]

Legendsport:

I liked your web site and the league ideas you have! Right now, from what I know, PureSim does not have very many (if any) online leagues especially in the historical arena. I sincerely wish we could garner more interest and see this aspect of PS really get off the ground. I have been a member of two leagues that fizzled after a great deal of interest so I don't know what to tell you. I still play in an OOTP 6.5 fictional league and enjoy it, but I would love to be a part of a historical league beginning in say 1915 moving forward. We can hope....

[Amaroq]

I have a confession to make. I've never played an online league of PS. [X(]

How much time do you guys find an online league takes, as an investment? Does it work for players on opposite coasts, or do you really need to get everybody 'active' simultaneously to make progress?

[legendsport2k]

I'd be willing to give a historical online league a shot, if there was enough interest. You'd need someone for each team to make it worthwhile. I've got webspace, and the desire to make it work, but you obviously need enough people to flesh it out.

I've never run a league in Puresim, but I have a lot of experience with both OOTP and Diamond Mind leagues. The successful ones have a committed commish and active GMs. Time-wise it depends on what's involved. I'm not sure how PS would compare with, say, OOTP. I spend about a half-hour a day on my OOTP leagues (I sim on alternating days to break things up).

[URett]

I have never played in any online league, but I'd like to give it a shot.

[legendsport2k]

Well, if we can get 12 to 16 people who want to give it a shot, I'm game. We could start in 1901 or something and go through baseball history.

[Deltadog]

The only 2 I have seen referance to can be found in "The Locker" section.  One seems to have had problems with the FTP aspect of gthe game.  Have seen nothing recently to indicate if this has been resolved (except by roll back to an earlier patch) and the second collasped when the commissioner to be had some sort of personal problems and no one else could/would take over.

[legendsport2k]

Hopefully we can drum up some folks who want to give this a try. Seems a vastly underused aspect of the sim. Maybe a successful league will bring more people to Puresim. I will certainly recruit some of my long-time OOTP league GMs to see if they want to give PS a shot. OOTP 6.5 is a very good game, but it's no longer supported and the series has gone in a completely different direction, while PS is still on the right track and will continue to improve.

[KG Erwin]

I'd love to be involved in a league, BUT, I really think you should wait until the final official patch for PS2007 is released. That's just my humble opinion.

I believe many of us are just maintaining a holding pattern until that time. After the final release of PS2007, work on PS2008 will begin in earnest (right?).

[legendsport2k]

ORIGINAL: KG Erwin

I'd love to be involved in a league, BUT, I really think you should wait until the final official patch for PS2007 is released. That's just my humble opinion.

I believe many of us are just maintaining a holding pattern until that time. After the final release of PS2007, work on PS2008 will begin in earnest (right?).

You're absolutely right. The only reason I'm posting now is to get the wheels rolling. If we can get some people to sign on, with the understanding that the league will happen when the final patch comes out, we can hit the ground running when that glorious day arrives.

[KG Erwin]

I'm there, man. Count me in. [;)]

This is my team:

[Deltadog]

I would be interested in a league once the final patch is out and FTP problems are resolved.
 
Any team no one else wants will be fine.
 
 
 
 
 

[Marsh511]

I'd definitely be interested in a historical online league, especially if we can wait until around New Years to start. I would love to see us start in 1915 (nothing magical about the year, just seemed like a good place to start). I thought we'd be drafting teams, but the more I read of the thread, the more it seemed we'd use stock/historical rosters?? I prefer to draft & trade, but maybe that would be too much of an undertaking considering Puresim hasn't been used for historical purposes much yet. I'm currently in a Strat league that started in 1921 and enjoying it immensely.

Marshall

[legendsport2k]

ORIGINAL: Marsh511

I thought we'd be drafting teams, but the more I read of the thread, the more it seemed we'd use stock/historical rosters??

I don't think anything's set in stone. We could decide as a group when to start (season-wise) and whether to use stock teams or draft things up. Personally, I'd rather do a draft. Maybe we could pick teams, "protect" a few players to give the teams personality, and re-draft the rest. That way no one automatically gets a powerhouse - or conversely a cellar-dweller.

As for timing, based on what Shaun's said about the final patch, it probably would be the New Year before we could begin anyway.

Another thing we could do is include Negro Leaguers if that's something everyone would like to see. I've built (actually AM building would be more correct) a Lahman-style database that I'm using for my OOTP leagues right now (I have a league in 1893 and one in 1925 which use it). It would be fairly easy to start a league anytime between those two years (hopefully somewhere in the "middle") and incorporate my custom database. I *think* I understand how the Lahman-db is integrated into PS, so I'd just have to port things over.

Just something to consider. It'd be less work for me to leave them out, if people prefer a "straight" historical league.

[dneely]

legendsport:

I would also be interested in your historical league idea!! But as I mentioned I have been on deck with 2 other leagues than after a big burst of energy and excitement never came through. Problems with DL file size, FTP and other issues always seem to keep the guys who wanted to be the Commish from moving forward. They basically got frustrated and dropped the project.

Two quick suggestions, one I would get in touch with Shaun and see what he can do to get us going and secondly I agree with the 1915 start date because as much as I enjoy the dead-ball era it is hard to do it justice with 18 man rosters and pitchers throwing complete games every other day. None of the games seems to handle that aspect realistically, including OOTP and PureSim.

[Amaroq]

Okay.

Given the problems with the previous MP leagues, I think there would be a lot of value to the PureSim community in us getting a league going:
1. Proof of concept for others who might be interested

2. Ideation and feedback specifically re: the MP format for Shaun, including generating a list of feature-requests for '08.

3. Generating excitement, interest, and forum traffic for others to follow.

I prefer to draft & trade, but maybe that would be too much of an undertaking considering Puresim hasn't been used for historical purposes much yet.

The last part of that statement shocks me, because I've been using it for little *other* than historical purposes for the past four years. When we did polls-on-usage, there was a good percentage of users that were doing historical leagues.

I thought we'd be drafting teams, but the more I read of the thread, the more it seemed we'd use stock/historical rosters??

I don't think we'd want to spend the time to do a full in-person draft at 35 or more players per team - even if we could round-trip the selections at one minute apiece, thats over nine hours. So, I think Shaun designed it as a 'let your scouts auto-draft' thing. At that point it might be fun to do historical rosters. Even if some folks do wind up with poor starting scenarios, they'd get high draft picks to compensate, and the challenge of carving out a winner from nothing would be very rewarding.

Alternately, we could go with
- Get however many players we can. 8? 12?
- Start in 1901. With the players from 16 teams (18 * 16 = 288) divided onto 12 teams, we'd have 24 players each, or 36 on an 8 team league.
- Leave 'allow expansion' ticked, and expand by two teams anytime we get two committed GM's.

[XCom]

Just want to throw my 2 cents in as someone who is currently putting together a multiplayer league.

(Just for the record, initially I was going to migrate over my current BBPro league to Puresim, but after working towards that goal for a while the decision was made by my owners and I to start fresh with a new fictional MP league)

First off, I would recommend starting off using the 1.20 official patch. Beta patches after 1.35 seem to have big time MP problems which I think are related to the option allowing you to use Matrix's server space to host your league. If you want to use a beta patch to reap some of the benefits of Shaun's recent changes then I have been using 1.31 with few problems over the last several months for testing.

Next, understand the size of the files you will be sending back and forth. [;)] An active 16 team league will generate a file on the order of 20mb that each owner will need to download after each sim session. Broadband is a must, really. Shaun had incorporated a switch to using the 7z compression routine in a recent patch (which cuts the files sizes by a factor of 5), but it was around the same time of the problems I highlighted earlier and I've never been able to see that in action yet. In conjunction with this, make sure you have the capability to handle the large amount of file transfer bandwidth that you will incur. Most hosting sites only offer small monthly bandwidth quotas (<1gb/mo) with standard packages, anything over the quota involves addtional charges from your provider, so be careful.

My league continues in the testing phase where some of my previous BBPro league owners are learning the workings of an active Puresim mutiplayer league. Overall, the in season stuff works very well. We are just now starting to tackle some of the offseason stuff to see how that goes.

Personally, I've always felt that there is nothing like competing against other humans in these kinds of games. The computer AI really can only take you so far before you need a better challenge. I'm surprised with the lack of other leagues out there, but there are still issues with the MP system that are discouraging to alot of people (the large downloads and file hosting issues being the major stumbling blocks IMHO).

Anyway, if anyone is interested in trying out a fictional multiplayer league then let me know via PM. I'm planning on starting another test in the next week or so that trys out the financial system in a MP league to see how that works. Also, we are evaluating it to see if we would want to use it in the real league or stick with our external financial system (we have one in place from our BBPro league now that works pretty well).

[dneely]

Amaroq

Very good ideas and points well made! Especially the way to stock the teams. But I still feel we may need some help from Shaun because the game still has some league based problems, or so I have read.

Ready when you guys are???

[legendsport2k]

ORIGINAL: Amaroq

Given the problems with the previous MP leagues, I think there would be a lot of value to the PureSim community in us getting a league going:
1. Proof of concept for others who might be interested

2. Ideation and feedback specifically re: the MP format for Shaun, including generating a list of feature-requests for '08.

3. Generating excitement, interest, and forum traffic for others to follow.

You're on the money. If even a few successful MP leagues spring up, it will drive excitement - and users - to PS and that would certainly help the game grow. Unless there's a sea-change over at SI, I'm not sure that OOTP will remain the sim of choice for historical online leagues based on how things look right now. There would be a fairly sizeable new customer base for Shaun if PS is proven to be a good alternative for disgruntled OOTP historical online leaguers.

ORIGINAL: Amaroq
I don't think we'd want to spend the time to do a full in-person draft at 35 or more players per team - even if we could round-trip the selections at one minute apiece, thats over nine hours. So, I think Shaun designed it as a 'let your scouts auto-draft' thing. At that point it might be fun to do historical rosters. Even if some folks do wind up with poor starting scenarios, they'd get high draft picks to compensate, and the challenge of carving out a winner from nothing would be very rewarding.

Doing an initial draft is time-consuming. I've done a bunch, and because you can basically never get a convenient time to do it "live" it's almost always done via email, with either lists (more work for the commish) or pick-by-pick emails (which takes forever to complete). If, for arguments sake, we went with an eight team league, we could simply combine an AL and NL franchise to make a new team. Maybe the 1st place NL and 8th place AL together and vice-versa, 2nd and 7th, 3rd and 6th, and so on. That would be an easy way to do it.

1915 works as an alternative starting point because of the Federal League. You end up with almost 900 players that season, which shakes out to over 50 players per team in a sixteen team league. I'm open to either. I'd also be good with starting in the 30s or 40s, if we wanted to move things up a bit. Starting "at the beginning" has a certain attraction. Really, as long as we're not duplicating the exact time frame of one of my other leagues, I'm game.

[legendsport2k]

XCom - thanks for the advice. Though I've got a ton of experience with OOTP and DMB, it's good to hear from someone who's tangling with the unique issues of Puresim.

ORIGINAL: XCom

First off, I would recommend starting off using the 1.20 official patch. Beta patches after 1.35 seem to have big time MP problems which I think are related to the option allowing you to use Matrix's server space to host your league. If you want to use a beta patch to reap some of the benefits of Shaun's recent changes then I have been using 1.31 with few problems over the last several months for testing.

Yep - I've played around with 1.20 and have seen the issues with 1.38, so if anything were going to be done now, it'd have to be in 1.20 - as far as I can see. I don't have 1.31 (and you can't d/l it anymore).

ORIGINAL: XCom
Next, understand the size of the files you will be sending back and forth. [;)] An active 16 team league will generate a file on the order of 20mb that each owner will need to download after each sim session. Broadband is a must, really. Shaun had incorporated a switch to using the 7z compression routine in a recent patch (which cuts the files sizes by a factor of 5), but it was around the same time of the problems I highlighted earlier and I've never been able to see that in action yet. In conjunction with this, make sure you have the capability to handle the large amount of file transfer bandwidth that you will incur. Most hosting sites only offer small monthly bandwidth quotas (<1gb/mo) with standard packages, anything over the quota involves addtional charges from your provider, so be careful.

Yep, I've seen the huge files. Luckily I have no bandwidth issues and my server is capable of dealing with the load. It would be nice to be able to compress the file to a smaller size, though. I tried to tar-gzip it and the file size was no smaller than a regular zip.

ORIGINAL: XCom
Personally, I've always felt that there is nothing like competing against other humans in these kinds of games. The computer AI really can only take you so far before you need a better challenge. I'm surprised with the lack of other leagues out there, but there are still issues with the MP system that are discouraging to alot of people (the large downloads and file hosting issues being the major stumbling blocks IMHO).

I agree on these points 100%. Online leagues are great - especially when you've got a good group of people on board. There's always the risk of getting someone in there who doesn't do things the right way, is disruptive or whatever, but they're usually in a small minority.

ORIGINAL: XCom
I'm planning on starting another test in the next week or so that trys out the financial system in a MP league to see how that works. Also, we are evaluating it to see if we would want to use it in the real league or stick with our external financial system (we have one in place from our BBPro league now that works pretty well).

I'd love to hear how that turns out.

Thanks again.