PureSim 2008 Design Discussion thread

[modred]

I would like to be able to see each team's current payroll and total number of players during the free agent bidding.

As far the large FA pool goes, in another thread I mentioned that it certainly seemed like that having a large pool of mediocre players (aged 25-35, stuff or contact between 30-50) caused the AI to try and sign these early in the process, leaving better and more talented player (65+ in contact/stuff) unsigned at the end of the draft.

And finally, I would say don't lose sight of PureSim's greatest strength - simming the games. Don't make me have to deal with idiosyncratic real baseball things like 40 man rosters just to sim. I still want 40 or 50 player total rosters but I don't necessarily want to have to manage keeping a 40 man roster full all of the time. I would say give me minor league lineup screens before you give me 40 man rosters.

I lied, the previous paragraph was not finally. So many of the previous suggestions seem to want some sort of fog of war otherwise known as scouts - that is the absolute number 1 thing that would cause me to not buy the game. If I want fog of war, I'll play a war. If I want simming, I want simming.

I think UI improvements would be a good thing, my personal preference would be to improve the player editor and to make lineup screens drag and drop and to include position/ages in the trade screen in the box where the other team lists the player it is interested in and to make the player name double clickable everywhere to get the player card (in other words retire the magnifying glass).

[orton1227]

ORIGINAL: puresimmer

The other option I might consider would be skipping this Baseball season so I could take my time.

This didn't work well for Markus and OOTP. There were a lot of people disappointed in having to wait 2.5 years for OOTP2006 and then freak out because there were major changes and rewrites.

Keep the price at $29.99 and I'd still buy an updated version of 2007 with a new UI, as long as there's a few more gameplay features too that make it more realistic.

[bigpapag]

Shaun

Just did a little research {looked at an old 1967 PittsfSeptield Red Sox program & schedule plus went to the international league and eastern league web sites} and found out that most minor league season end on or around labor day weekend. Is this info any help in doing the Sept callups?

Also what about the players that make acarrer in minor league ball?

Happy Holidays evertone

Big Papa Gil

[bigpapag]

Sorry everyone

PittsfSeptield is supposed to be Pittsfield. [:)]

[Amaroq]

ORIGINAL: puresimmer
I agree totally. PureSim's UI most certainly reveals it's historical progression (ahem).

I've spent the last few days triaging the myriad of things I'd like to improve and I'm currently suffering from the "Where do I start?" kind of paralysis

Part of me wants to do nothing but UI refinements for PureSim 2008, the other part wants to introduce new idioms like the 40 man roster etc. Of course it's not totally an either-or situation, but it's pretty close when one considers the only time I get to work on the game is vacations and weekends (can anyone tell I've been on vacation this week?)

Obviously, it's human nature to gravitate to the stuff I would rather do, but maybe PS 2008 should be the year of the UI refining and code tightening. The game certainly already has a ton of features that for sure can't be argued. Of course when I say UI refinements, I don't simply mean new graphics. I mean things like improving the draft experience, roster management interface, lineup management interface, better reporting output and customization options, improved navigation etc.

It's something I need to really think about hard. The other issue there is would that warrant purchasing a new version of the game?

I have to admit, sitting down and planning a new season of PureSim is probably the hardest part of the whole cycle given the constraints I must operate under: Legacy encumbrance, lack of time, 1 man team etc.

The other option I might consider would be skipping this Baseball season so I could take my time.

Hmm...

On the business side, I'm not sure any of us-the-community can help you. I suspect you'll get a lot of faithful "I'll buy it no matter what" responses, and some "You can't expect me to buy it if its the same game" responses.

It may be something you want to discuss with your publisher, honestly, and some things to think about might include:

- Who is your target audience?

If you're trying to capitalize on market share lost by OOTP's changes in a download-only scheme, this is the right time to be making a 'feature push' - matching or excelling OOTP on its core competencies.

If you're trying to grow the overall market for the genre, bringing new eyeballs to PureSim for the first time, and you feel your existing feature set is compelling, it might be the right time to be making a 'UI push'.

- What solutions are there outside of the 'do it all yourself' range?

Is this the right time to consider investing a bit in some contract help, possibly from an artist, HTML specialist, or UI designer?

Is there a local school which might have 'just graduated' or 'last semester' youngsters whom you could get some contract-based coding help out of without

Does Matrix have resources in any of those lines which they might be willing to invest?

Do you have sabbatical coming on your day job, or a very large vacation balance you can use to give yourself the luxury of time to push?

- Who were your key negative reviewers last season, and what were their points against?

If you can knock off the things the press considers weaknesses in your game, you make a convincing argument for improvement, and against the 'Its just last year's version' crowd.

- What are you personally excited about working on?

Face it, you'll be a lot more motivated and a lot less likely to burn out if you're getting to work on 'fun' stuff, regardless of the business and market implications. (That way lies danger, of course - you do have to build the game for your market, not just your personal enjoyment.)

- What are your time requirements?

If you have an early deadline from your publisher to hit a first-day-of-Spring-Training release, that's a very different scenario from a web-published-Opening-Day release.

. . .

Remember, even at a big production house, we have to prioritize: we brainstorm ideas - like this thread has - and we pull up the ideas that got discarded last time - you have this list - ... but eventually, we get down to a list of things, and we prioritize them.

Once we have a 'short list' of things we think we really want, we put a schedule estimate on 'em.

Then we do the cold, hard, math: we have N man-hours, and these features add up to X man-hours, and those ain't the same. So you trim your feature set down, juggling so that you don't bite off ten time-consuming features, but instead get four time-consuming features and thirty easy-to-implement features.

What you're facing is no different - just force yourself to be disciplined about it.

Step 1: Compile the list of all possibilities
Step 2: Roughly prioritize
Step 3: Estimate for the top third
Step 4: Prioritize the top third for real, cutting to fit time deadline.
Step 5: Chop the tasks down to chewable-size units.
Step 6: Chew the first one.

. . .

Finally, have you read "The E-Myth", or any of its follow-ons, by Michael E. Gerber?

Might be a worthwhile thing to give yourself for Christmas.

[lynchjm24]

ORIGINAL: puresimmer

How about if I severely curbed player development for players that were not signed to an organization? That feels a little less brute-force to me.

Well, if it ends up being close to the same, it doesn't matter how it happened .

[lynchjm24]

ORIGINAL: Amaroq


Career totals and sortability on the retirements screen would be huge.

Being able to set a threshold for PA/IP on some of those screens would be huge. AVG/OBP/SLUG. It's hard to look through them because the top of the list is littered with players who got less then 100 at-bats.

[bobsayah]

>>> Like lynchjm, I really dislike having the hundreds of free agents who haven't played an inning even in the minors aspect - severely curbing the development of players who don't have a team, and increasing the aging impact on players who don't have a team, would go a ways. (Basically, make it 'getting innings at ANY level of the minors is required for a youngster to improve, or to stave off aging past age 30 or so).

>>> You might also address this by having players who aren't signed to a team be much more aggressive about retiring

... and/or having those players drop their salary demands in order to get signed. I find that there are often very good players out in the free agent pool which teams simply cannot afford. In the current season of my association, my 3B is out for half the season with an injury. I really don't have anyone of any quality to fill in for him. In the free agent pool is a quality 3B who appears on many of the all-time leader lists. I'd sign him, but he wants 9 million a year, and I only have 6 million left in my budget. In real life, most guys (not all, of course) would accept a reduced one-year contract rather than sit out.

[bobsayah]

ORIGINAL: Amaroq

ORIGINAL: bobsayah

>>> Once a player signs a major league contract (e.g. the first time they are placed on the 40 man roster they can no longer be assigned a minor league contract salary level).

Just re-reading your ideas on this, and I'm wondering: How is it that a player's initial major league contract (salary and # of years) gets determined?

Currently?

Currently, players build for themselves a "contract demand", by assessing their performance and skill level against the other players in the league. They either give a discount or charge a premium for a long-term contract, adjusting the 'demand' either down or up accordingly. They also offer a discount the deeper you get into the initial draft.

No, I didn't mean "currently". I know how the game currently works. I was asking how this would work under Shaun's proposed new minor league contract idea. In real life, a player's initial major league salary is very low. He doesn't suddenly go from "cheap minor leaguer" to "market value" upon making it to the majors. How would this be handled by the proposed new feature? I've had guys who were recent minor leaguers who were asking for rather large salaries when offered an extension around the time of their initial callup to the majors. Is this asking salary reflective of what it would cost me to put this guy on my major league roster? If that were the case, since my "small market" team is always strapped for cash, I could easily see myself getting into a scenario where my team simply can't afford to add a minor leaguer to the major league roster. Somehow, that scenario doesn't translate well to real life. You don't see a guy stuck in the minors because his salary demands are too high.

[Amaroq]

That's a very good point, bobsayah, and one I'd definitely like to see addressed.

How's this for a design?

Maybe that first promotion moment is to the major-league minimum, with a maximum contract length of (7 - MLY) where MLY is the number of years spent in the minors so far. The player would demand something that approaches 'market value' at the 5-year-contract level for any contract longer than that.

You'd always be able to give a guy a one-year deal at the league minimum.

Players you'd drafted and developed would be yours for the first six years of their career, but you wouldn't be able to lock guys up long-term by burying them in the minors for five years, then offering them a five-year, league-minimum salary thereafter.

Example: The league minimum is $600K. The 'market value' for a proven third or fourth outfielder is about $5.0M. I draft Joe Outfielder in the 2001 draft, and sign him to a minor-league contract. In the middle of the 2004 season, I need to promote him to the bigs (and therefore, give him a major-league contract and put him on the 40-man roster). His salary demands might be:
-1 year, $600K
-2 years, $600K
-3 years, $600K
-4 years, $4.0M
-5 years, $5.0M
(6 years, $5.7M)
(7 years, $6.5M)

(Listing the extra two years for those of you who have modified the .XML to allow longer contracts).

[Amaroq]

ORIGINAL: lynchjm24

ORIGINAL: Amaroq
Career totals and sortability on the retirements screen would be huge.

Being able to set a threshold for PA/IP on some of those screens would be huge. AVG/OBP/SLUG. It's hard to look through them because the top of the list is littered with players who got less then 100 at-bats.

Agreed - maybe re-use the 150 AB / 50 IP threshold required to void somebody's rookie eligibility? I'd even be happy with using the algorithm "Major league games played > 0, or was on a human-controlled team's extended roster at the end of last season."

That way I get a notification if one of my minor-leaguers retires, and other than that I only see guys with actual big-league careers.

The screen could also be divided into hitters and pitchers, and start with a primary sort by 'At Bats' and 'Innings Pitched', respectively.

[Amaroq]

ORIGINAL: bobsayah
>> You might also address this by having players who aren't signed to a team be much more aggressive about retiring

... and/or having those players drop their salary demands in order to get signed. I find that there are often very good players out in the free agent pool which teams simply cannot afford. In the current season of my association, my 3B is out for half the season with an injury. I really don't have anyone of any quality to fill in for him. In the free agent pool is a quality 3B who appears on many of the all-time leader lists. I'd sign him, but he wants 9 million a year, and I only have 6 million left in my budget. In real life, most guys (not all, of course) would accept a reduced one-year contract rather than sit out.

Yeah, that's a pretty good point, too - it feels like the player's salary demands drop off as the free agency period progresses, but then jump back up to their 'default' value mid-season. Maybe the demands should continue to drop, fairly precipitously, running all the way from 9.0M down to the league minimum by the end of the season. This could even be structured by having it only impact their one-year salary demand, so your example third-baseman's salary demands in June might have looked like:
- 1 year, $5.0M
- 2 years, $9.0M
- 3 years, $8.7M
- 4 years, $8.5M
- 5 years, $8.0M

or whatever was appropriate past the 2-year mark based on his current age and situation. (As opposed to having them play the 'Oh, I'm only willing to sign a one-year contract, so that I get to prove myself' card.)

Had you waited until September, you might have gotten
- 1 year, $600K
- 2 years, $9.0M
- 3 years, $8.7M
- 4 years, $8.5M
- 5 years, $8.0M

There's another thing that happens IRL - if a player is cut by a team which has guaranteed him a huge salary, he will often sign for the league minimum with another team. Russ Ortiz, I think, is an example of this - cut by the D-backs after poor performance last year, he has signed a one-year, major-league-minimum deal with the Giants for the coming season, which reduced the D-backs' obligations to him by that amount.

[looneyluden]

Something I would like added for the next version is the ability to turn off the ratings bars on players cards. Basically the bars that are red for a rating that is "very low", yellow for "average", and green for "very good" in that rating.

The reason for this is for those of us who play with very low ratings settings (1-5, or 1-8 for example). I use 1-5 so that when I'm drafting or looking at free agents, it adds a lot more difficulty to trying to pick a good player. But having those colored bars underneath, all I really need to do is look how far across the coloring goes on the bar to see what that rating really is. It pretty much eliminates the reasons I chose 1-5 in the first place. Having that mysterious 1-5 setting without the colored bars would greatly increase the AI's chances of competing in the league, which is what I would want.

A quick example of this:

In a 1-5 ratings setting, lets say a player is rated 3 in Contact, 3 Power, 3 Eye, and 3 Speed. A very average player. But on a 1-5 scale, he's probably either high-side or low-side of average, you can't tell just from the number ratings...all 3's. But with those bars directly underneath the ratings, it is very easy for me to tell who is high-side average, or who is low-side average just by looking if the bar goes a little past half-way, or not quite to half-way. And with the coloring of the bars it makes it even easier to tell, because the low-side average guy has a bar is yellow, but the guy who is a little above average has a bar that is green.



Please consider adding the ability to turn ratings bars off in the next years release, if it is possible.

[Amaroq]

Or connect them to the numbering system - e.g., in the 5-point scale, the bar should only have 5 discrete positions it will go to, and the colors should map to the displayed number.

[Cantankerous]

I would like to see the possibility of adding a bullpen feature for the managed aspect of the game where relievers had to be "warmed up" before they could be brought into the game.
 
I remember this feature being a very big factor in the old Earl Weaver's Baseball.  If a reliever wasn't warmed up sufficiently when brought into the game then he wouldn't be as effective as he could be.  As well, the length of time to warm up a reliever might have a direct bearing upon how the number of pitches the present pitcher is throwing to each batter or other elements of the game.  Short relievers might warm up faster than long relievers, so knowing when (and who) to warm up would be vital to managing a good game.
 
Implementation of such a feature might also make it necessary to add a separate feature where the pitching coach might need to visit the mound (to burn time) and/or allowing the catcher to stall for time.  Obviously the coach/manager could only visit the mound once per inning (or the pitcher would have to come out) and the catcher would not be able to stall very much or for very long else the umpire get annoyed and shut that activity down.
 
This feature would do little for those that sim their games, but for the ones that manage each game, this would seem to be a very vital element of strategy within the game.

[Dirtdog20]

What about players that are drafted/created have a six year Reserve Clause Contract that pays the league min.   Once a player is called up they are assigned an arbitration contract for three years.  At the end of the six year reserve or three year arbitration they become a full free agent.

I am not a computer programer but it would seem to me that if you could give the AI GM a baseline of expected performance correlated to ratings; ie: On this scale a player should be expected to perform at (x) level.  If that players ratings say that the player should perform over a player currently on the roster then look at calling them up.  That might help with calling up players to soon and the shorter Arb contracts kicking in.

As far as there being players in the pool.  I look at them as orginisational guys that you have playing for you and one just happens to get lucky and is playing well at the time you have your need.  An example being a 40th round catcher who you took a flier on and this time you got lucky.

[galaril]

Shaun,
 
Looking forward to the next version of PS after getting the last two. One thing I would like are distinct personality types for GM's in game  and if possible add coaches at least the team manager. I think adding batting coaches,scouts and pitching coaches could be a latter improvement, but really want to see teams have a more dinctive style based on their GMs not just on some pre built profiles like games like PC strategy games do ala Galactic Civilizations 2 .
Your game really is  great in-game,historical replay and graphically but the game needs alittle more GM style for the Theo Epstein types out there;)

[PadresFan104]

Been playing a bit of some other baseball games, and thought I'd add to the list of "wants" for the next version. While the ball flight animation is the best in the business, I believe it's also been used as a crutch for not improving the play-by-play. <Ducks the reaction from Shaun...>

While there is some suspense, there isn't any drama.

At the end of the day the results and stats come out great, but the actual gameplay is still pretty "vanilla" and lagging behind. In other games I'm reading about fantastic diving stops, balls that hit the pitcher and deflect to another player who makes the play, or the sausage races at Miller park, etc. Yeah, yeah, it's 100% fluff, but boy does it help paint the picture in your minds eye.

[galaril]

I really think as others have said the text sim that can integrate an real audio announcer feature like the old baseball for windows game had with Ernie Hartwell will really clean up.

[Amaroq]

If you guys haven't caught the link, check out the Updated Draft, sparked, it would appear, by some of the discussion in this thread..