sov, how did you figure out where to insert logos? All I can find is 'generate logo' using the color codes. I don't see any way to link to them off the hard drive the way you could in previous OOTP games.

Option 3 is not an option. You can do the rest though.

I know I'm dumb, but I can't figure out how to assign a scout to scout a league (such as AAA). I've read the manual, and fiddled around to the point of insanity, but no luck. I'm sure it's something simpl and I'm just missing it, but does anyone know?

It should be if you are the new "active" manager.

What I'm quickly discovering is that this entire game is needlessly complicated to do just about any fucking thing.

I just opened up that particular directory in a window and drag-n-dropped.

I dunno. Maybe I needed to switch managers but I thought the act of adding one did that automatically.

Ugh. I'm just trying to figure out a way to have the game default to those logos the way you could do in OOTP 6. Having to drag-and-drop each time I create a new league is ridiculously draconian.

Go to Add Manager. Click on any of the choices for existing managers on the right list. That activates that manager. Then there is a button option at the bottom to delete that manager.

Did that. It highlighted the button for the added manager but not for the one sov had in there. Maybe I wasn't switching to the other guy, and so sov's manager was still active and thus undeletable. I'll try again on that later.

And nobody's going to offer more than a 30 year old reliever with an ERA in the fives for three months of Albert Pujols in his walk year?

Yeah, me too.

The Fantasy draft was 4 hours of my life I wish I could have back. I have a giant headache, and I'm not having a lot of fun right now. :(

Honestly though, if anyone can tell me how to scout a league (other than the MLB), PLEASE let me know.

Hell, I've played this thing for ten hours and I'm not sure I've yet to go past April 10.

All I've been able to do is get my guys to scout each team or organization individually. I've been assigning each of my coachs to scout my team - this gives me an idea of who I can trust and ho I can't, and what the error ranges are. I then send each scout out to a different team and have them scout the entire organization - first quick, then full. I can get most of the league done by opening day, and then I can cross-check players who are offered to me in trades.

I haven't checked it out yet myself, but have you peaked at the big manual yet? I think one of the blogs contained a large excerpt from the manual on scouting and it seemed pretty in-depth.

Ok, I just figured it out, and it WAS in the manual. I must have missed before.

You have to have chosen the league, and then you go to "Transactions" from the League Menu. After that you go to the bottom right and choose "Scout League"

It's just a REALLY unintuitive way to do something that should be on a dedicated scouting screen. Frustrating.

I used that word in my PureSim review.

It gives me an Inigo Montoya moment now.

"You keep on using that word...I do not think it means what you think it means."

at least there IS a manual this time.

SackAttack:

From your experiences so far, do you prefer puresim or OOTPB?

Oh, yes. A 300 page behemoth, and don't think I'm not happy about that level of documentation.

The problem is, the stuff giving me the biggest headaches - figuring out how to use the logos I want without having to jump through hoops every time I create a new league - well, you know, that stuff didn't get documented in time for the release.

Sad.

Josh, I'll have the answer in the next hour for you I hope. We were aiming to have a customization manual out on release day but in the end time ran out. It'll be uip soon!

Here's a post (re: logos) that might help you out a little --http://www.ootpdevelopments.com/board/showpost.php?p=1686691&postcount=1

Smartass answer: a gun barrel in my mouth.

Honest answer: God, I don't know. For the most part, I prefer the FM-style interface that OOTP sports, and God knows it buries PureSim statistically at the moment.

On the other hand, glancing at the tech support forum over at OOTP's forums, it looks like OOTP really wasn't ready for release even ignoring some of the complaints about its intuitiveness. It's a complex game, I understand that.

But when I see that somehow relief pitchers are earning wins and saves at the same time, I wonder how that made it past beta. It realistically should have taken one extra-inning game of sufficient length to find that. Hell, the first game I managed, I found that. Do the beta testers just bang on the simulation engine without testing the manage mode?

There are improvements to OOTP, and a great many of them, but what I'm finding right now is that getting STARTED is an overwhelming chore. Then there's all the hunting around through various menus to find out how to do things like make trades, activate players received via trade, there's stuff like lineup replacement that automatically voids the position (so if you swap centerfielders, you have to re-set your player as a centerfielder, doubling the number of necessary clicks)...

Let me summarize my level of frustration with the two games this way:

If I were an average consumer who had purchased PureSim, OOTP and Baseball Mogul 2007 right now, and I were choosing one to play, I would probably go with Mogul. It's simplistic, yes, but at least it won't drive me to baldness before my 30's.

PureSim needs some polish before I can call it the best of the bunch, and OOTP is clearly, CLEARLY suffering from growing pains related to the switch to SI's codebase.

With PureSim, I know that most of my frustrations are fixable with future patches and updates. That's going to be a game I can play and enjoy with a little patience.

OOTP, I can see a game in there that I want to play. What's driving me fucking batshit insane is figuring out how to GET to that game.

Thanks, Marc.

I know I'm full of piss and vinegar right now, but I also realize that this is a pretty radical change from what I'm used to. I'm giving it a shot to grow on me, and hopefully a week from now I can look back at my early frustrations and laugh.

In the meantime, I'm likely to be one bitter SOB until I figure out what the hell I'm doing. Be patient with me. :D

sov,

That helps me with the naming conventions. It's still a PITA if I have to do that process every time I create a new league (which, if a useable roster set ever pops up, might happen; I have a weird attachment to my favorite real-life Dodgers), and that's what I'm looking for. With OOTP 6, I could dump them all into the folder that the game used when creating new associations, so the same logos would get used each time.

That's what I'm after, is something along those lines.

But at least that link should get me started in the short-term.

Well, I think it's just a matter of time before everyone gets on the same page. A Los Angeles Dodgers logo should always be named Los Angeles (A)_Dodgers.png. Am I missing something, but isn't that the same as an old OOTP 6 logo always being logo13.bmp (or whatever it was)?

Well, other than that the Dodgers are (N) and not (A), yup. :D

No, that's not the issue. That's actually fine. The problem is that yeah, I can name the images appropriately and drag and drop them each time I need to use them, and that's fine and all, but what I want to do is find a way to just either import them once and for all or drag and drop them once, as OOTP used to do.

It would still assign the same logo to the same team, and that's fine, but it'd already be there waiting for me instead of having to manually insert them into the images folder with each new league.

I'm glad/sad to see that others are sharing my concerns and frustration with this game. I downloaded this last night and sat down eager to play. After 45 minutes had gone by and I STILL hadn't been able to actually play a game, I turned off the computer for the night. I'll try to pick it back up later today, but so far I can't help but be disappointed.

I'm not saying anything new here, but it's just so damned complicated to do anything in the game. The interface is not just unintuitive, it's counter-intuitive. And the play by play does not excite me. At least in older versions there were specific mentions of it being Opening Day and things like that. My first game of the season started out like any other game. In fact, I didn't even see any pre-game notes about starting pitcher and whatnot (perhaps that's in one of the OTHER ways to watch the game).

Like Sack said, you can see where this game has the potential to be very good, if you could strip all the extraneous crap from it.

I'm not feeling overwhelmed at all, but it might be the way I started in the minor leagues. That takes out a bunch of the decisions and possibly some of the frustration others are having (although it adds it's own issues IMO). I've now moved on to the Japanese Pro League and am having much more fun with the game. It was pretty easy to move up the manager's ladder even when I finished dead last in my Triple A league. I think I'd recommend to anyone wanting to try the game and having concerns about being overwhelmed to try the minor leagues, get used to the basics and then move on to the pro leagues. I think that might be a better way to learn the game a little at a time.

After 3 full seasons, I haven't had much problems with the injuries other than the stretch I posted. I'm willling to accept it being just really bad luck at this point but when you lose your #1, #2 and #3 starting pitchers for the year in the space of 10 days it's something you tend to notice. Not to mention that at the minor league level you can't control the DL, so these guys were just sitting on the roster eating up space despite being useless for the whole year. I think at one point I was using the bat boy as a starter. :D

I haven't quite gotten through spring training yet. I actually haven't been able to figure out how to look at my spring training stats. Nor have I figured out how I could actually watch/manage the game. I'm sure all this is in the manual, but I'm not really a manual kind of guy - that's on me, not the game.

You get a lot of trade offers, which are horrible to get through. If you go from the trade offer to the closest thing the game has to a trade block - then the game tells you the offer has expired when you go back to your email. This of course makes no sense because it tells you that you have 14 days to decide.

I set up a fictional league based on real life. I already miss the old OOTP 'transactions' screen. I think that might be my favorite text sim screen and the new one is much more complicated. You have to hit a drop down to pick which of the 5 minor league teams you are looking at and you can't see nearly as many players as you used to be able to. Certainly part of this is because of the added levels of minors, but I miss that screen.

The set lineup and rotation screens aren't all that easy to work with. Another area where the simpler screens in OOTP were better. Sure now you have more lineup flexibility, but I play as a GM mostly and used to only tweak things a little bit. Being able to quickly tweak lineups is something that isn't as easy as it was before.

It's really exactly what I expected. It's now more designed for the FM type player who slowly plays out seasons. There is just too much going on to really play this game like I played solo OOTP in the past. It's an amazing game, but if you added maybe a half dozen of the new features to OOTP 6.5 I would have been happier then I'm going to be with the complexity I'm faced with here. I don't have huge amounts of time to play and I'm interested in the long term aspects of a league, watching players develop - building a history around my team. I can't spend 20 minutes trying to figure out which player I should designate for assignment, but with all the information at your fingertips it makes decisions like that harder - not easier.

Maybe it will grow on me, but I have never been able to get into FM or EHM because there was just 'too much'.

maybe I'm missing something, but all you have to do is copy your logos into that news\html\images folder and make sure they are named right (Los Angeles (N)_Dodgers.jgp for example). that's it. if you make a new league with LA, copy the logo into the new folder. one caution - if you add logos to the folder while the game is open, they won't work in all places until you restart the game. in 6, you could do this while it was running (and almost had to, because you had to look up who was team 1, team 2, etc.)

I don't really understand why logos are giving people trouble. they should be much more upset about having all the logos and player photos in the same damn directory.

has anybody found the option to add stats in the players eval of AI instead of the pure ratings approach? I really liked that and tweaked it often in 6.5

spring training stats are a split.

for league stats...League dropdown menu>Statistics. View Batting Stats. You should now have several dropdowns, including Stats Splits - choose Spring Training. you can further refine with additinal splits (home / road) with the stats double split. unfortunately, lefty / righty splits do not work for spring training, but I think must of the other (albeit less important) splits are available.

to play a game, got to League>Scores & Schedules. assuming you're at that part of the season, pick a game and choose "manage" to play it out. quick-play used to be called sim - that will just sim it out. if you aren't yet where there are any games, you can choose the auto-play until buttons below to advance.

I may be wrong, but I do not think this is in the game.

Please help me understand the interface problems. It's difficult for me to recognise the problems having grown up on such an interface. The more experiences shared, the better chance I have of getting them fixed

Well, (for me, can't speak for Cam) for one, I find it frustrating to do the following:

Click on a screen from the dropdown. Say, just your basic roster screen.
Click on a player.
Use the arrows to toggle through your players

Now, in the old version, all you had to do is to close the player page, and you were back on the page you started - be it the roster page, a lineup page, a transactions page, etc. I don't see that there is any way to "close" a player page and get back to where you were besides going back up to the dropdown navigation and going down the tree again or pressing the back key a number of times? Basically, instead of a linear page memory, I wouldn't mind one that is tree-based in a way. Hope I'm explaining it well enough...

Then I really don't understand why it isn't in this game. Why regress?

Marc,

Just a few examples from me:

1) It took me 15 minutes to find the trade screen. Why in the hell isn't it in the front office of your specific team? Why do I have to go to the league screen to do it?

2) Why on Earth do I have to go to ten different places to send my scouts? I have to go to one place to scout a league, one place to scout a player, another place to scout a team. . . for the love of God, have a scouting screen like FM and let me assign my scouts on one page with a few clicks.

3) Speaking of the trade screen, where are my options for looking at anything other than stats? There are certain things that are important in trading in a career sim. Things like contract information, age, potential. . . it's a nightmare to click through all of it.

4) I click on the team schedule page and sim forward a day. It takes me back to the SION front page. To look at my box score, I have to click back into the schedule screen. Or I can use the league schedule screen and click the back button to look at an individual box score.

5) I couldn't figure out where to find the spring training stats either. Now that DD posted, I'll start looking at the screen, but I spent 10 minutes looking for them and gave up.
-----------------------------------------------------

I like the FM UI and I'm sure with some time I'll figure out where everything is and be OK. The amount of information is staggering and I understand that it has to be hard to organize all of the information. But my God, there are some things here that just blow me away. The scouting thing is about the best example I can come up with.

You have something that SHOULD be fairly simple to figure out and incredibly simple to execute. Counter-intuitive explains it 100%.

------------------------------------------------------

I haven't dug into the AI as of yet, but please oh please report the GoSeahawks trade from above as a MAJOR bug. I'll put up with clunky AI long before I'll put up with a triple crown slugger being traded for a middle reliever at the trading deadline. If things like that stay in, I won't be around long enough to figure out the UI.

What TroyF said, Marc. :)

One tip for those who have the game:

Use the bookmark feature. Use it extensively. I think I have about 25 bookmarks already, taking me to my minor league teams home pages, stats pages, trade screen, lineup settings, etc.

It's on the bottom right hand side of the screen. Probably the single most useful thing in the game.

there are a few things that are not in the game. there's no trading block. the star ratings are gone. I don't believe players get ejected from games anymore (may be wrong there).

I can't speak for Markus or SI, but in some cases it was a design decision (star ratings falls into this category). I believe other features not making it (back) in are simply a function of the game being rewritten from scratch. I have no idea where that stat rating thing falls, but I would suspect it's the latter.

Any idea how these bookmarks work in a multiplayer setting? Are they stored somewhere outside of the league directory local to your machine, or somewhere in the league file?

(I'd look right now, but don't have it set up at work)

I haven't been able to figure out how to only look at free agents from the Player Search screen.

I don't know to be honest.

I know that for my game, they are simply invaluable. Anything that took me more than fifteen seconds to find went into a bookmark. I haven't played wiht organizing them or any of those options yet. Marc, I'd SRONGLY reccomend making this feature as robust as possible in the first patch, I'm talking about being able to create folders for specific tasks (ie: you can put offseason tasks in one folder, stats in another, news in another, etc)

Now, with all of the negaitivity aside. I think the game has some potential, even in this version. I see no problem with quick simming. It can get interupted for things like trades, but I can set the options up to let the computer managers control anything I don't want to. As a GM, I'll probably let the manager control everything outside of promotions, demotions, trades and draft.

If I see a lineup tweak that should be made for a younger player, I can always control the lineups as well. (which while not easy to catch at first, isn't all that bad, it's easy to set up a depth chart and give your catcher a rest every fifth day for example)

Me either, but you can sort by team and it puts them at the top. The only problem is when you change views to see their stats and stuff it reorders them. :(

Exactly, I hate that every time you change your view it resorts the info. It should only sort when you click on a column, not just because you change your view.

Trading blocks and stars are just b.s. time savers in my opinion. I could care less about those things.

But the fact that you have the opportunity to tweak the ratings via actual performance brings a realistic feel to the universe you are playing in. I hate the full ratings approach.

yep, hopefully Marc will note this and have it fixed in the next patch.

It still seems like something that should be an option. Not everyone has 2 hours of free time 3 times a week to go through their whole organization in a multiplayer league.

If I remember right, in EHM there wasn't really the option to "watch" a game. You could coach the game, or you could quicksim it, but you couldn't watch without getting involved. Is it safe to assume you can just watch a game in OOTP?

But I think as with nearly all other the games, people will get used to it after a few weeks or so. Right now it's the learning curve that's throwing people off, esp. those expecting to jump right in like with previous versions. Four months from now I doubt you'll hear any issues about the interface since it will become intuitive by then and will be getting into the core of how the game runs. That is not to say that the interface is good (just like FOF's interface is not good) but it will become easy to use once they get into it. With complexity, which is what everyone seems to want, comes a more complex gameplay and user interface.

Not trying to be critical since I haven't tried the game yet and am reserving judgement. But this comment makes me wonder: how much actual usability testing is done on users who aren't already familiar with the FM interface?

Is there a way to sort players based on a particular scouts current rating and potential rating? I'm talking about the rating that shows stat/80. Now I'm just going through each player individually to check that number and it would be so much easier to just have it sort on the main screen.

I'll log the request.

there is not, unfortunately

How about a right-click?

If the program itself is solid, people will find ways to adapt to ANY interface.

You have that part exactly right. I expect by this weekend, I'll be comfortable with the interface, even if there are things I don't like about it. What we'll get to then is what is really important.

It's why I wanted to highlight the trade goseahawks posted. That issue is far more pressing than any UI function is. I'll fight my way around the interface if there is a reward. If the reward is watching triple crown threats traded for MR? Not so much.

I miss the FM ability to use the arrows on the keyboard to go back/forward on pages.

Correct.

.

I would also LOVE LOVE LOVE to be able to use the back/forward keys on my mouse like I already do with every browser out there, within the game. That would be a time saver.

I feel the same way. This feels almost like going back to OOTP 2 or 3. I am not seeing that the game was rewritten from scratch maybe the engine but the UI is 100% FM/EHM. As someone earlier said I tried many times with the demos and could never get into those great games due to the rather poor UI IMHO. Anyways, hopefully a few versions down the road the UI will be accessable to people who have jobs and families.

Agreed.

Seriously? That will do it? Ok then, thanks.

(I didn't know v5 could do this either, and I have no FM experience.)

I can't recall if FM does this as I usually use the arrow keys, but it was in v6 at least (maybe not 5).

It did work in v5 now that I checked, but I didn't realize this. I'd always just used the 'close' button (which seemed logical to me). Just heard from someone that in v3 the *only* way to do it was right-click, but v5 is my only OOTP knowledge.

Like many others, I didn't pick up and play a lot of FM and EHM because the interface was confusing. When I first got to use OOTP, I made it a point to learn how to use it because I like baseball. After a couple of days, I was used to it. I am thinking about giving EHM a shot now that I know this interface.

If the UI keeps you from playing these games, it is a mistake, IMO. :D

Bah, lo and behold, right-clicking is on page 31 of the Mammoth Manual.

Hopefully, after a patch or two and some user made templates I will be able to get into this one. But, to use a business systems development analogy right I am feeling this needs to be sent back to the Devel for more testing after User Acceptance Testing Phase failed.

Did anyone try quick simming seasons over night? I tried simming five seasons (MLB format) and only got to July 5, 2008 by morning. I'm using my gf's computer and it's way too slow to play this game. I can't go from page to page without at least a minute wait. Uggh, I can't wait to get this on my computer.

Yeah, I tried to go from 1980 to 2006 and made it to 1987's offseason this morning, with MLB and all of it's minors, the NPB and it's 1 minor level, and a Korean league. 260 teams in all. Whoever said you can replay MLBs history over night, I want to see their amazing top of the line specs.

How do you sim more than one season? I could only find ..sim to next year

I started my sim at around 8 last night and this morning when I left for work it had simmed 37 years. (which means I'll probably just halt the sim whereever it is when I get home from work tonight and get whatever is done uploaded)

As far as moving around the game goes, I'm not noticing any slowdown on my two systems, with the exception of changing a skin, which seems to take about 3 minutes to do.

Go to schedule screen. Click on the year and you'll see a drop down menu appear. Go to the year you want. Click on the auto sim button and select "sim until date shown"

Troy,
Are you using a standard MLB format? Also, did you look at any of the stats this morning or are you waiting til tonight?

I did 100 years using Lahman's from 1901 to 2001 over night. I'll have to redo it because OOTP doesn't expand automatically, but that's not bad for 16 teams.

I'm waiting until tonight. In fact, I probably won't even open the almanac before I upload them. Once that happens, I'll start a new thread with the link and let everyone comment there. We'll all see the results at the same time.

so, that's coming in a patch?

Dola:

I'm using standard MLB format (30 teams), Full Minors, Very High stat modeling of majors, normal for all the minors, no salary cap or other tweaks, 25 round June draft, trading and injuries at default, and I clicked on the settings to match historical eras. Which will give everyone the ability to look through everything from the dead ball era to the current era)

edit: Also DH in one league, not in the other.

Correctumundo.

But not the first one (or maybe not the second either).

No, it's the part in the last paragraph that won't make it until a later patch.

The games documentation sounds almost biblical.

And lo on page 38 verse 16:7 of the mammoth manual it says "thou shalt right click to sort and filter."

I've been able to sim 4 1/2 seasons in about three hours this morning, but it's made my computer run awfully slow so I eventually had to turn it off. I'll try to continue tonight. I'm assuming that this is the only way to get players histories in the game? For instance, when I started a regular season in 2006 last night, none of the players had stats from previous years (which is also a step back from previous versions of OOTP).

That's incorrect.


Porting the overall ratings to the big player list is being targeted for the second patch.

I see that now. Not having the game, I didn't pick up on the difference until you just pointed it out.

Quick question about putting the game on another computer....

Here's my deal, right now i'm home in NY and the game is on my dads computer, unfortunately its a bit old and although the game runs, its a little slow for my taste. I plan on having my computer sent up from Maryland and wanted to put the game on that one, is this possible?

Yes. You can have the game on two computers at a time. If everything works like it should, you can unlicense and re-license at will on any computers. But only two at a time.

I started out as a coach in my lowest level league and got fired before the end of the year. That's how badly I was doing as a minor league coach. It got to the point where I didn't care anymore because there isn't much to do with coaching below the bigs.

I simmed the rest of the year, looked at the available jobs and now as a 19 year old, I'm a GM for one of the major league squads. Cool. lol

My first impression ...

I feel like I just got the job as general manager of the Kansas City Royals. That sounds like a good thing. But my first impression is that I'm going to need to work 18 hours a day to go through all the reports and information available and still not have a clear idea of what to do because there are 800 guys who look exactly alike.

I don't think I've ever felt this way before, but after spending a night with the game last night, I still don't know what I think. I could see definitely liking this game. I'm just wondering if it's going to be too much work -- not work in the sense of trying to get Maximum Football to function, but in the sense of "Sorry, honey, I can't go to your grandmother's funeral, I'm waiting to hear back from the GM of the Mexico City Trout to see if I can make a trade for a 23-year-old right fielder who looks like the next Albert Pujols."

The possibility of managing the Mexico City Trout is almost enough to make me buy the game. Almost.

Is their mascot colossal?

Thanks guys for this thread. It's good to see you guys putting the game through the paces, and it makes me glad I didn't pre-order this thing. I'll wait for the demo, and see if I can get into it from there, but from the sound of it, since I didn't like the UI of WWSM or EHM, I probably won't be getting this.

I know it's one of those "whatever floats your boat" kind of things, but I have trouble understanding how guys have problems with FM's interface. The jury is still out on OOTP's new one though. I haven't dinked around with the game enough to make a valuable (or unvaluable) opinion. I don't think I'd consider FM's and OOTP's that similar though. But if you didn't like FM's I would be willing to bet you wouldn't like OOTP's so...

This game is simply maddening. It has so much there, but getting to it is as frustrating as hell. It took me a couple hours to get to a point where I felt like I knew the location of certain pages, but even then I still hadn't dealt with my team at all.

When I finally got around to working on my lineup I couldn't figure out an easy way to compare ratings of players at different levels. I had to click on each player and hope to remember enough to make the right decision.

I made it through spring training, but I still haven't played a single regualr season game. I've put in three hours or so and I'm still in the preseason. I just can't get around like I'm used to in OOTP and all the clicking back and forth is infuriating.

I haven't given up on the game, but right now it just isn't any fun. Its like some sort of advanced memory game for grownups. For the life of me I don't understand the decisions to make everything less fun and more complex.

Here is a clueless or lazy design decision:



You have to hold your cursor over the up or down arrows and wait for the countries to slowly scroll. It took 25 seconds to click on the change nation dialog and get to the United States.

Edit: And the mouse wheel doesn't help.

FWIW, there are plenty of data errors in the default quickstarts. That means there are plenty of errors in the quickstart I made last night. Things like the Iowa Cubs being from Iowa, Louisiana, etc. I'm gonna check all of the city data and re-upload a new quickstart. Maybe some new logos are done too.

exactly how much would you wager? right now, this instant - how much would you bet? $5? $24? or were you just making silly talk?

I may be missing something, or maybe this is just how it is, but when scouting a player are ratings the only things that will be shown, or is there ever a written report on a player?