Download the League File
Download the league file, put it in a directory somewhere and unzip it. Then start OOTP9 and load the game.
In the future, you will not need to download, unzip, etc. as you have been doing in the past. The game takes care of this. All you will need to do is go to your Manager home page, and click on the "Check For Updated League Files" link.
Game Version
I remember in the past, we had some problems with players not using the same version of the game. Please make sure you're using the latest version of the game, which is 9.2.2. You can check to see if you are using the latest version by going to Game -> Check For Updates in the game. If you are not using 9.2.2, please download it and install it.
League Rules
Below are the rules that I've applied to the OOTP9 league. Where a rule was covered in the old game, I simply applied the same rule. Where there was a new rule opportunity, I applied what I thought was the best rule (for example, I disabled drug suspensions). Of course, if anyone wants any of the rules changed, I'm always willing to listen to arguments and put the matter to a league vote.
Password
I've assigned a new password to all team owners and will email them to you separately. Of course, you're free to change the password once you've logged in.
League Date
The conversion process put the league date at Jan 1 2013. This gives us some time to iron out any bugs, make roster changes, etc. The season begins Apr 1. Since we already finished the amateur draft, I omitted it for the 2013 season.
League History and New League Site
The conversion process pretty much wiped out much of the league history. However, any major league stats are still available. In addition, I'm going to keep the old league site (ootp.izev.com) up for historical reference. The new league site is here. For the moment, it's still a work in progress. If there are any reports that you'd like to see that aren't there, please drop me a line.
Rosters
When the game imported, it only imported the major league teams. The minor league teams were NOT imported. I recreated all the minor league teams (for those of you who did not name your minor league teams previously, I left the ones that the game generated randomly). The players that were on those minor league teams, however, were left in a sort of limbo -- they weren't on any team and you could not reassign them through the transaction screen. There were two ways out of this: (1) you could go to your individual team rosters, select all the players in your organization and then assign them one by one to the appropriate minor league teams. After about 25 players, I found this very tedious. The other option was to simply have the AI assign everyone and then allow the owners to adjust them as they will (since they would then be availble through the transaction screen). In the end, I opted for the second option. So, please go through your minor league systems and re-assign anyone whom you feel should be at a different level.
What Can You Do and What Do I (or Michael) Have To Do?
According to the game manual, here's the scoop: Individual owners can:
- Change Scouting Assignments
- Change Lineups, Depth Charts, Pitching Staff, or other team settings
- Offer contracts (free agents and extensions) to players and team personnel
- Player transactions (promotions, demotions, DL, releases, etc.)
- Coach firings and new jobs/assignments
- Waiver wire claims
- Human manager player and staff shortlists
- Mail message status
- Manager options
Things that must be done in commissioner mode:
- Simming
- Trades
- Team Options (relocations, renamings, etc.)
- Writing news articles (feel free to write them and I'll submit them in the game)
- Game setup and commissioner rules
So, Where Do We Go From Here?
Well, the first thing everyone should do is download the file and make sure they can get into the game. The next thing is to look over your rosters and see if there are any problems that may have occured during conversion (missing players, etc.). Once we have a list of things that need to be attended to before the season starts, Michael and I will draw up a schedule for them. If possible, I'd like for all owners to make sure that they can use the game no later than Thursday. Please either email Michael and myself or else post a comment here on whether or not you can download the game file, use it and export your changes to the FTP site.
As always, if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask.
Zev
Edit: Hmmm... it's not so easy to cut and paste a Word table into the blog. I'll have the league ruleset up shortly.
Edit (3:06 EDT) -- I changed the league file from a tar.gz to a standard zip.
Edit (10:10 EDT) -- New league file with 40-man rosters. Also, please see Nate's note in the comments about Minor Leaguers who were brought up to the majors by the AI.
Zev
A few things...
ReplyDelete1. If any Windows users have trouble unpacking the league file Zev posted, try using 7Zip (www.7zip.org) to do so.
2. Any idea how to edit my name in the manager's screen? Zev misspelled my first name.
1. I changed the league file to a standard zip file, so this should no longer be a problem.
ReplyDelete2. Game -> Add/Edit Human Manager
Are scouts still going to all be set to average, or are we going by their ratings now?
ReplyDeleteWow, now that I've spent a few hours looking over my team, and a lot of players made quite a leap.
ReplyDeleteOr, they did if my scout is any good. So, yeah, I'm curious about scout rankings, as well.
One other thing I've noticed is that my coaches and minor league managers didn't make the transition.
Note, also, that some of your prospects might have been put on the major league roster by the AI. This will have the effect of starting their arbitration clock even if you move them back down to the minors. I've asked Zev to reset the one I was worried about and each of you should look out, too.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's why I was curious as well. My scout IS average, basically (10 out of 20 in both major and minor leagues), and there are some pretty significant jumps.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the ratings in 6.5 (I'm going by the old Web site's ratings here) are comparable to the "OSA" ratings in the game? Even those show some discrepancy but they're closer. The manual says that even the poorest scouts generally give more accurate information than the OSA ratings, so maybe that's what's going on here?
Am I blind, or do we not have 40-man rosters in this league?
ReplyDeleteNo, you're not blind. Let me look into that.
ReplyDeleteFound it... I had the rule disabled for some reason. I'm recompressing the league file now and will post (in the main post) when it's uploaded.
ReplyDeleteZev
Nate (and anyone else),
ReplyDeletePlease list the players in the comments section here and put them back in the minors in your upload. I'll reset the service time on them.
Zev
Damian Coppock, Robert Brown, and Buster Ducharme, I believe were the three that caught my eye.
ReplyDeleteI got the 40-man roster, but in the transactions window, there is not an option in the pull down menus for it. So if you change the top right window away from the 40 man, you cannot get it back. Or I am too computer illiterate to figure it out. I am on the mac version, if that makes a difference. I like the new look of the game, still figuring out where I stand player wise though.
ReplyDeleteFor Maui, the following players were called up to my active roster by the AI:
ReplyDeleteMatthew Cassity
Jeffrey Engelmann
Carlos Guerra
Imatarou Natsu
Henry Guadalupe
Chad Copenhaver
Steve Keo
Where the hell should the 40-man appear? I've redownloaded the file and I can't find it.
ReplyDeleteI believe it is in the top right window under transactions, but if you change that window to something else it is gone. I am not 100% sure on this.
ReplyDeleteI also updated the file and can't find the 40-man roster. It's not where it's supposed to be (which is the upper right corner of the transactions page). I wonder if we need to delete our copies and re-load them from scratch.
ReplyDeleteAlso, and I'm going to beat this horse until it's completely unrecognizable, but I BEG all of you that we increase the scouting accuracy. I'm lucky in that my randomly-acquired GM is very good, which enables me to see that most of my players' ratings are close to where they should be. But, if you look at the web-type of scout for the same players, the differences are simply unbelievable. For example, one player's rating for contact goes from 55 to 100. I think that's unacceptable. I really don't think the game will be anywhere near as much fun when nobody has any idea how good anyone is.
I hammered this before the upgrade and will keep doing it, but we desperately need to increase the scouting accuracy, IMHO.
Concur. I don't know what level of settings there are but higher is better.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's a good thing we have three months of game play before Opening Day.
ReplyDeleteAnd, if Zev and I, collectively, are better commissioners than Bud Selig, we'll get this straightened out in the end.
I agree with Mack (and Nate) - the scouting accuracy should be improved, if that is an option.
ReplyDeleteI realize I'm new to this league, but I'm having a really hard time evaluating player talent. Perhaps it is because I don't have the historical perspective that many of you have. But I'm seeing huge variations between the ratings by the OSA and my scout, which is unsettling to say the least.
Also, I'm not finding anyplace on the web site where it shows the star ratings of the players. Am I simply missing it, and if not, is that going to be added at some point?
OK, I FTPed my first changes up to the server through the 'export' function. Hoping I'm ready to go here.
ReplyDeleteThis is the list of my players that got called up to the MLs by the CPU:
ReplyDeleteSP Michael Sanders
MR Alfredo Herrero
MR Fidel Padilla
MR Victor Valles
C Chet Dailey
C John Clawson
3B John Grondin
SS Caleb Angeles
RF Gonzalo Valenza
I am going to change up my team now and FTP it up...hope that is what I should do.
By the way, I'm having no trouble seeing the 40 man roster in the game. When I click the "Transactions" tab and the "Overview" button is highlighted, I see 4 screens. Top left is active roster, top right is 40 man, and bottom two are AAA and AA.
ReplyDeleteI've uploaded the updated league file from within the game and still don't have the 40-man roster available. I suspect I need to delete and re-download the file from scratch. However, I'm not going to be able to do that until I get back in to work and that may not be until Friday or so.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I haven't made any roster moves because I was assuming from Zev's post that the first step was to see if, by Thursday, everyone could get the game working. I also assumed Zev would fix the inadvertent promotions made by the computer before we started playing with our individual rosters. Am I wrong?
I, obviously, don't speak for Zev, but I think the plan is to take things extremely slow before the season starts.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we're going to take it slow for a bit. I'd rather take the extra time now and make sure that everything works correctly rather than find out we have a serious problem once the season has started.
ReplyDeleteMack, I will be sending down to AAA all players mentioned in the comments here. I will also set the service clock back to 0 *provided* that the OOTP6.5 page shows that they have 0 service time.
As far as scouting goes, I would love to go to individualized scouting rather than set everyone to average. We may have to do some tweaking to make it fair, but I think we'll be able to come up with something.
Zev
Thanks for that clarification, Zev. I previously posted my list of players who were called up to the majors by AI, but didn't cross-check to see if any of them had previous ML service time. It turns out that all of them did, except for Steve Keo. So, everyone from my list should be sent back down to AAA, but Keo is the only one who needs to have his arbitration clock reset (if I'm understanding this correctly). Thanks.
ReplyDeleteZev: Just to be clear, I don't have a problem with letting people hire scouts and having some teams have better or worse scouts. In other words, I'm not advocating returning to the "Everyone is average" model.
ReplyDeleteI'm concerned about the variance in scouting, across the board. There is a much, much larger margin of error in OOTP 9 than there was in OOTP 6.5. Scouts opinions are very widely divergent from the actual ratings. So much so that I think it is detrimental to the enjoyment of the game.
In the options for the game, the overall scouting accuracy can be adjusted. I think it should be moved up from average to high (or whatever the terms are). I'm willing to try high and see how it works. There's also a really high setting that may go too far. I never got to test OOTP 9 enough to have a firm opinion as to whether high or really high was preferable. I was able to conclude though (and my look at the SDMB league after conversion has confirmed) that the average setting is way too low.
When you talk about variance in scouting, do you mean one scout is more accurate than another, or that the scouts are a lot more accurate than the game's OSA?
ReplyDeleteI think each scout should have variance, just as coaches do, but the OSA/web page scouting should be rather accurate.
Ok, folks, I've looked into the scouting thing a little.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, the OSA is SUPPOSED to be inaccurate. If you read the manual, it says they're meant to be a very, very basic scouting service (the manual describes them as "underfunded"), to provide some ballpark (heh) information about skills when you don't have another scout. It says, as I noted, that even the worst scout will usually give more accurate information.
So, I've compared the OSA and three scouts, using six players. Of the three scouts, one was perfect (200 ratings in all scouting areas, out of 200), one was average (100 ratings) and one was terrible (1 ratings). All three had their preference (tools or abilities) set to neutral. The six players were an established player, a prospect and a player with huge potential for improvement, one pitcher and one batter in each of those categories.
Basic conclusions. First, we'll look at differences between the scouts: While ratings between OSA and scouts could be wildly different, ratings differences between scouts differed by 4 points, at most, out of 20, and that happened in one single rating in all six players. Differences of 3 happened once or twice.
Some ratings didn't appear to change at all between the OSA and all the scouts: Star ratings were unchanged, no matter which scout looked at the player (OSA doesn't give star ratings). Personality ratings, hitter type, pitching velocity, groundball % for pitchers and pitch types didn't seem to change. At no point did a player gain or lose a position rating based on the scout or OSA. I don't claim this is the case in ALL situations, but it was in this test.
Differences between scouts and actual ratings: As noted, there are some pretty substantial differences between scouts and actual ratings. Obviously (assuming the scouting model isn't completely screwed), the scouts are taking a lot of things into consideration other than the actual numerical rating. From the manual, we know that scouting a player in your own organization is more accurate (which I controlled for, see below). The manual also says the ratings become more accurate both as the player ages, as well as the more times your scouting team looks at the player. In my case, this was the first time these scouts saw these players, which could very well account for some of the inaccuracy -- as well as for the inaccuracy of our league's scouts.
Methodology: I started a new league with 4 teams, scouting accuracy was set to normal. I identified a batter, a pitcher, a pitching prospect and a batting prospect, and put them all on my shortlist. I traded those four players to the same team, then simmed one year.
I then fired the scouts of the OTHER three teams and hired new ones. I edited their ratings, changing one to 200s across the board, one to 100s, and one to 1s. I made sure their preference of tools or abilities were set to neutral.
I then switched between teams, compiling the ratings of my four players (the established and prospect players) with the OSA and each of the three scouts. The OSA and each of the scouts produced scouting reports on each of those players on the first of the year, so they're all based on the same performance.
As an afterthought, I then switched over to the average scout and searched for a pitcher and a batter with a low star rating but a high potential star rating, then compiled those records. As a result, those might be skewed because a scout gets a bump in accuracy when scouting a player in his own organization (and I didn't pay attention to which organization those players belonged to throughout the year).
I've set up a spreadsheet with my results. The actual ratings were taken by looking at the player in Editor mode, dividing the player's rating by whatever scale that particular rating was in (200 or 250, usually) and multiplying by 20.
That's some very good stuff Brent and definitely food for thought.
ReplyDeleteFor those still struggling to get the 40-man rosters to show, I was able to get it working by completely deleting the file I first downloaded, downloading the file again from Zev's link, and unzipping it again.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that's what I had to do as well.
ReplyDeleteI'm a bit late to the party, but I'm here.
ReplyDeleteEverything seems to be working fine for me, Zev. And anyone on my roster that might have been accidentally promoted to the majors (I don't think there's anyone, but I haven't checked against the previous league) is going to stay there, anyway. So I'm satisfied with the conversion.
I'm sure I'll have more thoughts as we move along the process of getting close to the season, but for now, I'm just going to explore, and I'm more-or-less ok with all of the suggestions that have been batted around, here.
This is probably a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. I've seen several references to how the scouts' ratings differ from the players' "actual" ratings. What are you guys referring to - the OSA? I don't see anything in the game which shows actual ratings. Please help a confused newbie.
ReplyDeleteMatt,
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what they're referring to, but you can see players' real ratings (or at least the numbers used to compute their performance) in any league you're a commissioner of, by checking out the player's profile page in the game (not the HTML report) and clicking the "Editor" tab near the top. That's how I got the "real" ratings I used in my spreadsheet. For obvious reasons, you can't do this in our league.
The reports generated on the Web site have numbers by the OSA, I believe, which as I've pointed out, aren't accurate, by design. Unless we boost the ratings accuracy, I'd consider using the site's reports the same as a manager browsing publicly available stats at home, or looking at basic scouting reports on an airplane or something -- it's an overview, and you can't carry a lot of detailed info about every player all the time. Then when you fire up the game and take a look at stats, it's like you're in your office with all your reports and research right there.
I think the point of all this is there are no such things as "real ratings". Even the game throws in some randomness. The OSA is an inaccurate measure-of-last-resort. If my budget is dumped into major-league scouting and my scout favors abilities over tools, it stands to reason that I'm going to miss some young players who have a lot of potential. If another scout has a ton of amateur and minor-league budget and over-rates tools, he might pick out a bunch of future stars, but maybe he constantly undervalues workhorse veterans. The longer you keep a scouting team in place, the more accurate their ratings get, and you get a bump from ratings of players in your own organization. It's realistic.
(note: I'm not arguing to keep the settings as they are -- I really have no preference -- I just don't have a big problem with the current randomness)
Here are my players, Zev, that the game promoted against my wishes:
ReplyDeleteMR Matthew Vowels
CF Eladio Testa
RF William Kersh