I mean you can make the argument that guys with 54 health aren't destined to just skate through a 20 year career, and if you have an injury like that you want it a) to be long and b) to be at the end of the season so you can put him back on the 60-day after rollover.

I think it'd be nice to have some clarity on what changed with injuries in the recent past, though, as others have noted.

Posted by saintonan on 12/29/2020 3:52:00 PM (view original):
I mean you can make the argument that guys with 54 health aren't destined to just skate through a 20 year career, and if you have an injury like that you want it a) to be long and b) to be at the end of the season so you can put him back on the 60-day after rollover.

I think it'd be nice to have some clarity on what changed with injuries in the recent past, though, as others have noted.

But it adds new strategy to the game If you up your medical. When I have a guy like Johan Butcher
https://www.whatifsports.com/hbd/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=9118445

get injured, it’s bad enough losing him for 30-60 games. But it’s also why I was able to get him 26th in the draft. My medical should insure that players like this don’t become undraftable.

Posted by saintonan on 12/29/2020 3:52:00 PM (view original):
I mean you can make the argument that guys with 54 health aren't destined to just skate through a 20 year career, and if you have an injury like that you want it a) to be long and b) to be at the end of the season so you can put him back on the 60-day after rollover.

I think it'd be nice to have some clarity on what changed with injuries in the recent past, though, as others have noted.

No disrespect meant, but I don't get what the complaint is. Sure his rating dropped by a lot but its a major injury... I don't consider that player ruined, he is still a hell of a player. He was never really a SS, so again he is still fundamentally the same player a 3B that can get on base and give you ++ baserunning when he does get on base. I would not consider that guy a bust or his career over by any means.

Sorry I meant to quote jwynkoop2424

I mean I get that resources were invested in the player and consistency would be nice, but that's baseball. Players break.

1. Draft over multiple days to allow draft board re-rank. I would recommend a day each for rounds 1-5 (including a day just for supp round) then round 6 on would be one day for a week long draft.
2. Coach hiring is unenjoyable for everyone. Just use a budget number ($0M - $20M) as the modifier and be done with it.
3. Eliminate spring training. Sim players don't need to warm up. Any stats will have too small of a sample to be relevant. Lopping 18 days off the schedule allows WIS to roll the world a week earlier
4. All playoff rounds best of seven. Adds 3-4 sim days to the schedule and reduces variance.
5. More FA filters than two. Within FA stat search separate ML results vs. MiL results.
6. Fix FA demands for 6 year minor league FA. They should be happy with a contract of any kind. Maybe just not allow the original franchise to re-sign but the player will accept a MiL deal with the other teams?

Posted by rdierkers on 12/31/2020 1:45:00 PM (view original):
1. Draft over multiple days to allow draft board re-rank. I would recommend a day each for rounds 1-5 (including a day just for supp round) then round 6 on would be one day for a week long draft.
2. Coach hiring is unenjoyable for everyone. Just use a budget number ($0M - $20M) as the modifier and be done with it.
3. Eliminate spring training. Sim players don't need to warm up. Any stats will have too small of a sample to be relevant. Lopping 18 days off the schedule allows WIS to roll the world a week earlier
4. All playoff rounds best of seven. Adds 3-4 sim days to the schedule and reduces variance.
5. More FA filters than two. Within FA stat search separate ML results vs. MiL results.
6. Fix FA demands for 6 year minor league FA. They should be happy with a contract of any kind. Maybe just not allow the original franchise to re-sign but the player will accept a MiL deal with the other teams?

#4 would add insult to injury recovery because placeholder days give you a day of injury recovery. If the extra days of the playoffs led to my injured player being ineligible for the DL the next season, this could make the injury recovery mechanic even worse.

As mentioned numerous times above. The injury recovery mechanic should be near the top of the priority list. Injury recovery should depend on medical budget, makeup rating, health rating and possibly training budget. It definitely should not depend on when the player got injured.

Sorry to be a broken record on this.

1. The current balanced schedule is not realistic. In real life MLB teams play more games against teams in their own division than they do against teams in other divisions. It needs to be the same in HBD. How about this: 18 games games against the other 3 teams in your division-8 games against the 12 other teams in your league-12 games against your same division in the other league. (18x3)+(8x12)+(3x4)=162 games.

2. In budgeting, certain categories are limited to only changing a maximum of +/-4 from one season to the next. Increasing the maximum to at least 6 and preferably 8 would be an easy code change.

3. Several people want to have the draft expanded to multiple stages over multiple days to allow a chance to reorder the draft list after 1 or 2 rounds. I want to go on record stating I am NOT in favor of this. After the 2nd round, 99% of the players still available are good for nothing except filling roster spots on minor league teams. With most owners not caring about their minor league teams, the vast majority of owners are not going to take the time to reorder a minor league draft list. Why make the draft more complicated and lengthy when this is the case? There are several other things far more important to update than this.

4. International free agents (IFAs): Change the current system to be more like the regular free agent market in that there is a start date when all the IFAs become available. Maybe like 30 games into the regular season or right after the AS break the IFAs are all posted and available to bid on the rest of the regular season. Still build in varying quantity/quality in the IFA market from season to season as is done now. While maybe not entirely like the current real life IFA system, it would be a closer approximation of it I think. The international scouting budget could still work the same as to how many of them you see and the quality of the ratings you see being tied to how much one spends on that budget. I would enjoy this new IFA system much more than the current system.

When making offers to minor league free agents, increase the maximum number of free agents you can make offers to at the same time. Five is too low.

For what it's worth, I disagree with long term contracts for coaches prior to a complete overhaul of coaching. It could/should work eventually in a better coaching system-- but right now it's just going to serve to lock a handful of owners out of helpful fielding coaches for multiple seasons, which will be a disincentive to taking over a rebuilding franchise.

The big, long-term fixes of this game need to start with player development, including but not limited to coaching.

Here's a huge change that would probably be an easy code that I want to float to the larger group: eliminate training entirely by setting the overall budget to $165M and setting all engines to behave as if everyone had $20M in training. You could quickly code this by forcing everyone to be at $20M in training. If not that, a secondary fix would be to always allow $20M in training regardless of what the previous season's budget was.

The advantage would be that new players don't have to observe for themselves the negatives of <$20M training. It's my impression that every veteran owner that can run $20M training does. If I'm wrong, I'm curious to hear from those veteran owners who don't run $20M training; if there are a bunch of them out there then this is probably not a good idea.

Posted by dedelman on 12/31/2020 4:02:00 PM (view original):
For what it's worth, I disagree with long term contracts for coaches prior to a complete overhaul of coaching. It could/should work eventually in a better coaching system-- but right now it's just going to serve to lock a handful of owners out of helpful fielding coaches for multiple seasons, which will be a disincentive to taking over a rebuilding franchise.

The big, long-term fixes of this game need to start with player development, including but not limited to coaching.

Agree. Let's not make a change that will lead to more problems downstream. As a quick fix, add a "withdraw and return button" to the coach negotiation screen. I don't necessarily enjoy the coach hiring, but it isn't terrible either. Every now and then I can put together an impressive coaching staff like I did in Glavine during season 48. When that happens, it can be somewhat enjoyable.

Until I hear a great idea about overhauling coaching and/or development, I say put in some quick fixes like mentioned above. Also, let us know more about how the patience rating and discipline rating affect player development. Right now it seems vague. For example, the patience rating makes it easier to coach younger players. Does this have a multiplier affect towards players under a certain age? The discipline rating affects things like control for a pitcher, does it affect batting eye for a hitter? It seems to, but im not certain.

Instead of completely overhauling coaching, you could just create more fielding instructors. That would solve the major problem many managers have with coaching.

Posted by saintonan on 12/31/2020 5:17:00 PM (view original):
Instead of completely overhauling coaching, you could just create more fielding instructors. That would solve the major problem many managers have with coaching.

Totally agree. Right now there are so many good pitching and hitting coaches that any team who wants one with a rating of 70 or higher can have one. This is not the case with fielding instructors. There are so few decent fielding instructors available that several teams are forced to take one that has a rating in the 50s. From my experience, under 60 is so bad that your prospects in the minors will not develop/improve in their fielding ratings. Adding as few as 4 more fielding instructors to the pool would at least give most worlds a chance for every team to hire one that has a 60 rating.

It adds "strategy" only in the most trivial of ways - at rollover if my FI won't re-sign, I have to add $5M to my coaching budget to handle that impending bidding war. That's not interesting or beneficial in any way, and doesn't apply to any other coach. It's just dumb and very easily fixed.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned or not, but what if we added WAR to the stats page? Could help determine the value of a player

Posted by bripat42 on 1/1/2021 7:37:00 PM (view original):
I think adlorenz's top priority should be "fixing" the game so saintonan never has to cough up more than $750K for a quality fielding instructor.

Maybe we should just have an easy mode league where owners can have all their budget items be sliding scales, and players never get injured or lose ratings. In a way I kind of get their point, some of these items are vague and could be time consuming. Someone who doesn't have the time to address all those details can probably find more enjoyment from a more simplified game.

I personally signed up for this game because I wanted the feeling of controlling my own team and playing GM with all of its intricacies. Its also important to consider that this game is trying to simulate the real life chaos of a baseball season, and there are limits to what and how programming can simulate certain real life events. For example, there is no paternity leave or bereavement leave in the game, there is no toxic personalities that lower the teams morale, there is no owner setting lower budgets to reduce costs and line their pockets. A way that a game can address some of these events with its current programming might be to add a bit more injuries to closer simulate the amount of time players are away from the field, Earlier declines to compensate for ego's and the fact that we as owners tend to make trades without weighting the human cost of a deal. The injuries issue especially in relation to time of season when it occurs is a real interesting one. Its possible again that we are getting limited by some programmatical knot that is particularly hard to unravel. However, given some of the examples that have been posted, I wonder if its not somehow already being addressed. For example, one way to address it would be to make early season injuries less severe as far as a rating drop than late season injuries. This would compensate for a possible exploit of the recovery bump. In other words, a less severe rating hit + 1 recovery bump = a more severe ratings hit + 2 recovery bumps. or something like that.