damag,

Thanks for the reply.  Unlike Mike, who continues to rant that it's a bad idea because it's a bad idea, you and I are trying to think it through.

>>  It cheapens the product and lessens enjoyment of the game. <<

If you add "for me" to the end of that, I have to agree 100%.  But you're not everybody.  I am sure plenty of people would like to win most games 50-0. And win the championship every season.  You and I are probably not those people.  But that doesn't mean WIS should refuse to take money from those people.  You and I need those people paying money here to keep HBD alive.  You and I can play in worlds with 0 sim run teams or no more than 3 sim run teams or whatever setting we like. 

>> AI teams aren't supposed to win. No one wants that. They're just for allowing the league to proceed. Fine. <<

That is my suggestion.  However, there are a lot of games where beating the sim is very hard.  Not what I'm suggesting for HBD for the first version of this. But there's no reason to say there could never be very competitive sim teams.

>> Sim teams don't compete for free agents...   Competing with 6 humans is different than competing with 20+  <<

Yes, this is a tradeoff.  Probably the biggest one.  More sims in the world, more good FAs for the humans.  I see this as a feature, not a problem.  If we've learned nothing from the explosion of online gaming, it's that a lot of people like to win.  So why not let those people congregate in world with 20+ sims and have a good old time for themselves?  They aren't hurting the worlds with 0 or very few sims. They are putting money in the HBD pot, which allows WIS to invest.  And some of the people who start off winning every game 50-0 will look for more competition. Worlds with a lot of sims become another way to feed people who know how HBD works into other worlds.  Does anyone disagree that people who know a bit about the game are more welcome into worlds than those who are brand new?

Also, if you only focus on the side of the issue you presented, you're ignoring a current problem.  Human GMs will often tie up a lot of money for a lot of seasons on FAs that better HBD GMs would never pay half that much. And then they leave the team and that mess behind.  Simmy GMs could be programmed not to do that. 

I'm pretty sure any point you make where a human could do better than Simmy, I'd agree with that and be able to point to numerous examples of humans messing that thing up and thus making harder to ever get another human to take it over a team.

>> Running up the score <<

Doesn't matter in HBD.  Unless your team gets to the 5th(?) tie breaker for a playoff spot.  Possible, but unlikely.  Not worth shutting down the idea over this.

>> get him some PT. <<

More playing time doesn't really matter at all in HBD once players reach the ML.  I already look at the time I'm playing and rest my better players against bad teams. In HBD, no difference if they are run by a human or a sim.

>> And essentially, half the games or more don't count. <<

I get your point, but that statement wouldn't be true in HBD.  You still have to win enough games out of 162 to make the playoffs to have a shot at the WS.  If you've got 7 humans in the NL playing for 6 playoff spots, they have to decide how to use their players over the season.  You or I might not want to be in that world, but if those 7 guys are on the same softball team and they are having fun, that 7 x about $100 / year if the worlds roll right away x a **** load of worlds like that.  If there were just 100, that's $70K a year, which hires you about 1.5 rock star programmers to make improvements to HBD.  That's all the programmers it would take to provide ongoing interface and game-play improvements.  100 worlds of about 7 people who love the feeling they get when they go to their app and see that they won.

>>  Is it fun to go 34-2-2 when the other guy goes 34-3-1. Not so much. <<

Again, if you add "for me" to the end of that, I can't disagree.  You are not everybody.  There are a **** load of people out there who would love to go 34-2-2 every season and then (maybe) play one of their buddies for the championship.  Or play a sim and win the championship game 50-0.  It doesn't hurt the brand or the "better" worlds to take $100 from those people every year.

Yeah, you're a waste of time and too long-winded for me.   Do you really think anyone values your opinion enough to read all that?

Brevity is your friend.

Posted by frymaster99 on 6/25/2015 4:37:00 PM (view original):
To be fair to both sides I think the best route moving forward is the continuing of World mergers. Not everyone will be for it but it reduces the footprint on the HBD landscape.

I think you and others are doing great work helping worlds merge.  It's a great short-term solution. Better than doing nothing.

Very few business shrink their way to success.  More people playing, probably in more worlds, needs to be the goal, or HBD will soon be gone.

Different topic, but WIS should never show more than a few worlds with openings.

If you want to start playing HBD, you take the team you are given.  Or pick from the only 2-3 teams presented. 

If you're new to HBD, you probably don't know enough to pick one public world from another based on more than the number of openings and the name. 

Private worlds should be able to do as they like.  Sit with openings for months, if WIS is OK with that.

If you give people too many choices, they tend to pick none of them.  That's just how it works.  WIS can't change how people make decisions.

If you come to a game site and there are dozens, if not hundreds of open worlds, it tells you thing game isn't very good.  If there's one opening, you're likely to grab it. That's just how our brains work.  Has nothing to do if the game is really any good or not. Or if there are valid reasons why the best game in the world has dozens of openings.

Posted by MikeT23 on 6/25/2015 4:58:00 PM (view original):
Yeah, you're a waste of time and too long-winded for me.   Do you really think anyone values your opinion enough to read all that?

Brevity is your friend.

When guys like you melt down is one of the ways guys like me know we're on to an OK idea.

I try to answer all of your questions, because guys like me know we have to idiot-proof things for them to work.  Your questions are a good test.  If I can't answer them or they expose a hole, I need to go back to the drawing board or give up on the idea.

I think I've answered all you questions or demonstrated they have nothing to do with this suggestion.

Here are the points I think you've made:

1) Sim run teams didn't perform to your liking or win enough in other games at other times in the history of WIS. -- I have to agree with this, because you get to like what you like.

2) There is no way anyone short of an Ivy League math PHD could code logic that would allow an HBD team to get through a season without somehow ruining the world or the team.  You offered no support of this other than you says so. I suggested you step through a season, task by task, which would allow you to learn for yourself you are wrong about this.  You declined.

I think that's all of them.

I asked you to share with us 3 things you would do differently if your next game was against a Simmy team.  You declined to answer.

Instead, you melted down.  Which tells all of us you can't come up with even 1 or 2 things you would do differently.

Thanks for you input.  If nothing else, it's entertaining.

I would wager that a majority of users would avoid worlds that have sims running teams.  Which equates to less people playing and less money for WIS   And a bunch of destroyed worlds

Okay, I'll absolutely agree with the idea that you can add "for me" to any one of my observations about gameplay.  Fact is that I came to HBD because I was actively looking for a harder game to play, a bigger challenge.  I've been at WiS for an actual decade, bored of the original game that brought me in here, if there wasn't a next level to go to I was thinking I'd walk away at that point.  HBD looked like that next level, and the signup process, the FAQ, the forums let you know it's more complex.

My experience is mine alone.  But let me tell you how the soccer sim world population deteriorated.

I was one of the first to sign up.  I got into one of the first worlds created.  At the time, our world had three countries with twenty teams in each.  After three seasons, a fourth country was added.

The game is free to play, a bunch of guys forgot they even signed up, a number tried it out and walked away.  So sim teams started filling in the holes.  Ideally, a new owner waiting would jump in where a spot was available, but the soccer sim is programmed to have a set time for offseason and rollover.  At Rollover Day, any open spot gets a sim owner automatically and you move on.

The damn thing is, the more sim teams came into play, the more owners walked away.  That's what I mean about cheapening game play.  The more sim teams filled in, the more owners said - sometimes announcing it in world chat - "hey guys this is boring, I quit."

You'd have to give commissioners an opt-out, a "never add sim teams" option to the worlds.  In HBD right now we always face the question "guys should we just go public?"  I think - because I've seen similar - what bkfraser says is true, with sim teams you'd have owners walking away.

I can see how and why that would have sucked.

So many things that have proven to be bad ideas in online gaming rolled into one.

Free to play doesn't work if the quality of game play is majorly impacted if most people don't play.  Anyone who's signed up for a public, free fantasy baseball league learns that the first time. By mid-season it's you, maybe 2-3 other guys, and a bunch of abandoned teams. Easy to come in first place, but not a lot of fun for many.

There was no way to "escalate" your team or your world out of free play or to play with people who demonstrated they were into the game and/or at least OK at it.  Like HBD, your team was locked into a world.

When a new human signed up to play, they could have been given an open team so they could be playing right away.  It sounds like if I wanted to play, I would have had to wait for a world to rollover before I could start. Could be days, weeks, or months.  If I wanted to create an online game that was sure to fail, that's how I'd do it.

Your world commissioner didn't have an option to set the max number of sims allowed at the start of the season.  That would have allowed the people in your world to decide if they wanted to wait until every team was run by a person, or if maybe 2-3 sims would be OK (and hopefully 1-2 next season and 0-1 after that).

If the game was boring, it was boring.  Maybe it was boring because it was easy to pound on the sim teams.  Or maybe it was just boring.

Point I'm trying to make is I don't think it was that there were some sim run teams that killed WIS Soccer (or is it still alive?).  It was that the use of sim run teams was very, very, very badly implemented.  On top of WIS not thinking through how free to play would obviously work out in that particular game.

SIM teams are inherently flawed.   Doesn't matter which sport it is.  They get lesser talent, run predictable gameplans and are easy to outbid, outrecruit, outgameplan.   This causes the sim teams to spiral downward in talent.   In HBD, this would be a difficult team to sell to a new user.   Thus, the longer the sim, the more sims, the less likely that other users will join the world.  The world will then deteriorate to the point where there are several 120 win human teams and 120 loss SIM teams.   This will deter users away from the game entirely and turn HBD into a wasteland used by the few who enjoy whipping the computer on Madden on easy level

Posted by tufft on 6/25/2015 9:54:00 PM (view original):
I can see how and why that would have sucked.

So many things that have proven to be bad ideas in online gaming rolled into one.

Free to play doesn't work if the quality of game play is majorly impacted if most people don't play.  Anyone who's signed up for a public, free fantasy baseball league learns that the first time. By mid-season it's you, maybe 2-3 other guys, and a bunch of abandoned teams. Easy to come in first place, but not a lot of fun for many.

There was no way to "escalate" your team or your world out of free play or to play with people who demonstrated they were into the game and/or at least OK at it.  Like HBD, your team was locked into a world.

When a new human signed up to play, they could have been given an open team so they could be playing right away.  It sounds like if I wanted to play, I would have had to wait for a world to rollover before I could start. Could be days, weeks, or months.  If I wanted to create an online game that was sure to fail, that's how I'd do it.

Your world commissioner didn't have an option to set the max number of sims allowed at the start of the season.  That would have allowed the people in your world to decide if they wanted to wait until every team was run by a person, or if maybe 2-3 sims would be OK (and hopefully 1-2 next season and 0-1 after that).

If the game was boring, it was boring.  Maybe it was boring because it was easy to pound on the sim teams.  Or maybe it was just boring.

Point I'm trying to make is I don't think it was that there were some sim run teams that killed WIS Soccer (or is it still alive?).  It was that the use of sim run teams was very, very, very badly implemented.  On top of WIS not thinking through how free to play would obviously work out in that particular game.

tufft, explain how you think the implementation of sim teams would be any different than in the soccer sim, ESPECIALLY since your main point is that they would swoop in and take over to pick up rollover times, the same as it worked in the soccer sim, according to this thread.  There is no good implementation for sim teams, and there are no good sim teams.

Your point has not suggested anything about improving gameplay - it only speaks to how to improve profits for WIS.  Meanwhile, playing a worse game that is, quite simply, just more profitable to the HBD gods would not be helpful in retaining current GMs.  I liked an idea of yours in the other thread (Map HBD to CBA), but frankly, this is a terrible idea.

The complexity and competition is something that draws people into HBD.  If somebody loves to whomp on awful AI competition, more than likely they aren't playing HBD.  Thus, your "target" crowd isn't even playing this game at the moment.  I'd bet that adding Sim teams would ruin the experience for most of the current, and would just bring in a different (and smaller) group of less dedicated and less interested individuals.  Ultimately, I don't see how this would be more profitable, either.

bk - You are correct. If every world is set to allow 24+ sim teams and the sim logic total sucks, I suspect it will go pretty much as you describe.

I suspect you haven't played many strategy or tactical games over the years. Probably making you a better man than I. If you had, you'd know that there are a lot of games where the sim holds its own. Others were a few sims among a group of humans make for a better game than one with fewer paeticipants. (Or in the case of many HBD worlds, no games at all.)

There are also many games where the sim at the toughest setting is very hard to beat.

I suspect you don't have a math degree or a background in programming. This means you spent years learning **** I probably don't know much about.

It wouldn't take a remarkable programming effort to make an HBD sim good enough to make a team a playoff contender as quickly as any human.

The person programming the sim logic would have access to near perfect HBD data. A few examples -

2 players with the same arm ratings. One has range 80 and glove 75. The other has those flipped. Who do you play in CF & who at 2B?

You and I probably have theories on that. But we don't really know which choice is better. It would take us days to try to scrape HBD data from the site and analyze it. Much of the data we'd need isn't there.

Person programming the sim logic could quickly simulate 500,000 games where that was the only variable. And then know exactly which option performed better.

Same for batting order, catcher PC vs power, and dozens of other things. Start with a crap sim. Run a test like that a day and add the results to the sim logic. How many days until the sim is pretty good? 30? 90? 180?

The sim programmer has access to every HBD game every played in every season. It's not all that hard for someone who knows how to mine that data to find, for example, 100 things teams that win 100+ games tend to do and 100 things that teams that lose 100+ games tend to do.

When the sim logic runs every day, it does as many things as possible on the first list and never does anything on the second.

Unlike humans, the sim would never overpay an aging star or fall in love with a mediocre draft pick or go on vacation and miss the day to adjust budgets or not have time to check the other team's SP or anything else us humans can and do mess up. Even if it wasn't as good at HBD as we are, it would have the advantage of never missing even one 1/2 cycle.

Imagine you're a programmer working for WIS. You and some of your buddies at work like HBD and baseball.

What are the odds in all they years of HBD you and your buddies, with some of your spare time, have not tried to write a program that plays HBD? Either working together or betting a pitcher of beer that goes to the first programmer whose team wins a World Series?

I would be very surprised if at least HBD team in one world is not being run by a program written by HBD insiders. How could they resist?

cs, I've already answered all your questions. Most in the post you quoted. You can read that again if you like. It seems WIS soccer had many problems. Unlimited sim teams in every world and crappy sim logic seems to have been two of the problems.

Not playing at all is very bad gameplay. That problem is real today.

>> target crowd not playing HBD today <<

BINGO!! Could not have said it better.

So, in summation, everyone who has replied has said "Bad idea."

That's a hint.   Take it and move on.

I'll also pile on and say: horrible idea.

Under the assumption that Simmy teams would only be filling unfilled spots in worlds than have gone public and unfilled for "x" number of days (say, 2 weeks), then what you're going to end up with is a number of worlds that are still all human (because the commissioners won't go public) that will be unaffected, but the other worlds, which generally are 'tard worlds, ultimately becoming über-'tard worlds.  The real people playing in those worlds, which are often the n00bs, will get disillusioned when they're playing in a world with 24 Simmy teams, and routinely winning by scores of 31-3 because they and the other 7 real people got all the prime FAs and are competing against 24 AAAA teams.

Not sure how that's good for HBD.

Mike's "smaller worlds" suggestion is the much better idea.

To hijack the thread, because SIMMY teams is a such a bad idea, allowing a commish to reduce the size of a world(and never be allowed to increase the size again) would allow worlds like For Life(a theme world that rolled a million years ago) and Crash Davis(public world that rolled 2 months ago) to survive.   For Life has unique rules and a very limited appeal so the target audience is small.   They're trying to recreate the "old days" before free agency.   Allowing them to be 16 strong would be almost perfect for them.   Crash Davis is losing owners the longer they wait.   Putting them at 16, and releasing the other 16 team's players as FA, would create a balance that was obviously missing.   Finally, if a world can't survive at 16, maybe it's just killed 90 days after rollover.