The way this site is advertised is that one could create their own Dream Team
Idk when I joined, I wanted to use Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, Ty Cobb, Justin Verlander, and Miguel Cabrera. I was lucky enough to have a family member tell me about Theme Leagues to afford all those guys.

These noobs don’t have that luxury and will probably go into OLs wanting to draft Mickey Mantle, Bob Gibson, and Tom Seaver. $80 mil is high enough to where they can draft a couple of those guys, and they’d still perform. The least fun part is rounding out the lineup with guys like Scott Fletcher, or Bill Doran, or a rotation with Scott Garrelts or Slim Sallee.

All lowering the cap would do is make owners make more of those boring decisions. Raising the cap will have fan favorites underperform. I’m all for keeping the cap the same, but don’t mind a beginner’s league.

I'm ok with that, but a salary tweak is needed to offset where we currently sit. Salaries are all over the board...a reset is needed, and a few adjustments afterwards will likely be needed as well...it might take 6-12 months to get it right...it will need some serious monitoring...

Most here want realism. Admin will ultimately decide how to best sell their product. Packaging an Open League team as a Dream Team is a lousy idea. It isn't realistic...it will be a disappointment. Why not sell and promote a realistic product that won't disappoint? You'd be giving the customer what you advertised...push the realism, but showcase the higher cap Dream Leagues while doing so...show that there's a wide number of ways to play here...

Beginners play here at this cap. Then for more experienced players we offer historical/progressive leagues, and higher cap leagues featuring all the best of the best...

As a fan of the game, I love being able to use some of my favorite players, but I also find it very fulfilling to find players I’d never heard of before the sim (like Slim Sallee) to round out my rosters. The growth of my baseball knowledge and learning about players is part of what makes this game so much fun in my opinion

You still need to resolve the chronic underachieving of guys like Seaver, Carlton, Spahn, Dimaggio and Pujols.

Your built in advantage given to deadball pitchers needs to go bye-bye. Put the post-1920 pitchers on par with the early guys. You need more parity across eras. Too many players get little to no usage because they can't produce anywhere near what they should. That's a serious problem. I should be finding ways to get ARod, Spahn, Lefty Grove, Johnny Bench or Joe Morgan onto my roster. I want Seaver or Marichal as my ace. Ed Summers or Joe McGinnity shouldn't be outperforming them on a regular basis...

Get that fixed, then have dynamic pricing make the necessary market corrections...the game will be fluid, not the current stale, static mess it currently is...that I love to play, nonetheless...

Settle on an Open League salary cap. Perhaps come up with an All-Star Open league salary cap, where you can have Trout, Duke Snider and Chuck Klein in your outfield. Trot out a rotation of Gibson, deGrom, Seaver and Feller...give people a chance to go whole hog in drafting an upscale Open league...$120M - $140M perhaps, maybe even $150M...double what you spend on the $75M Open League..

Give them flashy, but sell the realistic game as well. You can do both...

Posted by d_rock97 on 1/21/2021 10:08:00 PM (view original):
The way this site is advertised is that one could create their own Dream Team
Idk when I joined, I wanted to use Jeff Bagwell, Craig Biggio, Lance Berkman, Roy Oswalt, Ty Cobb, Justin Verlander, and Miguel Cabrera. I was lucky enough to have a family member tell me about Theme Leagues to afford all those guys.

These noobs don’t have that luxury and will probably go into OLs wanting to draft Mickey Mantle, Bob Gibson, and Tom Seaver. $80 mil is high enough to where they can draft a couple of those guys, and they’d still perform. The least fun part is rounding out the lineup with guys like Scott Fletcher, or Bill Doran, or a rotation with Scott Garrelts or Slim Sallee.

All lowering the cap would do is make owners make more of those boring decisions. Raising the cap will have fan favorites underperform. I’m all for keeping the cap the same, but don’t mind a beginner’s league.

It seems like the SimMatchup should have a season-long feature to allow that kind of thing. Build your dream team with whatever salaries you want, and play it against a set of real-life teams from a certain season for a full 162-game schedule. That way you get the fun of seeing your stars perform like stars against normal opposition, instead of against everyone else's dream teams (or cookie cutters). SimMatchup is free for individual games, but a full-season version could be priced like a regular team, or priced higher to allow for the fact that you'd be the only owner in essentially a specialty league. There are plenty of scenarios where I would rather play for a season with my team simulated against a certain historical league / schedule, than against teams created by other users. The same applies to other sports... simulate your favorite college team against a schedule from a stronger or weaker conference, or plug Tom Brady onto your favorite NFL team and replay its schedule. That's getting way off topic, but seems like a way to address wanting to satisfy the interest of the new users who are drawn in by the "What If..." dream team ideas.

If I was signing up for the first time and got my "dream team" and they all batted .250-.270 and my pitchers all had 4-5 ERAs, I don't think that would be very enjoyable.

The issue is, you can't have it both ways.
You're going to get plenty of new players who want realism, they want to try to find a useful utility player and back of the rotation guys that can survive, while their 2-3 stars perform like real life.
You're also going to have plenty of new players who want half their team to be all stars.

The problem is these two ideas aren't compatible, and often times new players want them to overlap. It's also hard to explain to newer players why A-Rod batted .270 with 20HR and Griffey only hit 25, while at the same time their Randy Johnson has a 4 ERA. We want all great players, but we want them to perform like they did in real life! There is no answer to this problem however.

The only solution that could work long term is education. They must understand that a very good MLB team is about 60-65M and any over 65M was winning or competing for the World Series. This would mean that at 80M batters/pitchers are going to face considerably tougher competition than they did in real life, thus their stats are unlikely to match their actual stats. The other one they need to understand is how normalization works. While I am sure many would easily agree that a 30HR season today or in the peak of the steroid era doesn't mean near what it did in say, the 70s, but they need to understand how and why that matters.

So bottom line is, changing the salary cap solves one problem, but creates another, whether it's changed up or down. To keep new players, they have to have some understand of how the game works and that no matter what the rules/cap is, they can never have their cake and eat it too, a collection of all stars that all perform at their real life level.

Posted by DoctorKz on 1/21/2021 11:02:00 PM (view original):
Settle on an Open League salary cap. Perhaps come up with an All-Star Open league salary cap, where you can have Trout, Duke Snider and Chuck Klein in your outfield. Trot out a rotation of Gibson, deGrom, Seaver and Feller...give people a chance to go whole hog in drafting an upscale Open league...$120M - $140M perhaps, maybe even $150M...double what you spend on the $75M Open League..

Give them flashy, but sell the realistic game as well. You can do both...

you might be on to something here Doc! A $70mm "real" OL and a $140mm "dream" OL ...I like that. Personally I'd never even think about the higher cap, but that gives everybody the option.

"The problem is these two ideas aren't compatible, and often times new players want them to overlap. It's also hard to explain to newer players why A-Rod batted .270 with 20HR and Griffey only hit 25, while at the same time their Randy Johnson has a 4 ERA. We want all great players, but we want them to perform like they did in real life! There is no answer to this problem however.

The only solution that could work long term is education. They must understand that a very good MLB team is about 60-65M and any over 65M was winning or competing for the World Series. This would mean that at 80M batters/pitchers are going to face considerably tougher competition than they did in real life, thus their stats are unlikely to match their actual stats. The other one they need to understand is how normalization works. While I am sure many would easily agree that a 30HR season today or in the peak of the steroid era doesn't mean near what it did in say, the 70s, but they need to understand how and why that matters."

Which, to me, a PC/Code idiot, it seems like the real issue is in the algorithm. It doesn't deliver real life realism well. Some pitchers vastly over perform and most hitters vastly under perform. IMO, from just my playing experience, I see certain ERAS that perform much better than other ERAS and that shouldn't BE!! The normalization in use here doesn't really seem to "normalize" certain Eras well. Thus the advantage for some players (cookies). And then, when you add in that the recent years aren't even on the same salary scheme.........no wonder Ketel Marte is on so many teams.

Changes NEED made.

Posted by laramiebob on 1/22/2021 8:00:00 AM (view original):
"The problem is these two ideas aren't compatible, and often times new players want them to overlap. It's also hard to explain to newer players why A-Rod batted .270 with 20HR and Griffey only hit 25, while at the same time their Randy Johnson has a 4 ERA. We want all great players, but we want them to perform like they did in real life! There is no answer to this problem however.

The only solution that could work long term is education. They must understand that a very good MLB team is about 60-65M and any over 65M was winning or competing for the World Series. This would mean that at 80M batters/pitchers are going to face considerably tougher competition than they did in real life, thus their stats are unlikely to match their actual stats. The other one they need to understand is how normalization works. While I am sure many would easily agree that a 30HR season today or in the peak of the steroid era doesn't mean near what it did in say, the 70s, but they need to understand how and why that matters."

Which, to me, a PC/Code idiot, it seems like the real issue is in the algorithm. It doesn't deliver real life realism well. Some pitchers vastly over perform and most hitters vastly under perform. IMO, from just my playing experience, I see certain ERAS that perform much better than other ERAS and that shouldn't BE!! The normalization in use here doesn't really seem to "normalize" certain Eras well. Thus the advantage for some players (cookies). And then, when you add in that the recent years aren't even on the same salary scheme.........no wonder Ketel Marte is on so many teams.

Changes NEED made.

Thing to remember is not all impacts are as easily seen as other. Deadball pitcher increase errors, but you won't see that reflected in their stats. Allowing runs or baserunners from errors doesn't impact they main stats people generally use to evaluate their pitching performances (ERA, OAV, WHIP), in fact, errors HELP all three look better than otherwise by removing data from the numerators (sort of). The latest TWISL is filling now to help demonstrate the full effect of this and the actual value of deadball pitchers versus their perceived value. As a whole, I feel like the normalization works really well, it's the compounding effects of normalization, defense, and ballpark factors working together that can create a perception of things not lining up well or giving advantage one way or the other. Pricing is off right now across eras, but that's mostly a result of the old dynamic pricing and freeze and later seasons not being affected at all. The pricing discrepancy can also create perceived era discrepancies on top of the above factors.

I really like dannyjoe's idea of having a season-long dream team you can make to play against standardized computer teams. It makes me think of sports video games (especially older ones) where you could pick the best team in the league, build up gaudy stats, and win 150 games. There's a degree of fun to just play something easy and dominate. There's a segment of the market that doesn't care much about striving for realism and gets frustrated and leaves before they "figure out" the sim. Dream-Team seasons for a modest cost might be a big boon for the site, even if not many of them really become traditional SLB players. I have no idea how challenging this would be to implement, but I think it's a worthy idea.

Posted by DoctorKz on 1/20/2021 7:34:00 PM (view original):
With current salaries, an $80M Open league team is more talented than an average MLB team. A good number of players underachieve. Either lower the cap number, or adjust salaries up a notch to correct.

The rewrite is necessary. Unavoidable, period. It is technologically outdated.

I agree. I find that $60M is the point where players perform closest to real life. Lower it, and have a $90 or a $100M OL level only for those that have gotten through a certain number of teams first, as an incentive, but also as a place where they would face more competition. Make the $60M possibly a beginners' league even.

Most importantly, assuming in any case you won't actually lower the cap, please DO these things:

1. lower the suggested PA and IP which put newcomers at a competitive disadvantage.
2. have AAA with their real names and seasons listed.
3. make clear in big writing to newcomers that they will have AAA, that these will be useful players and so not to spend a lot on bench players whom they will likely send down to AAA when the AAA players are available.

I wonder if an algorithm could be made that could create random teams for opponents? This could be the start of single player mode!

It would draft innings and PAs within a certain range and have certain constraints so the rosters make sense for the 23 other teams. This would have close to unlimited replay value!!

I'm not an expert programmer, but this is something I could make. It would kind of be like randomizers you see for a lot of older video games where the key items you have to collect throughout the game are shuffled so you don't know what you're getting when you go there.

Posted by DoctorKz on 1/21/2021 10:51:00 PM (view original):
You still need to resolve the chronic underachieving of guys like Seaver, Carlton, Spahn, Dimaggio and Pujols.

Your built in advantage given to deadball pitchers needs to go bye-bye. Put the post-1920 pitchers on par with the early guys. You need more parity across eras. Too many players get little to no usage because they can't produce anywhere near what they should. That's a serious problem. I should be finding ways to get ARod, Spahn, Lefty Grove, Johnny Bench or Joe Morgan onto my roster. I want Seaver or Marichal as my ace. Ed Summers or Joe McGinnity shouldn't be outperforming them on a regular basis...

Get that fixed, then have dynamic pricing make the necessary market corrections...the game will be fluid, not the current stale, static mess it currently is...that I love to play, nonetheless...

I also agree here. Is it possible to factor into the overachieving single seasons something like an overall career corrective, so that Ed Summers with all due respect is not a better pitcher than Tom Seaver or Warren Spahn?

In any case, yes undo by all means the deadball advantage.