12-20-2024, 04:29 PMBfine Wrote: My understanding is that a big part of the issue is FHM is a worse engine than what other leagues use. Unless something has changed (And its possible it has), the PBE has communication with the devs for OOTP and they can usually get big issues fixed. For the SSL, FM is just an objectively better engine with more customization to allow sim leagues to do what they need. FHM is rigid and doesn't really like everything we try and do (Which is why scouting errors will always exist for example) and the devs don't really care to fix any bugs since FHM is not nearly as big of a revenue driver as OOTP. So we make do with what we can but its definitely a bigger fight than other leagues. 

Someone of course please tell me if I'm wrong but that's my general knowledge from the sim engine side.

This is honestly the big thing, yes. OOTP (the game) and FM both have much, much bigger dev teams than FHM does. While FHM remains the best option for us at present, it's absolutely not nearly as optimal for a sim league as the games those leagues use. There are weird things we have to have our simmers and fileworkers do that other leagues just don't, and if they do, the methods of doing them are more intuitive and/or less tedious. Just for a few examples here:

Team morale - the game has financial features we simply can't turn off, it's not an option. It gives everyone a budget that doesn't correlate to the contract tiers or anything we do in this league, bases the team budget off stuff like ticket sales (which in turn is based off stuff like fan loyalty, team success, etc), things we can't use at all in this league, but we still have to work around them in order to make sure everybody is on an even playing field and isn't having their team morale and performance tanked because their GM didn't pay for enough team bonding activities or whatever.

Test simming - we've completely outlawed it here because it's such a massive, toxic time sink in a way it just isn't in other leagues. OOTP has a built in simming module that allows you to churn out a thousand games in a matter of minutes. FM doesn't have that, but in SSL, managers only have to worry about 2-3 games per week as opposed to often three or more games per sim day GMs have to worry about in a hockey season. This goes for simmers as well. In OOTP, you can watch one game live on stream and multiple other games will be happening in the background with a live scoreboard so people can keep up with the other teams playing at the same time. FHM doesn't have that - if we're live simming a game, we have to then go in and quick sim all the other games and go through their boxscores individually.

Places for human error - we just have more of them. Baseball simmers don't have to worry about goalie swaps. OOTP handles pitching rotations itself (if I recall correctly there's some changes the simmers make during the playoffs, but during the regular season, absolutely no one is hand managing any one player for each team for every single game).

Filework isn't the same here as it is there, either. All of our filework has to be done manually. We can't do things like update a CSV and then import it into the game to update players, someone has to physically go into the file and update each player. And it's not as if other leagues don't also have errors in player updates occasionally - other leagues also have audit teams who have to stay on top of that stuff.

Separate leagues! In PBE, the majors and minors leagues are one file. The games happen at the same time! You don't have to schedule two different simmers to do two different sims in a day, because it's all the same file, it all happens at the same time. So, twice as many sims per day also means twice as many opportunities for human error (when as I've mentioned we already have more opportunities for that just in either league alone).

And honestly, some of it just comes back to quality of product. I'm really excited about the broadcast team Ace is spearheading for us, but as a former PBE user I can say that the biggest reason the PBE streaming experience is better is because OOTP is just straight up more fun to watch. It's more fun to engage with, and even if FHM had beautiful perfect graphics, a hockey game is much, much harder to watch that way, because hockey is constant action. In a baseball game you can just watch each pitch, you don't sit there staring at the same icing play six times while the game replays it for you. You get specific, quantifiable segments of action that the game can break things down into. I'm sure I don't have to tell all of y'all that hockey just doesn't break up neatly like that - sure, sometimes you'll have a very clear sequence of passes from puck drop leading to a goal, but more often than not, you get a lot of meandering around the ice, line changes, etc, before anything happens. That's harder to present, and it's harder to commentate on, and it's harder to boil down into a short enough time frame to make it viable for a stream.

So the tl;dr here is we really just don't have some of the same basic tools to work with as other leagues who have "perfected" their sim experience. What we have done, and continue to do, is try to come up with new ways to make the product we have more fun to engage with. The broadcast team is one part of that, but our sim team has been a constantly evolving thing, and with evolution there are always growing pains.