The problem is proving your 21-3 team is so much better than everyone else's that it really should win 130 games.
With all due respect to Nev, I completely disagreed with him on his various complaints. If you look at all of the things Bernie/TSN/John/SOM have added over the years since ATG1, there have been a staggering number of improvements. You don't need me to list them to know what they are, but to say SOM has been unresponsive is a bit unfounded.
Normalization in ATG1 was obvious and easily proven. There was no reason based on dice probabilities that Ruth or Mays should not hit 70-80+ home runs playing in Fenway 67 against weak pitching. And yet they didn't.
To extrapolate that to "my team was 21-3 and now I'm only 6 games above .500" is completely different. Pythagorus say in order to win 80% of your games, you basically need to average double the runs of your opponent per game. Read that again: average double the runs! Do you know how freaking hard that is to do in a league where everyone operates under the same salary cap? That means if you win a game 6-4, you need to win the next game 10-0 to keep that pace in order to cover the expected occasional losses. Looking at the ATG record books, the team at the top of the list with 116 wins had a whopping run diff of about +330, and they were outscoring opponents by roughly a 6-4 margin, and Pythagorus says they won about 3 more games than they should've.
Bottom line, there was no way to prove "team win" normalization. Just because you are out-managing your opponents and winning a lot of close games (which Nev was very good at), does not mean current success equals future success.
Nev's other big complaint was the so-called "black box" features of the game such as pitcher fatigue and the various game settings such as home field advantage. He wanted 100% transparency of game results. All I can say there is I disagree with his viewpoint. SOM online is a baseball simulation, not a simulation of two people sitting across from each other rolling dice. With that said, this game has a tremendous amount of transparency. If you've played the computer version, you know that we get to see probably 98% of the game results with complete transparency. The black box features account for the rest, and it was this other 2% that Nev couldn't get past. In my experience playing the computer version, these features account for AT MOST one game outcome per team per season.
I realize Nev isn't here to defend himself, but he's welcome to return anytime and shout me down.
Sat Mar 18, 2017 10:34 am