Originally Posted by Rain Man
(Post 9703712)
And again, we're not intentionally trying to be obtuse, but we want people to think of the game more as football and less as a statistical exercise to maximize their odds. Football coaches have to make these same judgments during the course of a season - Branden Albert is injured, so do I put Stephenson in or do I move Fisher to the left and put Stephenson on the right?
I have a good example of what we're trying to avoid. Many years ago, I was in a league that played Strat-O-Matic baseball. It was a cool game, but it was baseball, which is pretty simple statistically and the game system was transparent.
Well, I had two shortstops, Cal Ripken, Jr., and a journeyman for the Twins named Al Newman. Newman was a career .226 hitter with 1 home run in eight years. Ripken was clearly the better player, but in one type of matchup (something like clutch situations against right-handed pitchers) Newman was actually better.
I did my math and figured that out, so when that situation arose, Ripken was out of there and Newman took over at shortstop. One of the guys in my league was a baseball purist and he would get furious at me when I would do that. My response was always, "I did the math."
But the bottom line is that I wasn't really playing the game in a manner suitable to baseball. I was manipulating the game system. What we don't want in this game is for someone to discover that some offensive tackle (John Tait?) got the ball once on a lateral and gained 28 yards, so you can move him to running back and he'll be Godzilla.
I'm not saying that anyone in our leagues would do that, but we all know each other and are reasonable people. Once we go commercial with the game, we'll certainly have people willing to do that, so we have to prevent it from happening, both via the game system design and via our management of the game.
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