Who changed the Game Engine from ATG 7 to ATG 8?

I foolishly thought I'd finally "cracked the code" or some such after all these years ... was making the playoffs consistently during the reign of ATG 7. Then ATG 8 is introduced, and the same style teams ... with lots and lots of the same personnel ... when I can get them of course ... get schwacked way down in the standings ... or do somewhat well but not nearly as well as before. So c'mon Senor Johnny Garcia, what gives? Whadja tinker with this time?

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My theories:

The game engine hates the 3 column on a hitters card.

The game engine makes sure 6's, 7's, and 8's, get rolled adequately, 4's 5's 9's and 10's not so much.

The game engine will not let closer type relievers dominate the game.

The game engine makes sure players with 100+walks will never hit near their batting average.

The game engine does not handle 'reverse' situations very well, so you can make some hay here.

The game engine will hand out a terrible year to almost anyone on MY team, i just have to guess who it's going to be.

But I'm not complaining here.... Ha Ha

As far back as ATGI I have made repeat teams of my really good teams at times now and again. Even when I managed to get the exact same players I didn't get the same results. For me it was usually champs and chumps. But that being said there were guys that made the same team time after time and had success. Anytime I made a repeat team I named it the same and added II. I have one now. It's going to finish last in the div. I think the game just likes messing with you. You think you have a great idea and it slaps you down. I think the problem today is everybody is way too concerned with making their team unbeatable at home. Then when you make the same team and the opposing parks change, your done. Along comes a couple teams that own you at home and you can't win away. Just a thought.

As far back as ATGI I have made repeat teams of my really good teams at times now and again. Even when I managed to get the exact same players I didn't get the same results. For me it was usually champs and chumps. But that being said there were guys that made the same team time after time and had success. Anytime I made a repeat team I named it the same and added II. I have one now. It's going to finish last in the div. I think the game just likes messing with you. You think you have a great idea and it slaps you down. I think the problem today is everybody is way too concerned with making their team unbeatable at home. Then when you make the same team and the opposing parks change, your done. Along comes a couple teams that own you at home and you can't win away. Just a thought.

Matt makes a GREAT point here!

You MUST be flexible after the draft to reshape your team based on the stadiums inside your division and even even consider ALL of the stadiums and trends towards deadball - slanty power - speed demon teams, and Fulton Cty teams. Owners who fail to tweak their teams, including trading and/or swapping some of their STUDS (not all of them) that won't perform well due to ALL of the 3 stadiums in the division being completely different is the undoing of many teams. Less and less do you find a league with 5 or 6 or even 7 Phillies/Anaheim neutral stadiums in a league.....when you do, then CLONING teams perform much more consisently. I've noticed many of the old timers that dominated before, FAIL TO make whole sale changes post draft (when divisional stadium allignments warrant) and that has resulted in some of them not dominating as they did before .......MY TWO CENTS.

i think the mention of noticing the differences league-to-league in the opposition makes sense - back in ATG2, I played the identical roster in 2 leagues that played simultaneously (those drafts were fun...) i was trying to also test the then, somewhat widely held belief that the same player went down in all leagues at once - I did not find any evidence of that either

point being - one of those teams won its league from the wild card, the other finished somewhere around 60 wins...


have not looked at those teams in a while, but my recollection is that the competition was pretty comparable - similar mix of newbies and vets or different levels of success.


it was only one test, but it convinced me that the competition matters and that HAL is inscrutable - no great revelations, obviously.

so, not sure about the game engine, i don't recall any announcement about it, but that doesn't mean I didn't miss one...

Great points made. I think the formulas that we once used for success, be it lefty, righty, small ball, etc do not have the same impact in version 8, at least for me. The large player pool produces stronger and better balanced leagues (by accident or not) and makes finding an edge more difficult. DefiniteIy stronger competition. I consistently made the playoffs in previous versions, now I am lucky if I get a team to play over .500. The rule of thumb used to be make your team great at home, and hope to break even on the road. That doesn't cut it anymore. Some guys have figured out the "formula" and there are some consistent winners, but the majority of us are still trying to figure it out. Back to the lab!