Leferd

I would agree. Most successful teams are able to marry sabremetrics with traditional scouting. Use the data to back what the eyes are seeing and have scouts check up with what the stats say. There was a huge war with the traditionalists throwing their nose up at people like Bill James for years, until Sandy Alderson came to power in Oakland in the 80's. He bought in early, and collected each of Bill James' annual baseball abstracts and quietly put these newfangled theories into practice. Later on, he introduced these books to Billy Beane who completely doubled down and went all in when he took over for Alderson in 97. By this time, the sabremetric community was in glee that one of their own was OPENLY making smart baseball decisions using the objective based analysis --and all other teams are none-the-wiser. Of course, after the release of Moneyball in 2003 - floodgates have opened and most teams employ personnel well versed in sabremetrics. Oakland gradually began to lose their competitive advantage and had to come up with new ways in finding undervalued players at rock bottom prices.

Preseason games start today! The Golden State Warriors are 7:1 against to take the Western Conference. Over/Under is 49.5. I'll take them odds!

Yep. Driving up pitch counts is always a good batting strategy. Most sabremetrically inclined teams (Oakland, Boston, Texas) tend to go after guys who'll take pitches. PS If you didn't already know, Boston actually hired both Bill James and Voros McCracken were hired on by John Henry and Theo Epstein early on in their regimes. James is still a consultant.

You misunderstand. Those measurements are already sorted by most major league teams and broken down. But there is no magical formula (advanced metric) that measures that. You can just measure it in different ways after pitch counts using conventional means. Just use the raw data.

You don't need an advanced metric for pitch counts. One of the more useful metrics for pitchers are those that that fall under DIPS (defense independent pitching statistics) - most prominent among these is BABIP (batting average on balls in play) as developed by Voros McCracken in the late 90's/early 2000's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Independent_Pitching_Statistics Even Bill James was busting himself at not having come up with it.

Patch 4 beta is now live. Biggest one yet. Info here: http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Total_War_ROME_II:_Patch_4

Hmm...Max Scherzer is pretty good.

This is pretty neat! In four parts and funded by The Creative Assembly.

PE will already be balanced for a six person party. I should hope that at each character can fulfill a unique designated role negating the need to have a jack of all trades. Plus, as was mentioned, 11 classes are enough - and having more variables to balance is going to take more development time - from a practicality standpoint.

IIRC, there won't be any "speech" skills in the game. However, your character traits, ability scores, and individual skills will impact and influence dialogue.

Oakland scored 34 runs on Detroit last time they met in their four game series in August. Hoping there's no regression towards the mean. Max Scherzer v Bartolo Colon Superstars v bunch of platoon hitters

They've included character traits on creation in many of their past games - IWD2, Fallouts, NWN2; I don't see why they wouldn't include this for PE.

Plus technically it is a turn based strategy game with a real time tactical component.

It's silly, but I bet some folks will buy them, which means it's a good idea from a business standpoint. Lols. Brilliant! Just like Personal Seat Licenses.

Yep. That sounds right.

I would sell one of Nep's kidneys and put the proceeds towards that High School RPG MCA is always talking about. They had to compromise. Elementary School RPG. http://www.obsidian.net/games/spsot Didn't need Kickstarter for that.

Expansion? Maybe. But I'm sure they'll have to work out a new contract or hire him back outright. I think the issue with Ziets was that being only a writer, Obsidian couldn't really afford to have the luxury of having too many dedicated writers as opposed to having designers who also happen to write well.

I'm not gonna trash Smith now because he's good. Whatever the case, it took him 6 years to live up to his potential which is a pretty long time, when you are a #1 pick. Harbaugh absolutely made the right call in making the switch to Kaepernick.

No. Alex Smith was garbage until Harbaugh came in the picture.

I'd probably back an Obsidian kickstarter for any genre. How much though depends on the details of the setting.

No, I don't think Alex Smith is underrated at all. He is viewed exactly as he is: a smart, reliable and good, but not dynamic QB.

Since they are already well into production and because Ziets is only a writer (and not a designer), I doubt he'll be involved further.

KC 4-0 NYG 0-4 Wow.

Obsidian will be using something better than cinematics - Scripted interactions. I'm very stoked about these. http://media.obsidian.net/eternity/media/updates/0054/pe-scriptedevent-wip.1280.jpg

Group Love -Ways to Go Has a Wes Anderson type feel to it.