I bought my first version of OOTP over 20 years ago and have followed the project ever since.

OOTP is still likely the most detailed baseball simulation available, although the core baseball understanding is now approximately 20 years old and does not match a modern view of the game of baseball. The introduction of pitcher BABIP in OOTP 24 as a skill that could cause the expected BABIP against to range from .250 to .400 was a significant step away from a game that had previously prided itself on adhering as closely as possible to a sabermetric understanding of what makes baseball tick. These changes have also caused simulations in early baseball eras to become substantially less realistic, which takes away a key selling point of previous versions. Much of this regression in the quality of OOTP concided with its acquisition a few years ago by Com2uS, and the original lead developer who shepherded the game through over two decades is no longer part of OOTP.

My primary experience with the most recent iterations of the game was through Perfect Team, with thousands of hours played each cycle. Although the game has considerable potential, the choices made on the development and community management end have steadily driven players away. Rather than taking that feedback and improving the game, the announced changes for PT26 have doubled down on the choices that drove players out of the game in recent cycles. As a result, I cannot recommend a significant time investment in PT 26 unless you already have strong ties to the community.

My previous experience over two decades was through both running and playing in online leagues, and a vibrant community is the key to OOTP's success. Leagues run in previous versions of OOTP will seamlessly import into OOTP 26 and there is active developer support and a twitch community dedicated to these leagues.

Overall, lacking a major competitor, OOTP will still likely remain the industry standard. However, the key new features introduced in recent versions have been a step backward both in terms of the baseball simulation and in terms of Perfect Team and other features aimed at the active community. I do still recommend OOTP as a market leading baseball simulation, but I would recommend buying OOTP 23 (or any other version of that vintage) and using a model which works better in most eras of baseball history rather than "upgrading" to OOTP 26.

It's good for somebody's first OOTP game. I feel like if you already have OOTP 25, you can probably wait for a sale though.

Performance issues don't make up for the mediocre changes that barely iterate on itself in the previous version. Playing for longer than 30 minutes introduces input lag so severe you need to restart to fix the issues.

I've been playing OOTP since OOTP18, and have 6k+ hours across all versions. This is one of the worst performing, least improved versions of the game I have received, and if you have either OOTP25 or OOTP24 there is no reason to buy this version.

It feels like the game needs a huge refresh to introduce truly modern baseball analytics like batspeed and chase rate, as well as true simulation data. It becomes apparent that the game is outdated, but with such a small playerbase I would be surprised to see any developer tackle this market - OOTP will likely remain the best baseball simulation strategy game on the market.

I really would hope they drop out of the yearly release schedule and really focus on huge improvements, but that would cost more than they make. Unfortunate.