Is the Fatigue Code Broken in the Sim? Topic

I know that one game is a small sample size, but I have noticed that fatigued players are still performing at levels that are very high when they are fatgiued. Remember that when a player shows 99%, they are actually at least 11% fatigued (since WIS gives you the first 10% free).

This is a playoff game from a 1932 replay progressive: http://www.whatifsports.com/slb/Boxscore.aspx?gid=19703173&pid=1&pbp=0&tf=10

Note that the Boston Red Sox scored 22 runs on 23 hits and made 0 errors despite 7 of the 8 starters all being below 100% and with 5 of those being below 96%.

I wanted to verify that fatigue is functioning in the sim to negatively affect tired players. It seems to me that fatigue should play a factor, especially in the playoffs.

3/20/2013 9:37 AM
Posted by frazzman80 on 3/20/2013 9:37:00 AM (view original):

I know that one game is a small sample size, but I have noticed that fatigued players are still performing at levels that are very high when they are fatgiued. Remember that when a player shows 99%, they are actually at least 11% fatigued (since WIS gives you the first 10% free).

This is a playoff game from a 1932 replay progressive: http://www.whatifsports.com/slb/Boxscore.aspx?gid=19703173&pid=1&pbp=0&tf=10

Note that the Boston Red Sox scored 22 runs on 23 hits and made 0 errors despite 7 of the 8 starters all being below 100% and with 5 of those being below 96%.

I wanted to verify that fatigue is functioning in the sim to negatively affect tired players. It seems to me that fatigue should play a factor, especially in the playoffs.

Free is free. Someone at 99% is 1% fatigued, 11% "over pace".

Also 1 game is hardly enough of a sample size. 

Also no players below 93%, which is where several claim the "drop off" really hits.
3/20/2013 11:54 PM
IMO, fatigue is functioning the same as normal.

Also, IMO, it is now, and has been for quite some time, poorly designed and broken.  The penalties for playing a tired player should be severe, and anyone who argues against that is only gaming the system.
3/21/2013 9:30 AM
Posted by biglenr on 3/21/2013 9:30:00 AM (view original):
IMO, fatigue is functioning the same as normal.

Also, IMO, it is now, and has been for quite some time, poorly designed and broken.  The penalties for playing a tired player should be severe, and anyone who argues against that is only gaming the system.
Knowing this type of result is "normal" and that "93% is the dropoff" is crazy. I know my example is a one-game small sample size, but speaks volumes for why the fatigue model should be changed.

The team in questions went on to win the LCS 4 games to 1 and played fatigued players the entire series against a team that had everyone at 100%. IMO it shouldn't be the norm that a team who manages PAs and thus fatigue correctly be beaten ruitinely by a fatigued team that faces no ill effect.
3/21/2013 9:51 AM
3/21/2013 9:55 AM
Posted by biglenr on 3/21/2013 9:30:00 AM (view original):
IMO, fatigue is functioning the same as normal.

Also, IMO, it is now, and has been for quite some time, poorly designed and broken.  The penalties for playing a tired player should be severe, and anyone who argues against that is only gaming the system.
Thing is players played tired in real life, and the numbers while fatigued is part of the stats... I don't really have a problem with the way the hitting fatigue model is currently... there are penalties, and they do show up more as you drop below 93, especially defensively...

3 games is still a small sample size...

Pitching, on the other hand... but pitchers are completely different.
3/21/2013 1:19 PM

Response from CS:

Our fatigue system is non-linear and the effects are percent adjustments off their core ratio stats. A player at 99% is pretty close to 100%, but a player at 60% is a shell of his 100% self. It's an exponential decay. Sample size is always a factor as well.

3/21/2013 1:55 PM
Posted by uncleal on 3/21/2013 1:19:00 PM (view original):
Posted by biglenr on 3/21/2013 9:30:00 AM (view original):
IMO, fatigue is functioning the same as normal.

Also, IMO, it is now, and has been for quite some time, poorly designed and broken.  The penalties for playing a tired player should be severe, and anyone who argues against that is only gaming the system.
Thing is players played tired in real life, and the numbers while fatigued is part of the stats... I don't really have a problem with the way the hitting fatigue model is currently... there are penalties, and they do show up more as you drop below 93, especially defensively...

3 games is still a small sample size...

Pitching, on the other hand... but pitchers are completely different.

I know that players play tired in real life. That is how they get as many PAs/IPs as they did in the first place. Yes, this is built into their stats and may be what separates a good player from an All-Star in real life. However, we look at just thier stats and for WIS purposes, when we see a guy who hits .275 .358 .451 we assume that is his 100% line.

I agree that 4 games is a small sample size in this case, but that owner had to be playing those players fatigued for a while for them to get that point and the results of anything negative is just not there.

I've been playing the game for a long time and I know that pitcher fatigue is completely different from hitters. But why is that OK? A fatigued pitcher, even one in the 90% fatigue area shows negative performance very quickly. Why not hitters?

It seems that the lienar curve needs to kick in sooner than 60%. That is almost 50% more usage than real live PAs since you get the 10% built in for free already. A palyer should be a "shell of their former self" if you try to stretch a player that far beyond their real life PAs and still expect similar performance. But why not at higher fatigue levels? WHy not make 95% 15% worse or whatever the linear amount is.

A player at 99% is already 11% over thier pace for PAs when you count the free 10%. 99% should not be a very big deal as it is close to 100. But I recommend the fatigue aspect play more of a role in affecting hitters offensive and fielding stats more quickly as they drop through the 90s...95% should be much different than 99% for example.

A few years ago, WIS made changes to open leagues to force owners to draft 4,800 PAs. This was because owners were gaming the fatigue system in place. Having hitters perfom well when fatigued exacerbates this problem as there is no incentive to draft backups for rest when your hitter is going to perform nearly as well fatigued.

3/21/2013 2:10 PM (edited)

"Linear Curve" is an oxymoron. Its just a curve, and one that is probably based on curved value of OBP like their pricing system. I think it would be correct of them to do it that way. The pricing system prices OBP relative to the number of runs a team would score if all 9 members had that same OBP.

The OBP curve very roughly shows that as OBP increases 100pts or so, scoring doubles. So if you wanted to penalize a .500OBP guy 20%, making him a .400OBP guy would be a gross error as that is actually a 50% reduction in value.

I give you that example to help you appreciate the slowness a curve needs to start with in order to be correct. If they start turning .300 hitters into .270 hitters when they are at 90% fatigue, the way to then game the system would be to only ever play 100% players. I'd prefer to have the flexibility of playing fatigued players if I need to, with an appropriate penalty rather a disproportionatly high one.

3/21/2013 4:33 PM
It is true (oxymoron aside) that your samples make sense. I also agree that flexibility is a good thing. But players who are fatigued playing at a high level is not flexibility...it is unrealistic.  Fatigue should matter in a league and a manager's decisions should be tough.  The manager would have to choose to either roll the dice with a fatigued player or rest him. The goal of a fatigue penalty should be to have people try to play their players at 100% or face some consequence. Shouldn't your bench matter? It does in real life. Players take days off in real life. 

The problem is that If the real fatigue penalty doesn't kick in until 93% or 90%, a full 17% or 20% over a real life player's PAs, then there is no managerials decision to make. You just keep running out the fatigued player every day. There is no real reason to draft a player with enough PAs to make it through a season at 100% because you're essentially wasting money on PAs if a player who is fatigued will play at the same level. Since you don't need to rest players becuase their performance isn't negatively affected by fatigue, then the why waste money on bench players? Because guys can effectively perform while above 93%, you are essentially taking key managerial decisions out of the game. It's becomes "set my lineup and go".
3/21/2013 11:31 PM (edited)

a .300 hitter at 99% fatigue becomes about a .2986 hitter. not noticable in one game, probably not noticable in one season, perhaps he could play a whole career at 99% and nobody would know if they weren't told. But consider all of his stats are declining for each 1% drop and fielding may be dropping more sharply, it's still best to play at 100%.

In the old days of WiS we didn't have the option of setting the fatigue level at which we wanted our players to rest. The program used 93% as the threshold for resting guys. This fact was revealed and then msiniterpreted to mean fatigue doesn't kick in until 93%. That myth has been circulating for years. Fatigue kicks in at 99% and again for each 1% drop.

3/22/2013 12:30 AM
Frazzman, I think your ideas about what is "realistic" are ridiculous, no offense.  In the context of other video and simulation games, maybe you could be made to believe that a player at "95%," as if percent of rest and health can be really quantified in the real world, should be significantly worse than a player at 100%.  In the real world I don't think that's true at all.  In baseball more than in most sports guys who aren't at 100% can still play very well, and frequently do so.  In fact, in a sport where you basically play every day, I think very few players could be truly said to be "at 100%" by the 3rd or 4th week of the season.  Frankly, I think expecting a massive dropoff at a few percent fatigue is what's really unrealistic.  You want the team of guys at 100% to beat the team with guys in the mid-90s, but the reason they are fatigued is clear - the team winning this series spent significantly more per PA than the team that lost.  So yeah, those guys aren't quite at maximum performance, but their max performance level should be head-and-shoulders above the losing team.  I would have been much more surprised if that team had LOST the series, not just in the sim but in the real world as well.
3/22/2013 5:37 PM
I have been a bit disappointed in my performance in the game. One of the things that I believe has hurt me has been my reluctance to play fatigued players. No question, fatigue isn't as big a draw back as it could be. But, it isn't the fatigue model, per se, that i think is the issue. I think it is the pricing system that prices PAs too high. The stats we can purchase using ~550 or PAs are quite a bit better than a 700 PA player. At 90%, he is still a much better player. That is the glitch, IMO. '95 Maddux or '00 Pedro at 90% are still very good pitchers. If they are priced accurately, than IPs are too expensive, and the stats that make the superstuds into superstuds need to be priced differently. I think the fatigue model works reasonably well. It is the pricing of the stats that lead to fatigue that need tweaking.
3/22/2013 6:41 PM
Posted by pfattkatt on 3/22/2013 6:41:00 PM (view original):
I have been a bit disappointed in my performance in the game. One of the things that I believe has hurt me has been my reluctance to play fatigued players. No question, fatigue isn't as big a draw back as it could be. But, it isn't the fatigue model, per se, that i think is the issue. I think it is the pricing system that prices PAs too high. The stats we can purchase using ~550 or PAs are quite a bit better than a 700 PA player. At 90%, he is still a much better player. That is the glitch, IMO. '95 Maddux or '00 Pedro at 90% are still very good pitchers. If they are priced accurately, than IPs are too expensive, and the stats that make the superstuds into superstuds need to be priced differently. I think the fatigue model works reasonably well. It is the pricing of the stats that lead to fatigue that need tweaking.

A PA cap for cost might be nice.

While theoretically it's possible to require 884 PAs to stay at 100%, that involves max offense every game which isn't very likely in the SIM. In my mind, a more reasonable number might be somewhere around 663. That is to say, make it so that all PAs beyond the first 663 are free. (That's 4.5 PA/g over 162 games, which is midway between "max offense for fatigue purposes" and "minimum PA for a full game", with the 10% "bonus" accounted for as well.) This would take off some of that edge, because unnecessary PA can make some players overpriced... 

 Another option would be to curve the $/PA model, changing it at various thresholds, to make guys in the "nearly enough" range cost more, but I think this would almost certainly end up overcorrecting.

FWIW, I typically will allow hitters to play to 95, but no lower, unless it's the playoffs, in which case I might let them play lower on a case-by-case basis.

3/22/2013 9:33 PM
Posted by grizzly_one on 3/23/2013 1:47:00 AM (view original):
I am almost compulsive in wanting to play guys at 100%. But as the so-called "Master of the Fatigue Strategy" I feel WIS has fatigue all wrong. They should forget about "downgrading" any player for being fatigued. But instead at every level of fatigue a players drops to, his "STRIKETHROUGH" percentage increases. What "Strikethrough" would mean he is simply ineligible to play that game and sparky picks who plays.

PS, if anybody thinks this post is relevant, please quote me as I will delete soon after 17 or so red stars
Not related to grizzly's quote, but relevant to the topic at hand

The above link is a discussion on this very topic from not too long ago... since that time I've been particularly testing this aspect of the fatigue model. 

I've long held that the fatigue model is broken and as the "father of the fatigue strategy" I've toyed around with fatigue related tests more than just about anybody (possibly excepting Grizzly and CLK). It's not just broken in the manner that allows the fatigue strategy in the first place, but also in its implementation. Though boogerlips, dahsdebater, and rbow are correct (and I don't have a problem with this aspect of the fatigue model), I don't think it affects all performances equally. Certain stats seem to be affected before others for both hitters and pitchers, so for those who know this and know what stats are affected first, this aspect can be gamed by drafting players that will be less affected by the effects of fatigue. This is what I've been testing. 

I think I've isolated two different types and sets of stats for pitchers to lessen the effects of both in-game fatigue and seasonal fatigue. Thankfully, these sets are mostly opposites of each other so you cannot take advantage of both aspects, but you can draft a team of pitchers that you can pitch deeper into fatigue than most would be comfortable with while still maintaining a level of success (my tests have involved pitching players down to 60% and 80% fatigue). 

I have not begun to test the hitting aspects yet (though I have some ideas already), but I've been saving the data from the leagues and have intended to post game logs and numerous stats from each of the pitchers in the leagues. For those who might want to monitor the current test, the league can be found here: MLB104339
3/23/2013 2:11 AM
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