This question is two-fold.

First, if you promise a recruit minutes / starting and you follow through with that promise, do recruits' ratings see any benefit? In the past, I always felt those are the recruits who tend to see increases in ratings (including WE), but this has always been a assumption of mine.

Second, due to this baseless belief, I promised a recruit 10 minutes thinking I may be able to increase his WE a little and he may eventually be a viable player. However, if he is not going to receive any benefit, he isn't good enough to play 10 minutes now. If I did not follow through with that promise, would I suffer any negatives other than potentially losing the player? Prestige, future promises, current players, etc. being affected? He isn't terrible for even the couple minutes per game, but I have a bench player who I'd prefer playing this season if I can.

As far as i know the only benefit in promises is during the recruiting process and ive never noticed any benefit in the way you describe.
as for future ramifications for not fullfilling the promise you risk losing the player and even worse keeping the player but with a reduced work ethic but no long term hits otherwise. You may see a slight drop in reputation but i believe that only really affects your chances if applying to a new job.

Posted by Adjacent1 on 9/28/2019 3:26:00 PM (view original):
As far as i know the only benefit in promises is during the recruiting process and ive never noticed any benefit in the way you describe.
as for future ramifications for not fullfilling the promise you risk losing the player and even worse keeping the player but with a reduced work ethic but no long term hits otherwise. You may see a slight drop in reputation but i believe that only really affects your chances if applying to a new job.

Interesting. I surely didn't recruit him for his high WE to start and it can hardly get lower. Thanks for the help!

Starts increase WE. Overall playing time will help increase ratings faster than if he rides the bench. So if you sign one of those players with 6 to 9 green categories and a 20 WE, it's best to start him every game of his career. The starts will boost the WE, and the higher WE mixed with playing time, will speed up the development of all the green categories.

Yeah tops right. I read ops question as does fullfilling promises in and of itself cause a WE bonus increase. If thats not his question than go with what top said.

Posted by Adjacent1 on 9/29/2019 12:50:00 PM (view original):
Yeah tops right. I read ops question as does fullfilling promises in and of itself cause a WE bonus increase. If thats not his question than go with what top said.

You are right. That was his question. I was just adding in something different that is useful. But as far as OP..... if you sign 2 players with the exact ratings and WE, and you fulfill the promises for the 1 recruit, they will still progress at a fairly equal rate. Assuming playing time and starts were the same.

Fulfilling a promise does not independently give you a bonus of any kind.

agreed, no bonus to growth from meeting a promise, what you are seeing is the benefit of minutes played, which directly increases growth, and which is often correlated with promises (you are unlikely to give a freshman 20m without that promise - but the ultimate cause of the higher growth is the minutes, not the promise).

i do believe reputation impacts recruiting but also that it is so slight you can ignore it. not sure its totally negligible but seems to be close for reasonable ranges of reputation. i would definitely not worry about like, the hit from an occasional broken promise - running around at an a- rep for a season instead of a+ is almost definitely not a big deal. i wouldn't necessarily be comfortable telling you there is no impact if you were going to try something that would result in really bad reputation, just because i'm skeptical anybody really knows. nobody has ever come forward with anything compelling and many have said they don't see any impact, myself included, but its just such murky water - we don't know the value of a ton of stuff in recruiting, if a+ vs a- was 5%, we may not see it - most of us live at a+ anyway and have very limited data.

I'm pretty sure it was a theory I had or assumption I made when I started in my early HD days. Overtime, I hadn't question it and it just became cemented in my head. All of a sudden, I asked myself why I was offering this player below-average player 10 minutes and I couldn't find anything supporting my idea. All this time, I've been offering 10-15 minutes to players who may not have deserved it to help progress them, when I could have not stressed with it.

The more you know.