Other than giving a player extra minutes, does anyone know if a player starting factors in a player's improvement or is it strictly WE, practice minutes and playing time that factors in?

starting does not factor into player development directly but WE growth is hugely based on starting which will start paying immediate dividends (well the very next game) in terms of ratings growth. so kinda depends how you mean it i guess.

Thanks. I kinda figured that. My starting PG is pretty much maxed out and I should easily win all my conference games so I was thinking about starting the backup so he could improve more. So I just wanted confirmation that my thinking is legit.

Gil, I was actually under the impression the answer to this was yes - that starting a player / giving them more minutes impacts their skill development as well as their WE.

Do we have a definitive answer from seble / CS on this?

Posted by sol_phenom3 on 11/23/2020 8:07:00 AM (view original):
Gil, I was actually under the impression the answer to this was yes - that starting a player / giving them more minutes impacts their skill development as well as their WE.

Do we have a definitive answer from seble / CS on this?

well, i think you are talking about two different things. giving them more game minutes and starting are different, even if highly related for fatigue-based schemes (which should be most folks). in the OP, he distinguished between the two explicitly.

i would call all this definitive:

1) player ratings growth is ran each game or whatever based on WE, practice minutes, and minutes played - the latter being very important - but NOT starts
2) WE growth is heavily based on starts (but also minutes played, and other stuff that doesn't matter so much like class and current WE). WE growth leads to higher work ethic and therefore indirectly, anything that grows WE contributes to growth
3) GPA growth is based on highschool GPA and work ethic, but not minutes played, offense run, starts, or current GPA

not sure if that resolves your questions, but i am not aware of anything in this arena that hasn't been rock solidly known for many years, or anything that has changed. probably a lot of people talk about these things generally and aren't too concerned about the details - probably the only nebulous thing in this arena is our communications on these forums on the subject, really.

anyway. so yeah, minutes played impacts directly ratings growth, and also indirectly via WE growth. starts only impacts indirectly via WE growth.

getting starts and minutes to key players who need it for player development purposes is a pretty important part of the game, to be sure! back in 2.0 before promising starts to every 5* who looked your way was the norm, i still started slates of underclassmen all the time. i just had the luxury to put my real team in for a couple choice games, but otherwise, i started just as young of teams then as now, because my motivation is not promises, its player development. getting end of season sophs NT ready is really the goal. that is the prime differentiator between a lot of the very good teams and the truly great ones!