Do you get much benefit at all from putting more than 20 minutes on any 1 skill category? The skill category I am specifically asking about is orange, and the player is a senior. I currently have 20.

On the flip side, do you get much benefit at all if you put more than 6 minutes on a red? Can red skills still develop?

Red skills you can maybe push another point out of, but only if the player has high WE.

If I have a senior with all reds and one orange I will put up to ~35 minutes or something in the orange. There are diminishing returns but the minutes are better used there than in a red.

there's really two questions in here, which are not directly linked and so i want to explicitly split them out. the first is about more than 20 minutes in a category. there are some diminishing returns, but they are fairly small. you'll see significantly better improvement with 30 minutes in a category, compared to 20, and this is true regardless of the potential remaining. well - you might not actually SEE it, depending on how little room for growth is left, but its happening all the same.

the second question is about the rate of return on an almost-maxed category. the way i think about practice planning is there is basically a curve that sets the return on investment against potential (remaining room for growth). this curve is essentially fixed and un-changable. you get a lot of return per effective minute practiced if there is a lot of potential left, and a little bit if there is a little bit of potential left. there's not much difference between 80 points remaining and 30, but it drops pretty significantly from 30 all the way down to 0.

all you are really doing from there is contributing an effective minutes practiced each game. maybe you need 20 minutes effective practice to go from 40 points remaining to 39, and maybe you need 400 minutes effective practice to go from 3 points remaining to 2.

effective minutes practiced would really be a combination of practice minutes, work ethic, and minutes played, minus the constant value of break even minutes required (essentially 7 per category, 3 for lp/per). so a guy who is playing 25 mpg, practicing 20m, and with 80 work ethic, those numbers run through a formula that roughly multiplies the practice minutes by a work ethic modifier, then adds the practice minutes multiplied by a work ethic modifier, and then subtracts the break even minutes. this might convert to say 22 minutes effective practice. then he gets 22 minutes of effective practice worth of gains - so if he has 40 points remaining, maybe this gives him 1.1 points of growth (using the above made-up but not super unreasonable numbers with 20 minutes required for a point of growth). if he has 3 points remaining... he gets whatever it is, 22/400 points of growth. if you increase the 20 minutes practiced to 30, maybe he gets 9 additional minutes of effective practice (perhaps 7 from the 10 minutes at break-even work ethic, but because of his high work ethic, maybe its 9?)

that way of thinking will get you to the right place. the potential tells you how many effective minutes required to get the next point of growth, while the practice plan, minutes played, and work ethic give you the effective minutes. once you rack up enough effective minutes, you get the next point (its really all decimals, so you get the fractional portion after each practice). the diminishing returns relating to 20 vs 30 minutes in a category, that doesn't relate directly to the potential of the category. overall, you get perhaps 75% of the value going from 20 to 30 minutes as you do from 10 to 20. not super confident in that number, but you still get pretty good return on those minutes.

side note, there is no seperate logic for rate of decrease. it runs off the same curve, its just that your effective minutes might be negative if you aren't practicing, and therefore, you'll be slowly dropping. if you need +400 effective minutes to go from 3 points remaining to 2, you'd need -400 effective minutes to drop from 2 remaining to 3.

Thanks for typing that all out gil, I started a couple times and got sidetracked and Safari killed my work. I knew you’d cover for me!

Personally, I suspect you’re looking at a bit less than 75% value by the time you get to 30. That’s about where I’d put 25 (from 20) I think. After 25 I think it goes down a bit more. And it should be noted, 20 is not the *optimal* minute allocation either, you’re looking at some diminished returns at that level, too. But it’s small enough that we don’t bother with it, certainly not for important categories. I also do think the scoring attributes (LP/Per) run on a slightly different scale because of the split - it’s easier to see point gains on lower allocations when they’re orange and even red than other attributes.

I think there are different levels of returns on practicing high minutes.

The IQ grades are pretty straight forward. Once you get past 10-15 min the diminishing returns can be measured. Up over 25min or so and you could be seeing only 50-70% of a full return per each additional minute.

I think the category skills additional minutes don't lose there "worth" or value as quickly as the IQ grades do.

Posted by shoe3 on 8/18/2022 1:34:00 PM (view original):
Thanks for typing that all out gil, I started a couple times and got sidetracked and Safari killed my work. I knew you’d cover for me!

Personally, I suspect you’re looking at a bit less than 75% value by the time you get to 30. That’s about where I’d put 25 (from 20) I think. After 25 I think it goes down a bit more. And it should be noted, 20 is not the *optimal* minute allocation either, you’re looking at some diminished returns at that level, too. But it’s small enough that we don’t bother with it, certainly not for important categories. I also do think the scoring attributes (LP/Per) run on a slightly different scale because of the split - it’s easier to see point gains on lower allocations when they’re orange and even red than other attributes.

no problem! i agree that by 30, its probably under 75%. i am not that confident in this figure at all, but what i was saying is, the total 20->30 gain is probably like 75% of the 10->20 gain. so by 30 you are definitely under 75% in that model. that may be a bit high still, but i guess i feel like the community at large under-utilizes practice plans over 20 minutes (mostly because i have seen so many folks' practice plans and virtually none of them were as extreme as i like to go). so i probably err on the side of over-stating the value. but i'm not really feeling like 75% is overstating it, although, i've never really tried to pin it down that precisely. i feel like even the 40->50 minute range still gives you a good half value or something on those minutes.

Posted by oldwarrior on 8/18/2022 8:44:00 PM (view original):
I think there are different levels of returns on practicing high minutes.

The IQ grades are pretty straight forward. Once you get past 10-15 min the diminishing returns can be measured. Up over 25min or so and you could be seeing only 50-70% of a full return per each additional minute.

I think the category skills additional minutes don't lose there "worth" or value as quickly as the IQ grades do.

i agree completely, i didn't feel the value was there going 25->30 on the team practice, despite trying pretty hard to make it work and being a big fan of team IQ in general. i have even dropped below my standard 25/25 a bunch during 3.0 because the recruits i bring in are just not elite enough, and also i have less depth than i used to, so i can't really even justify the 25/25 a bunch of times. i think i've been in the 22/22 range on florida a&m the last few seasons even, with legitimate title contenders in there.

but practice minutes, pushing from 20 to 30 is something i don't do more only because its often hard to find that many minutes to steal. but i have numbers over 20 all over the place and numbers over 25 every season. i think folks in general are too adverse to putting 32 minutes into a critical green per or the 24-28 conditioning minimum standard i run with on press teams, and that sort of thing. that is stuff i do like, all the time.

Posted by gillispie on 8/19/2022 12:19:00 PM (view original):

Posted by oldwarrior on 8/18/2022 8:44:00 PM (view original):
I think there are different levels of returns on practicing high minutes.

The IQ grades are pretty straight forward. Once you get past 10-15 min the diminishing returns can be measured. Up over 25min or so and you could be seeing only 50-70% of a full return per each additional minute.

I think the category skills additional minutes don't lose there "worth" or value as quickly as the IQ grades do.

i agree completely, i didn't feel the value was there going 25->30 on the team practice, despite trying pretty hard to make it work and being a big fan of team IQ in general. i have even dropped below my standard 25/25 a bunch during 3.0 because the recruits i bring in are just not elite enough, and also i have less depth than i used to, so i can't really even justify the 25/25 a bunch of times. i think i've been in the 22/22 range on florida a&m the last few seasons even, with legitimate title contenders in there.

but practice minutes, pushing from 20 to 30 is something i don't do more only because its often hard to find that many minutes to steal. but i have numbers over 20 all over the place and numbers over 25 every season. i think folks in general are too adverse to putting 32 minutes into a critical green per or the 24-28 conditioning minimum standard i run with on press teams, and that sort of thing. that is stuff i do like, all the time.

My standard is 20 for conditioning (FB/P, it varies a little for the others) for the first couple seasons anyway - players that go red in stamina might get relieved early. It isn’t uncommon for me to have 45+ on seniors, because stamina is often the only thing left I care about at that point. I tried starting at 25 when I got back into FB/P; really didnt see the value there though for the players I was recruiting. It should of course be noted that I do tend to reach a bit lower and take players with more potential across the board than many folks, and that affects what kind of practice plan brings value to my team, especially the younger players.