We're on the same page, zhawks. (I think.) And for what it is worth I was involved in testing for simleague baseball twice and all we did was run a single season. The sample size wasn't terrific.
But by strategies I pretty much meant identifying bugs. For example:
- Big men with good perimeter ratings. Some do exist now but I think we're going to want a decent sample size if possible for testing. And if the freshmen come to campus with 50 ratings and high potential it is going to be tough to gage if that is working well or not unless we see the results after they develop both in skill and IQ.
- Good rebounding guards. Right now very few teams have those in D3 and it's possible that a team that can rebound at all five positions could be a glitch -- in both directions. Going to be really tough to test.
- Combo defenses. Some Knight teams are currently set up to run combo but given how empty D2 and D3 are there might not be a whole lot there. And if a team that is cloned with IQ's for combo goes into Sim AI hands will they run the combo or the default set for the school?
- What happens if you have 12 players with amazing speed but no athleticism? Or vice versa?
- How does a team filled with single rated defensive players work? Does it matter what defense is being run? I think many would consider this to be a D3 exploit right now and it would be nice to confirm it is fixed. There also might be some D3 teams available to test something like this so unlike the other bullets we might be able to get some decent results.
- And even something zany like a team having big men with awesome ball handling. Conventional wisdom is that this would have a small impact on things but if there isn't a roster designed to test it, we won't know.
- Not to mention that if we don't have four seasons (five if you want to measure redshirting) we'll have trouble assessing if the IQ development is working well along with figuring out if we end up putting 40 minutes into study hall for our juniors and seniors because they are maxed out.
Obviously for all of these strategies there would be some curiosity involved. But the main point would be to make sure everything works as intended. I'd be shocked to discover that the key to success is having a bunch of guards with zero speed but tons of athleticism and rebounding abilities along with a front court of speed demons that can do tricks with the rock but lack any athleticism whatsoever. But unless we test that, we won't know for sure. And if we're bringing over 75% of our players from the current Knight world, it will be difficult to find out if those oddball strategies produce normal results or if they work way too well (or not nearly well enough).
And what scares me about new releases is that it typically is something oddball that ends up being the glitch because nobody thought to test it. And then it gets exploited. And then "fixed" with an over-correction which just leads to more problems.