Posted by uneedusman on 1/29/2012 11:43:00 PM (view original):
First, norbert, thank you so much for not only your efforts but also your attempts to seek input from the users. Whether WifS recognizes it or not, your efforts are making money for them by keeping people like me playing in anticipation of some improvements to GiD.
I'll try not to let this post get too long but I've been thinking about this idea for a while. As you're probably aware, since the last major engine change, most users seem to believe that there is some random factor affecting the outcome of games. No one wants a game in which the team with the best players wins every game, but if there is a random factor making players sometimes play above or below their ratings, I believe that we should know what that factor is. This is a ratings based simulation, not real life. Unknown factors produce unexplainable results which then produce unhappy users, in my opinion.
So the idea that I came up with is adding a rating for each player called Focus. Focus would represent the mood, attitude, and focus of the player for each game. This rating would fluctuate completely randomly to simulate real life and would affect the way a player plays in the game that day, either in a negative way or a positive way. So a player with a higher than normal Focus rating would play above his ratings that day and a lower Focus would mean he's likely to have a subpar day. Each player could be affected differently by his Focus so that it wouldn't be obvious just how good or bad a day he was going to have. But a coach who paid attention would be able to figure out how his players would perform as their Focus went up or down after looking at each player's performance over the course of a season or a career. This would lead to more strategy is setting depth charts for each game as the coach would have to decide if, for example, his #2 RB with a higher Focus for the upcoming game should start over his #1 RB who happens to have a lower Focus for this game. And it would allow for upsets to occur and not appear as random as they appear to be currently. If the more talented team happened to have several players with low Focus ratings and his opponent had many of his players with high Focus ratings, it would help explain why an OL with a 10 point rating advantage was unable to get the running game going, or why a QB who threw only 7 interceptions in 300 pass attempts throws 4 in one game, for example.
It's just an idea. It may not even be possible. I'm sure there are things that I'm not considering and there may be better ways to address the issue. As much as we want the game to reflect real life, it is not and the results should not be artificially manipulated just to produce life-like outcomes. I just have trouble accepting the idea that there is some unknown, random factor which the users can never have any control over or knowledge of and yet it is helping to determine the outcome of a ratings based simulation.
Again, thank for all your efforts, norbert, and thanks for listening to all of us.
Well, I don't want to get this thread off track, but this is something that I feel should be addressed. There isn't a factor or setting or predetermined
anything that makes a player perform worse or better than expected. What I have mentioned before is that the randomness is in determining each and every play result. When each team lines up for a play, it simulates that play in determining how many yards a player gets on a rush or if a pass is complete or incomplete and so on. You have the base chances of different things happening at each point in the game (tackled for a loss, etc) which is where comparing to real life averages come into play. The base chances with no modifications should be similar to real life averages. Then you modify those base chances based on the players' ratings, so a higher rated player increases the chance of success and a lower rated player decreases it. Now, if you throw all the results of those plays together and the higher rated player actually doesn't have a lot of success, that's where I would say the player did not play up to expectations or "had a bad day", but this means the poor performances are left up to chance depending on how each play plays out. So there are many checks and chances for a player throughout the game and not just one randomly predetermined performance factor.