Posts tagged "Player Development"


Several Football GM updates, including improved player and team ovr formulas

Football GM has long deserved some updates to the core of the game. Here are some.

First, and most importantly, there are new player ovr formulas for all positions. In my opinion, this was the biggest problem with FBGM. Too many players would consistently overperform or underperform their ovr rating, which made the game feel random and unpredicatable. That's especially bad in a football game, where the small number of games per season and single elimination playoffs already makes it pretty unpredictable.

Read more...


Rescaled real player development determinism

The "real player development determinism" (RPDD) setting has existed for a little while now, but it behaves somewhat unintuitively. You may have noticed that if you set it to anything above about 30%, the results feel about the same. That's weird. 30% should not be almost exactly the same as 100%.

Why does it work that way? Because of the stupid way I implemented it. The initial implementation worked like this, to find the new ratings for every player in a new season:

  1. Run the normal player development algorithm
  2. Combine that with the player's real ratings for the new season - RPDD% comes from the real ratings, and (1-RPDD)% comes from normal player development.

That may sound okay at first glance, but the problem is that every single year you're averaging a player's real ratings into the random ratings, and their real ratings tend to be correlated pretty well across years, so the real ratings will come to dominate the random ratings.

That's no fun.

Read more...


A bunch of new options for league creation: challenge modes (no draft picks, no free agents, no trades, no visible ratings), player development realism, and more

Today I added a bunch of fun new features to Basketball GM and Football GM. They're all available when you create a new league, by clicking the "More options" link at the bottom.

Different types of leagues will have different options available. This is what you see when creating a new "real players" league in Basketball GM, which has almost all of the new options available:

Some of those options (challenge modes and real player development determinism) are also available in God Mode, where you can change them in any existing league.

What exactly do all of these new options do?

Read more...


Player ratings and development changes are live

A lot of things have changed! If you want all the details, read the blog post announcing the beta. But the main points are:

Thank you to everyone who helped beta test these changes. You helped me improve it a lot from the initial beta. However, I know it's not perfect now. Why not? Because it's hard! Even if someone correctly notices an issue, it's difficult to fix it because everything is interconnected. Fix X, break Y and Z. So it's not perfect now, but it's pretty good I think. As always, please let me know if you disagree!


Player ratings and development beta!

Today I released a new beta of Basketball GM featuring big changes to player ratings.

There were a lot of things wrong with player ratings previously. For example, the career arcs of ratings were very unrealistic. For example, it was not uncommon for a player to enter the league with no jump shot and grow to become one of the all time great shooters, or for a player to enter the league with horrible athleticism but grow to become an elite athlete. Sure improvement is possible - but not that much! I mostly implemented the changes described here to make individual rating changes more realistic.

Read more...