Player Development, FOOL and The Future

[Tellistto]

What I really want to see in this league. I want to see 25 seasons go by, I want the entire first crop of players gone. I want the playerbase to mature and stabilise and really see where this league goes. At this point, we don't even know if players can last past 34 years of age. Having played the NABA quickstart, however, players should last well into their 30's and even 40's with the Ronco development settings of 500 and 2000. I think a large part of the problems that we're having with this league right now is that it was created in 2008 version, and it's a VERY young universe.

Tell

[Young Drachma]

What I really want to see in this league. I want to see 25 seasons go by, I want the entire first crop of players gone. I want the playerbase to mature and stabilise and really see where this league goes. At this point, we don't even know if players can last past 34 years of age. Having played the NABA quickstart, however, players should last well into their 30's and even 40's with the Ronco development settings of 500 and 2000. I think a large part of the problems that we're having with this league right now is that it was created in 2008 version, and it's a VERY young universe.

Tell

+1

Do we want to sim a bunch of years into the future and then do a redraft, now that we can we can do a draft in-game without having to waste a lot of time? I know we talked about this in another league I'm in that converted over from an older version to a new one and while not everyone agreed, I liked the idea.

I don't expect the idea to be well-taken here either, but...I do think there is some merit to what you're saying, but I dunno what else we do other than slog through the current player base.

[Chief Rum]

But we don't have the .500-2.0 settings, right? Don't we have the latter number set to 1? I want to use what settting is certain to have players able to play into their mid to late thirties as solid players at least. I think we should see crappy to mediocre players start to retire at 36-37, with good players lasting a bit longer, maybe even making it to 40. 40+, though, should be rarer, IMO, as I think a lot of the current set of that in real life is related to steroid use.

[Young Drachma]

But we don't have the .500-2.0 settings, right? Don't we have the latter number set to 1? I want to use what settting is certain to have players able to play into their mid to late thirties as solid players at least. I think we should see crappy to mediocre players start to retire at 36-37, with good players lasting a bit longer, maybe even making it to 40. 40+, though, should be rarer, IMO, as I think a lot of the current set of that in real life is related to steroid use.

Aging is at 1.000, in Ronco's settings (which has aging at 2.000), over a long period of time guys last into their 40s, but it takes a good while to get there. In the meantime, we have to sit through it and it tears our vets apart in the meantime. Development is at .500, half of the game's defaults and the number Ronco suggests.

I lowered it to 1.000 once I saw that it was killing off our younger players. I read his study and it says that's what happens, but that overall you'll see a league that's more "realistic." I didn't see that in our case and because we swapped to it in the middle of our league, it wasn't healthy, so I dropped it down to the defaults and I think we're seeing better player modeled of our older guys as a result.

[Chief Rum]

I think we'll understand the precedent and the future guys won't even register on the list. It's not the fault of Dooley or Hughes that FOOL started up when they were already in their primes. Future guys won't even get on the ballot with numbers like these.

Sorry, just doesn't work for me. We're not going to give guys a break in the future either just because they joined from the Vulture League at 27. Them's the breaks. If these guys performed like true Hall of Famers day in and day out throughout their careers, that's one thing. But neither of these pitchers had any truly dominant seasons that I can tell. They just seemed to be solid pitchers, maybe #1s, more like #2s to me. Sorry, you have to do it for longer than 8-9 years if you expect to get on with that resume.

But as I said, it looks like the vote's not going that way.

What's funny is that in other leagues, I am usually the guy all for the more open Hall. This is below even my standards. You want to see tough; get Maple Leafs into the league.

[Tellistto]

With our current settings, players should last well into their late 30's easily. The problem is that we have a LOT of players created under the old default standards and most of our current players have peaked at a very young age. Look at all the players that were already there and came in in that first season. All of them hit their prime right off the bat without any real development time. Now with the newest players since the change to .500 development we're seeing players not reach the majors until they are in their mid to late 20's.


Like I said, this universe just needs to mature and stabilise. It's not either at this point.

Tell

[Chief Rum]

Aging is at 1.000, in Ronco's settings (which has aging at 2.000), over a long period of time guys last into their 40s, but it takes a good while to get there. In the meantime, we have to sit through it and it tears our vets apart in the meantime. Development is at .500, half of the game's defaults and the number Ronco suggests.

I lowered it to 1.000 once I saw that it was killing off our younger players. I read his study and it says that's what happens, but that overall you'll see a league that's more "realistic." I didn't see that in our case and because we swapped to it in the middle of our league, it wasn't healthy, so I dropped it down to the defaults and I think we're seeing better player modeled of our older guys as a result.

So is 1 going to result in what I was suggesting, or is it going to have our guys failing in their early 30s? Seems to me we're getting more of the later. Maybe that setting should be 1.5?

[Young Drachma]

Sorry, just doesn't work for me. We're not going to give guys a break in the future either just because they joined from the Vulture League at 27. Them's the breaks. If these guys performed like true Hall of Famers day in and day out throughout their careers, that's one thing. But neither of these pitchers had any truly dominant seasons that I can tell. They just seemed to be solid pitchers, maybe #1s, more like #2s to me. Sorry, you have to do it for longer than 8-9 years if you expect to get on with that resume.

But as I said, it looks like the vote's not going that way.

What's funny is that in other leagues, I am usually the guy all for the more open Hall. This is below even my standards. You want to see tough; get Maple Leafs into the league.

Neither played for me, so I don't care. ;) That's why it's put to a vote. Lobby away. I'm glad we're having this discussion now, so we know what kind of Hall we're likely to have.

[Young Drachma]

Like I said, this universe just needs to mature and stabilise. It's not either at this point.

Tell

Hence my question. I'll open a new thread for that.

[Young Drachma]

I gave this it's own thread, because I figured that it needed to be talked about separate from the Hall of Fame discussion. What I'm wondering is -- and I'm asking because I've heard from lots of people in the past -- do we need to simulate years into the future to let our player base stabilize, then do a redraft of the league before we start, say 20 years into the future?

It'll solve our player development issues, I think and we'll also have some benchmarks from which we can operate from, which right now we simply don't.

[Chief Rum]

Even though I have put a ton of work into this team, I would be for this idea. I like getting a little history behind us before we really get into it. We can see how the current players play out, and move out of range of the early development issues. Everyone gets a fresh restart, too, if they don't like where their team is, or if they just came into the league and were handed a neglected, crappy team.

[Chief Rum]

Even though I have put a ton of work into this team, I would be for this idea. I like getting a little history behind us before we really get into it. We can see how the current players play out, and move out of range of the early development issues. Everyone gets a fresh restart, too, if they don't like where their team is, or if they just came into the league and were handed a neglected, crappy team.

Posted the above in the Hall of Fame thread.

To add, I would also be down for a redraft in that future.

[Chief Rum]

Okay, the post moving is tripping me out.

[Young Drachma]

Okay, the post moving is tripping me out.

Sorry. Just trying to organize stuff to make it easier to read. My bad.

[Young Drachma]

That said, I'm drafting a proposal of how it would work right now. I like the idea. I think it makes a ton of sense for a lot of the concerns people are having about the league and it might induce more participation and if nothing else, put us all on an even playing field to start. It'd be like restarting the league from scratch, without the messyness of having to really start over. I don't see a downside other than the whole thing about having built up a team now and stuff, but even with that, I figure that this is a good opportunity to get a clean slate and well...it's not as if we'll have a presumptive favourite starting forward.

Best of all, it'd only take us a week to do it.

[Young Drachma]

AI trading would be off, each team would be run by AI and the reason for that is to ensure that there wouldn't be any stoppages of play during the time we were simming. We'd literally want to set the game to sim 25 years into the future (1970-1995) and then push the button and let it go.

After it was done, we'd upload the new file dated February 1, 1995, release everyone and do an inaugural draft that everyone could set draft preference lists for, obviously. The draft order would be based on overall team winning percentage for the 35 seasons of FOOL to that date. Then we'd restart our regularly scheduled FOOL play, 25 years into the future with a whole new set of players to get to know,etc., but with benchmarks and a host of other stuff that we'll able to base things on. We could even get the dreaded "Pitcher of the Year" award named after somebody.

[Chief Rum]

AI trading would be off, each team would be run by AI and the reason for that is to ensure that there wouldn't be any stoppages of play during the time we were simming. We'd literally want to set the game to sim 25 years into the future (1970-1995) and then push the button and let it go.

After it was done, we'd upload the new file dated February 1, 1995, release everyone and do an inaugural draft that everyone could set draft preference lists for, obviously. The draft order would be based on overall team winning percentage for the 35 seasons of FOOL to that date. Then we'd restart our regularly scheduled FOOL play, 25 years into the future with a whole new set of players to get to know,etc., but with benchmarks and a host of other stuff that we'll able to base things on. We could even get the dreaded "Pitcher of the Year" award named after somebody.

Based on overall winning percentage with best team drafting first or worst team? And would the draft be a snake draft?

Does AI trading stop the sim? Not sure I would want to remove a tool from the AI to fix their rosters, even if they screw it up. They screw up everything, though, so there is a decent change with trades they could fix an issue they created with bad signings and drafting.

I would guess the season would be run under the same current rules--25 man rosters, $65 M sal cap, owner budgets generally out of the equation? And do we reset fan expectations and markets again after all this?

And what happens with the Vulture League? Or how talent is brought into the league via the Vulture League? Can we automate the players coming from there to dump into the free agent pool the way it is now?

Good ideas. Looking forward to see how this goes forward. Wish we were getting more feedback from the league, though.

[Chief Rum]

Also, not to put any undue pressure on it from a personal perspective for me, but I am going on vacation a week from this Friday. Obviously, if we don't have a team in place in time, or the steps full fleshed out, I may have issues putting together my team or being available to make decisions.

So I hope we get a consensus and move it forward ASAP.

[Young Drachma]

Based on overall winning percentage with best team drafting first or worst team? And would the draft be a snake draft?

Does AI trading stop the sim? Not sure I would want to remove a tool from the AI to fix their rosters, even if they screw it up. They screw up everything, though, so there is a decent change with trades they could fix an issue they created with bad signings and drafting.

I would guess the season would be run under the same current rules--25 man rosters, $65 M sal cap, owner budgets generally out of the equation? And do we reset fan expectations and markets again after all this?

And what happens with the Vulture League? Or how talent is brought into the league via the Vulture League? Can we automate the players coming from there to dump into the free agent pool the way it is now?

Good ideas. Looking forward to see how this goes forward. Wish we were getting more feedback from the league, though.


AI Trading wouldn't stop anything. We could turn it on. Same rules would otherwise predominate. The Vulture League is just a free agent league and would operate as it does now, AI teams would sign the players and they'd join our league as they do now.

We can reset fan markets and fan interest, etc., again after we're all done if we wanted to. That's an easy fix, since we just set them to max and then let them go from there.

[Chief Rum]

So best or worst drafting first? And would it be serpentine?

I know, I know, lots of questions.

[Young Drachma]

So best or worst drafting first? And would it be serpentine?

I know, I know, lots of questions.

Worst to first. I don't know if it could be serpentine. I'm almost certain it could be, though.

[muns]

Im not keen on the idea at all, but im listening.

[Commo_Soldier]

I would not mind this if it went throught, but feel some things may need to be changed. The ingame draft list I feel does not work very well with it removing players from the list, in addition it would be hard to really set up your team. I would be in favor of using another tool that a league I am in utilizes called Getchs Utilites. We would then be able to set our draft list up on there and set to auto draft or make a pick online when it is our turn. I think this would be a better solution since this draft is too crucial to screw up because of frustration from the ingame list. Second I think we should maybe open it up to the following possiblities for draft order instead of the last 35 years.

1st ten years of Fool history, rewarding the current set of owners since the AI could run their team in the ground.
Last 10 years of the 25 year simulation. This would allow the teams that have been dominating to get a little boost since it would be somewhat random.
Go by the following: 1) Fool Championships, 2) League Championships, 3) Winning Percentage, 4) Wins. We would do number one and move down the list in the event of a tie. The order or those involved would not have to be this set.Overall I am for just playing it through as it is right now as baseball has its different era's. They lived through them and were not able to skip ahead so I think we should just live through them and slowly adapt. I would not be upset or completely against the sim if everyone else wanted this however.

[Tellistto]

I don't care how it happens, whether it takes three months or one week, I just want to see this league mature and stabilise. I want to see what becomes of it, and as fast as we've been moving it won't take that long to get to where I want to see this thing go. If in general people want to accelarate the process so that it doesn't take that three months, so be it. My original post was a general desire, not so much a wish for it to happen right now.

What really prompted this whole conversation was the HOF vote, and my questions on whether or not we really expected to see guys hit the numbers I specified or not.

Tell

[Young Drachma]

Well I remember when Ben was in the league, one of the things he said too was that he was just waiting for this first wave of players to get old and leave and get to the next generation of players. The only reason I support moving ahead now, is because it would give us a new place to start from and it might reinvigorate things in the league. Otherwise, I wonder if we'll even hold people's attention enough to get to the future.

The only thing in our favour is the fact that this league moves so fast that it won't really be a big problem forever, but...I still wonder about the stabilization factor and so if we can fix the problem now and be done with it, we ought to.

[Young Drachma]

It seems like for simplicity's sake, at least in the status quo, we ought to keep things as they are. Things will eventually even out and while I think this is an interesting idea, I think that it would probably end up causing us more problems in terms of people being confused by what happened, etc., than not.

At least we've talked about it and we can continue the conversation into the future, as we might be at a point where someday, sometime like this would be worthwhile to consider.

Just my .02

[Alan T]

I really really don't like the idea of fast forwarding and then a re-draft.. I've grown attached to my team, I feel immersion finally and I really don't want to lose all of that. Like I said before, we need to leave the various tinkering alone.. just go with the draft for adding new players (no more super-21 year old free agent prospects), and just let things shake out. It should only be a few weeks before we have a decent feel of how things will go and can plan accordingly.

I guess I'll be very dissapointed to see the league restart.

[Chief Rum]

I really really don't like the idea of fast forwarding and then a re-draft.. I've grown attached to my team, I feel immersion finally and I really don't want to lose all of that. Like I said before, we need to leave the various tinkering alone.. just go with the draft for adding new players (no more super-21 year old free agent prospects), and just let things shake out. It should only be a few weeks before we have a decent feel of how things will go and can plan accordingly.

I guess I'll be very dissapointed to see the league restart.

I guess this doesn't change now or later, but I myself am extremely down on the draft because of the stupidity of the draft list issue.

[muns]

I guess this doesn't change now or later, but I myself am extremely down on the draft because of the stupidity of the draft list issue.

can someone explain what went wrong with the draft. I missed the one and am not really sure what happened. I guess the list i did didnt work somehow??

[Young Drachma]

I really really don't like the idea of fast forwarding and then a re-draft.. I've grown attached to my team, I feel immersion finally and I really don't want to lose all of that. Like I said before, we need to leave the various tinkering alone.. just go with the draft for adding new players (no more super-21 year old free agent prospects), and just let things shake out. It should only be a few weeks before we have a decent feel of how things will go and can plan accordingly.

I guess I'll be very dissapointed to see the league restart.

We won't, don't worry. Given the divisions on it and thinking about it more, I realized that it just would be way more hassle than it's worth. I mean, if we had say 12+ active owners strongly in favour, sure. But not when less than half the league is engaged with the idea.

As for the draft list idea. I have no idea what goes wrong, because I just let the AI decide for me. I tried to install getch's utilities, but they rely on perl and it doesn't seem to load on my hosted accounts. So...we're stuck with the draft, though admittedly, I didn't want a draft for the very reasons that we're dealing with now, that it's kinda stupid.

If we could figure out a way to make the Vulture League more robust or create a high school league that's similar to it, we could get rid of the draft, since the problem with the original way we did things -- letting young players be on the free market -- was only an issue because of the MLC contracts issue with using feeders.

But that problem goes away with the use of free agent leagues. So..maybe that's our new best solution.

[gstelmack]

I'm in favor of just letting things ride. It won't be long before all the older players are out and we finally have guys working on normal development curves. If we're here in 6 or 8 seasons and I still have 27-year-old guys tanking, THEN I'll be looking to do something, but I'm okay with moving forward as we are and letting the player database shake out.

[Chief Rum]

If we stay with the here and now, I would really like to see the far end of the developmental setting moved up to somewhere between the 1 and 2 settings. 2 was apparently producing late 30s-early 40s players, from what Tell was saying. And we're seeing at least some evidence that players at the current setting are falling off too early right now at 1.

I want to know what sort of value to put on these players, and the hit and miss nature of this right now leads me to believe I'll end up having to eat some huge contract on some player who should have been good for much longer, and thereby taking much enjoyment out of things for me.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that we be reasonably certain that the players in the league right now will likely maintain some level of their current ability to the age of 34 or 35.

[Chief Rum]

can someone explain what went wrong with the draft. I missed the one and am not really sure what happened. I guess the list i did didnt work somehow??

Probably the best way to explain it is to point you to the offseason thread and read up to the part where we run the draft. You will find several posts of mine (and some from others) talking about the difficulties and inanities of the draft list program in the game.

[Young Drachma]

If we stay with the here and now, I would really like to see the far end of the developmental setting moved up to somewhere between the 1 and 2 settings. 2 was apparently producing late 30s-early 40s players, from what Tell was saying. And we're seeing at least some evidence that players at the current setting are falling off too early right now at 1.

I want to know what sort of value to put on these players, and the hit and miss nature of this right now leads me to believe I'll end up having to eat some huge contract on some player who should have been good for much longer, and thereby taking much enjoyment out of things for me.

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that we be reasonably certain that the players in the league right now will likely maintain some level of their current ability to the age of 34 or 35.


It's not unreasonable to ask. And if we could have it/do it, I think we'd do it. But the problem with OOTP, is there is NO magic bullet to this stuff. It takes decades to be able to really see how the game is modeling player development over time. The switch to 1.000 aging (the default) happened after I noticed more and more out of players dying out at 2.000, because that's intended to double the speed in which players age, not to slow it down. If we wanted to slow it down further, we'd have to lower it to below 1.000

And I have no problem with that, at all, for the record.


To be completely honest, I think unpredictability will always happen. It's part of the game and I think that for every guy that lasts into his productive 30s, there will be those who become ghosts of themselves. We're seeing a trend of guys having success years into their 30s now, when we didn't use to. No way Nathan Adams would've left Compton after two AWFUL years and go back to Brooklyn and find stellar success.

I think these are great stories and part of what makes things interesting.

I think we should continue to ride things out as we have, they are finally starting to stabilize as we stop making drastic changes to the setup and so, we'll be able to see a league that starts to come into its own in the coming years, IMHO.

[Chief Rum]

It's not unreasonable to ask. And if we could have it/do it, I think we'd do it. But the problem with OOTP, is there is NO magic bullet to this stuff. It takes decades to be able to really see how the game is modeling player development over time. The switch to 1.000 aging (the default) happened after I noticed more and more out of players dying out at 2.000, because that's intended to double the speed in which players age, not to slow it down. If we wanted to slow it down further, we'd have to lower it to below 1.000

And I have no problem with that, at all, for the record.


To be completely honest, I think unpredictability will always happen. It's part of the game and I think that for every guy that lasts into his productive 30s, there will be those who become ghosts of themselves. We're seeing a trend of guys having success years into their 30s now, when we didn't use to. No way Nathan Adams would've left Compton after two AWFUL years and go back to Brooklyn and find stellar success.

I think these are great stories and part of what makes things interesting.

I think we should continue to ride things out as we have, they are finally starting to stabilize as we stop making drastic changes to the setup and so, we'll be able to see a league that starts to come into its own in the coming years, IMHO.

Oh, did I have the directions reversed? I thought Tell said Renco's settings with 2 were having players lasting into their late 30s?

I'm no guru on the settings. I can only point to what aging effect I would like to see (35-37 for poor players, slightly younger 1-2 years for better players), and hope we can have a setting that will result in that.

[Young Drachma]

Oh, did I have the directions reversed? I thought Tell said Renco's settings with 2 were having players lasting into their late 30s?

I'm no guru on the settings. I can only point to what aging effect I would like to see (35-37 for poor players, slightly younger 1-2 years for better players), and hope we can have a setting that will result in that.

No, that's right. Ronco's settings though work better with a fresh talent pool generated from start to finish, as opposed to being grafted onto an existing set of players. It's why Ben's NABA simmed a bunch of years into the future before it started, because that's the best way to use Ronco's settings and that's why I suggested the whole 25-year time capsule solution.

Since we're not going to do that, we'd do better to stay with 1.000, because while it might not be "realistic" from a long-term modeling perspective, we'll be able to keep a lot more of our players a lot longer using the defaults than what the double of the defaults would do to us.

We can just keep monitoring the situation and after a few years, we'll know if we need to change things for sure.

[Cringer]

Glad things look to be staying the same and no sim into the future will happen. No way Rio Grande wants to miss the beginning of the punk era. :D

We can start fast forwarding when hair bands come around though.