*New Archetypes Proposal - Wide Receiver

[Swanty]

Something tc said made me relook at this. The purpose of this was to provide more different options, but based on the results you’ve made 5 of the exact same receiver. Like at lwr, 5 catches, 98 yards, 0.7 td no matter which archetype you choose. Shouldn’t the idea be to have one option that catches more balls but at a lower average, one that catches fewer balls but at a higher average, etc?

The purpose of this was to provide variety of options indeed, but options that can be all be considered viable for a new player to choose. They're not exactly the same as you can see from the last image. There is far more variety in builds, they just average out to perform more equally. Our current archetypes are more similar in terms of build but wildly different in terms of output.

Of course it would be ideal to come up with archetypes which are not only all viable, but which perform better in different situations. Right now, we have 3 archetypes which perform almost identically in terms of completion percentage (Poss, RR, Speed), but Speed completely outclasses the other two in terms of yards per catch. So there's no real game situation that we can control through strategy where the former two are better, or even equal, to Speed.

In trying to balance them, we do see completion rate differences. Target Man then Physical have the best 2, then Speed and Athlete are equal, then Pocket Rocket has the worst. Their yards per catches are more even (17.3-18.7) than the 3 current archetypes, but that's necessary to make them all options.

As TC alluded to above, this study is very broad, using only the Balanced playbook to achieve a much more equal, average performance than before. And because the end results are so close together, it's likely that each playbook/formation combination is going to have one given archetype perform the best, while that archetype will need to be worse in another situation to make it balance.

No doubt this will get tested to death if released, and teams might realise that Athlete works best at LWR for Spread but is terrible at RWR on Power for example, but I've got no intention of trying to define the metagame for teams. This was intended to provide 5 archetypes that could legitimately be selected by a new player and allow them to be competitive, minimising the risk of being asked a few seasons in to switch over to Speed and ruin the immersion they've created with their player.

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Thoughts:

I've never seen height or weight have an effect on WR performance in this sim so you might want to vet that.

It does. WRs would be wise to max theirs out!

85 strength and 95 speed might result in a need to redo TE archetypes as at that point you really make them weaker, especially something like the vertical TE.

This makes sense, especially if people start playing the Physical archetype at TE. Would likely need to be tested to death alongside archetype changes for all other positions.

LWR vs RWR vs Slot has a lot to do with the playbooks. They each have a different amount of targets by position etc. Balanced targets the LWR the most excluding the two-TE formation where it targets RWR more, and in spread Slot gets the most targets. But this target % is highly variable based upon the number of receptions and the hands stat of the receiver.

Yep, agreed. No doubt even though the average works out even, some of these archetypes will be better in certain playbooks. But it's nice to know that all archetypes will have certain playbook/position combinations out there that work for them. That's for the teams to figure out in my opinion.

We need to be careful using efficiency metrics as the yardstick here. While it's an easy way to look at things we need to remember that efficiency by design is going to change based upon target volume. More receptions, speed drops. More yards, speed drops. Pretty soon your player is crawling along the field by catch 9. A player that is designed to catch more balls and get more first downs (red zone etc) is going to be less efficient, that doesn't make them worse. A player that is designed to drop more passes is going to be more efficient, even with the drops, that's fine, it doesn't make them better necessarily.

That makes sense, and might merit testing again with different tempos to see if one archetype hits that cap a lot earlier than others.

Edit: Me again. The sample size is really confusing me. I'm trying to figure out overall win % (as thats more important than home vs away imo) and if your methodology is that you played the other 13 teams an equal amount of times but I'm coming up with 57.08 games per team? And why is the sample size twice the size for your reworked archetypes, which this is 114.15 games per team? As it stands, control win rate was exactly 50% for 3 archetypes and 50.9% for route runner.

What do you mean by overall win %? In this study, I was the away team the whole time as I believe that takes into account more attributes like Endurance, as when playing at home it doesn't really play a part. It also allowed me to keep the win% around 50% as that allows for more visible variance in win %. And yes the sample size number wasn't exactly spot on. I think it was 57 for some teams and maybe 58 for one team.