I think that having GMs update offensive line bots would be too involved but I really like the idea of GMs customizing their offensive lines with a pool of TPE or drafting randomly generated linemen. That customization and team identity would add another little wrinkle into team management which would be interesting.
The issues I can see are:
1. How to keep the offensive line balanced with the rest of the league as average TPE increases season by season? This will take some testing to find the right balance but I would say start them off at x TPE where x is whatever testing shows provides the best balance to the league right now then increase the bot TPE pool by 6 (or however many bot linemen each team will keep) times 50-75% of total TPE available to active players. Monitor sack rates and average rushing yards per carry going forward to see if the linemen are keeping up with the league and adjust if necessary.
2. How frequent should the offensive line turnover be? Are we re-creating/drafting every lineman every offseason? Give each team 2 (or 3 or 1 or whatever) swaps per offseason? If offensive linemen bots get better every offseason to scale with the league this could get thorny.
3. How can we integrate people who want to and like playing offensive line into this new system? This is definitely the hardest part in my opinion. Semi-active linemen should be better than bots to give the human priority but having active/semi-active linemen shouldn't give a team a large advantage so that people don't feel obligated to take one for the team. This is why I think a system like "3000 TPE lineman pool, divide amongst however many linemen you don't have a human player for" wouldn't work since a human offensive lineman switching to another position would cause the line bot TPE and the overall TPE of the line to drop significantly. Perhaps something like "3000 TPE lineman pool with 75% of active human linemen TPE subtracted then divided amongst however many linemen you don't have a human player for."
So for example Team A has a 600 TPE active lineman and a 500 TPE active lineman while Team B has no active linemen and each team has to carry 6 linemen. Team A gets 2175 TPE to spread amongst 4 linemen (544 TPE average) while Team B gets the full 3000 for 6 (500 TPE average). Team A has a total offensive line TPE of 3275 because of their two actives while Team B has the standard 3000.
This scenario hinges on human linemen always being at or above average bot level. Otherwise we get scenarios like where a team with a 300 TPE active lineman (2775 TPE pool for 5 bots) builds a bot line of 4 615 TPE bots and a 315 bot for bench fodder. I don't think that kind of human-bot disparity would be good for the league. What happens when the league starts hitting max builds and the offensive line bots have been scaled to keep up? Do we keep bumping up the starting TPE of human linemen so that they basically start maxed? How do new creates in, say, season 15 catch up to 10 seasons of scaling bots that are up to 1800 TPE or whatever and teams get for free? Why would any team draft a lineman? This would be somewhat fixed by not subtracting any of the active linemen TPE from the pool but that goes back to giving current offensive linemen an obligation to stay even though they don't really want to. Perhaps a number somewhere between 0% and 75% of human TPE subtracted from the pool finds the right balance.
Another interesting thing about a system like that would be how much min-maxing we'd like to prevent. Say a team has 3000 TPE for 6 lineman and wants to create an 900 TPE left tackle, an 900 TPE left guard, an 900 TPE center, and 3 100 TPE bots as filler. Is that good for the league? Is it an interesting team identity or would it cause further imbalance?
Obviously most of the above ideas are half-baked at best but I think that type of system could work, even if it is a bit complicated, in conjunction with an overhaul of the OL template/update scale to keep them competitive. There's a very real danger here of causing more trouble than we solve if we're not careful, though.
As I was typing this there were some posts suggesting a cap on the number of customized bots (that is, forcing each team to carry 1 or 2 human linemen). I'm behind enough at work as it is so I can't go back and edit the above but I do think that's a great idea to alleviate some of the concerns I mentioned. I wouldn't make it position-specific (ie: force all human OLs to be LTs or Cs) so that people can keep a certain flavor to their lineman if they'd like but a minimum human player threshold could be a big help.
The issues I can see are:
1. How to keep the offensive line balanced with the rest of the league as average TPE increases season by season? This will take some testing to find the right balance but I would say start them off at x TPE where x is whatever testing shows provides the best balance to the league right now then increase the bot TPE pool by 6 (or however many bot linemen each team will keep) times 50-75% of total TPE available to active players. Monitor sack rates and average rushing yards per carry going forward to see if the linemen are keeping up with the league and adjust if necessary.
2. How frequent should the offensive line turnover be? Are we re-creating/drafting every lineman every offseason? Give each team 2 (or 3 or 1 or whatever) swaps per offseason? If offensive linemen bots get better every offseason to scale with the league this could get thorny.
3. How can we integrate people who want to and like playing offensive line into this new system? This is definitely the hardest part in my opinion. Semi-active linemen should be better than bots to give the human priority but having active/semi-active linemen shouldn't give a team a large advantage so that people don't feel obligated to take one for the team. This is why I think a system like "3000 TPE lineman pool, divide amongst however many linemen you don't have a human player for" wouldn't work since a human offensive lineman switching to another position would cause the line bot TPE and the overall TPE of the line to drop significantly. Perhaps something like "3000 TPE lineman pool with 75% of active human linemen TPE subtracted then divided amongst however many linemen you don't have a human player for."
So for example Team A has a 600 TPE active lineman and a 500 TPE active lineman while Team B has no active linemen and each team has to carry 6 linemen. Team A gets 2175 TPE to spread amongst 4 linemen (544 TPE average) while Team B gets the full 3000 for 6 (500 TPE average). Team A has a total offensive line TPE of 3275 because of their two actives while Team B has the standard 3000.
This scenario hinges on human linemen always being at or above average bot level. Otherwise we get scenarios like where a team with a 300 TPE active lineman (2775 TPE pool for 5 bots) builds a bot line of 4 615 TPE bots and a 315 bot for bench fodder. I don't think that kind of human-bot disparity would be good for the league. What happens when the league starts hitting max builds and the offensive line bots have been scaled to keep up? Do we keep bumping up the starting TPE of human linemen so that they basically start maxed? How do new creates in, say, season 15 catch up to 10 seasons of scaling bots that are up to 1800 TPE or whatever and teams get for free? Why would any team draft a lineman? This would be somewhat fixed by not subtracting any of the active linemen TPE from the pool but that goes back to giving current offensive linemen an obligation to stay even though they don't really want to. Perhaps a number somewhere between 0% and 75% of human TPE subtracted from the pool finds the right balance.
Another interesting thing about a system like that would be how much min-maxing we'd like to prevent. Say a team has 3000 TPE for 6 lineman and wants to create an 900 TPE left tackle, an 900 TPE left guard, an 900 TPE center, and 3 100 TPE bots as filler. Is that good for the league? Is it an interesting team identity or would it cause further imbalance?
Obviously most of the above ideas are half-baked at best but I think that type of system could work, even if it is a bit complicated, in conjunction with an overhaul of the OL template/update scale to keep them competitive. There's a very real danger here of causing more trouble than we solve if we're not careful, though.
As I was typing this there were some posts suggesting a cap on the number of customized bots (that is, forcing each team to carry 1 or 2 human linemen). I'm behind enough at work as it is so I can't go back and edit the above but I do think that's a great idea to alleviate some of the concerns I mentioned. I wouldn't make it position-specific (ie: force all human OLs to be LTs or Cs) so that people can keep a certain flavor to their lineman if they'd like but a minimum human player threshold could be a big help.
![[Image: h5Ta7H1.png]](https://i.imgur.com/h5Ta7H1.png)
