*The League As I See It-Part 1: Player Progression

[Rusfan]

Introduction:

Hello all! You know me as Rusfan, or Joel Drake safety for the Colorado Yeti. Some of you may even know my first name (a fact I haven’t exactly kept hidden). But regardless of what name you know me by, I hope that my now 9 months in this league have been made a more pleasant one for others by my presence in it. So as we approach the ¾ anniversary of my first time in the league, and continue my 5th season, I think it’s an appropriate time to look back on my experiences in the league and muse on its future.


Also I may have lost a bet this past in-game week and need money.

Player Progression:

TPE: Training Points Earned. It’s what is supposed to determine your skill on the field. If you bother to venture into the media section of this league you’ll no doubt be familiar with the way it’s earned: activity checks, weekly training, PTs, predictions, equipment, and, if you’re lucky, fantasy. The idea is a simple and compelling one: You want to be good on the field? Earn as much TPE as you can. However there is a problem. How much you earn has very little to do with your players’ skill on the field.

Oh, of course if you join the league at 50 TPE and fail to even hit triple digits, your player may be useful for a season in the DSFL, but you won’t go anywhere past that. But from the average earners up to the Frostbite’s of the world, it can be very hard to distinguish who is who on the field. I’m not necessarily talking about average earners who play like superstars, or even the reverse where really high earners struggle. It’s the case a lot of the time in real life that really talented players can coast off of that talent for success even without working hard, and really hard working players are just not talented enough to make it. But it’s my personnel belief that within the rules of a world we control, we should aim to make the outcome as controllable as possible so that peoples actions and choices make the maximum possible effect on the outcome.

So here’s how I see the problem breaking down with player progression:
There are some players that seem to have a predetermined level of skill regardless of the earnings of the user
The talent pool is so equal and spread out that no one player or team stands out simply because of their own level of earning
That same progression system seems to make getting to that upper level of talent too easy, making what should be average players seem equal to those who should be above them
So to put it simply: The talent of some players is out of their control, talented players have no real way of standing out, and truly talented users are too grouped in to the rest of the pack to make any real difference. It’s sort of like having a bell curve where some points are on the low end, some on the high end, and most packed towards the middle, but the curve is taken and then squished so that every point is made closer together and they all seem to be the same. You have a 99 overall running back and a decent offensive line, and as a user you’re a max earner and you have over $100M in the bank? Well that’s too bad because the defensive lineman are all 95’s with just decent updating, Good luck! So, how do we fix this?

Now of course there isn’t much we can do within the confines of the simulation itself, a topic I will cover in another section, but we don’t deal strictly within the sim itself. The entirety of 90% of this league runs on the website you’re on right now. The earnings section as of now has about 3 separate tasks you can work on to earn up to a total of 11 TPE just this week. The entirety of a player getting better or worse happens right here. We can change and control how that happens. So here are a couple of proposals that can easily be implemented as of next season:

Add even more tiers of higher TPE to the rating column

Just 1 season ago, the ratings of 90-100  all cost 15 TPE to get 1 upgrade for whatever skill you were upgrading. This past offseason it was determined (correctly) that getting that last tear of super elite traits was too easy, so we made a new level gap. Suddenly if you wanted to make an upgrade past 95, you would need to apply 25 TPE for each upgrade. Only 10 more TPE per upgrade may not seem like a lot, especially with not many traits going above that 95 threshold, but that extra block to development has been a good start to adding parity among even the best players. I propose we go even further. I’d take this one of three ways.

One: Each new level of traits requires a certain amount of TPE to begin upgrading. Now someone smarter than me would have to do the math on this, but let’s say you wanted to improve your strength as a defensive lineman from the 70’s to the 80’s. Well before you could go from a 79 to an 80, maybe you had to hit 250 TPE first. You wouldn’t need to apply it, you would just need to earn it, the same way we do contract minimums. So if you really wanted to max out that one trait first, it would require holding back the development of other traits like tackling for example.

Two: We expand upon the idea already in place. As shown before, we’ve already added an extra tier for the very top of the ratings scale, but what if we did that for the rest of the scale? So if you wanted to get from 90-95, it would require more TPE than it does now. Or maybe you just add that boost to the upper half of the scale for each tier. So 80-85 wouldn’t be affected, but 85-90 would. Same with 70-75 not changing, but 75-80 would, and so on, and so forth. This way, to break into the next tier it would cost more, but it would let up for a little bit of development before you got back to the upper tier of the scale. We see this all the time in real life sports where a player improves very quickly on the little aspects of whatever “skill level” he’s on, but great strides of improvement take much longer to happen and usually occur over the course of an offseason.

Three: As with the traits system we have now, where you are required to both meet skill levels and spend TPE to unlock whatever trait it is you want, do the same with each tier of the skill leveling. You want to be able to access ratings of 90 and up? You have to spend 20 TPE before you can start earning that. This in my opinion is the most easily applicable and sensible option. It doesn’t massively change anything, and the rest of the system itself stays largely as it is. Just at these specific points you have to jump over a hurdle to keep improving. Again I think this system of a slight pause can really change certain builds. Do you save up to really make a trait elite? Or do you try to balance yourself out before going for the really high ratings? I would determine both off the field development and on the field performance.

Make the economy even more important to earning

As of right now, your money matters for two things: Weekly Training and Yearly Equipment. $1M for 5 TPE a week and $500k for 3 TPE. and an entire scale of cost for your equipment culminating in Tier 6 for 30 TPE that costs $13.5M. After that, your money is practically meaningless. Oh sure you can make some bets at the casino, but if you don’t really gamble that entire section of the site means nothing to you. So here’s my proposal: make even normal earning cost money. The issue I see with the current system is thus, players like Infinite or others with 100’s of millions in the bank, people that make tons of content for the league and otherwise make a bigger impact on the community as a whole aren’t as strongly represented on the field as I think they should be. The exact numbers wouldn’t be up to me but maybe the weekly PTs would require a cost of whatever amount to take part, or maybe make more equipment purchases or upgrades throughout the season, so that those with more money will have more opportunities to get ahead than others without. Now I know the immediate argument will be thus: “But Rusfan, what about the new users and those without the opportunity to earn right away?” and my solution would be to not make these things cost any money until your player is in the ISFL. While your player is developing, you don’t have to pay for these things until you get called up. You then get at least one, probably two seasons to earn enough money to keep yourself solvent while in the pros.

Spread out the talent in the league
This section will be rather short, in fact I could condense it down to one word and an entire future section: Expansion.

To give this section a nice TL;DR: The progression system is nice for new players, but leads to an oversaturation of talent on the field and could use quite a bit of balancing.

[Big Edd]

Just don’t update belive me it works

[.Laser]

90-100 was previously 15 TPE, now 90-95 is 15 and 95-100 is 25

[deadlunatic]

I like the idea of this in theory. How it could be applied would be interesting

[Kotasa]

Personally disagree with normal earning costing money, there are a lot of players who are very low key in the league who don't earn a lot of money and already struggle to have enough money for weekly training let alone equipment. I think the theory is fine but it is more likely to punish the low end people of the league than actually make an impact on the top 10 users.

[Kyamprac]

Personally disagree with normal earning costing money, there are a lot of players who are very low key in the league who don't earn a lot of money and already struggle to have enough money for weekly training let alone equipment. I think the theory is fine but it is more likely to punish the low end people of the league than actually make an impact on the top 10 users.

This. I'm not even a huge fan of the new TPE scale because it makes the grind harder on our more casual players. Not everyone is a max or even high earner, but many of the proposed changes tossed around as of late seem to be more focused on those who earn more.

Think this could just exacerbate the whole "people stay down in the DSFL too long" issue. Sure, expansion might force the call-up of some of the lower earning guys to fill a DC - but what impact will they have and will it even be worth their time to pay attention and stick around the league if they can't compete?