Is endurance distributed reasonably?
 

In FOF, my best guess is that the player creation system is pretty broad-brush -- players are in one of several categories, and are assigned variable ratings in accordince with that overall skill level. I guess that makes sense -- there are still the occasional guys with one or two ratings that are exceptionally high or basically zeroed-out, which adds a nice flavor -- but overall I find this to be true.

I wonder if Endurance, a rating relevant for every player, is perhaps too strongly correlated with this overall skill level? If I go perusing through the ranks of the great unwashed unclaimed free agents in any league... not only do I find tons of players with pretty marginal skills levels, but they *also* have pretty low endurance, by and large. That doesn't strike me as being really fair... I don't know what the distribution of endurance from "iron horse" to "oxygen hog" ought to be, but I don't think there ought to be tons and tons of nominally professional-caliber players who simply can't perform the basic duties of their position.

I just checked the free agent running backs (a position where endurance is suddenly a really big deal in the game) in one MP league, and among the dozens of them, there were a handful of guys with an endurance rating of about 50, and lots and lots of them who had ratings in the range of 30 or lower, just like most of their other skill ratings.


So, open question. Even if you accept the general concept that a guy from the "marginal player" creation process ought to have mostly skills that are marginal... does it make sense for that guy *also* to be cursed with low endurance? Or should that be an independent variable of some sort? (And maybe one without so many players tending toward the "not able to play very much" side?)

Personally, I might like to see a system where endurance was partially inherent, partially based on body makeup (ratio, maybe), and influenced by training camp. But no, I don't think it should really be tied to overall player skill.

Anecdotally, I see lots of guys with high skills but near-zero endurance (especially O-Linemen it seems). So I'm not sure it is applied in the same manner.

I'm not an expert in breaking down FOF data, but how difficult would it be to extract relevant data to do some analysis? (Initial thought would be that endurance, overall rating, experience and position for all signed players and free agents (in a suitably mature 'universe', so the data isn't skewed by the initial player file, which probably won't be consistent with the players coming into the league each year through the draft) would be sufficient to get an initial impression of the distribution of endurance, and how this is affected by the quality of player - think that you may need to exclude some of the older guys who have started to decline (as this may skew the analysis...))

Just a thought (and one I'm not really qualified to follow up on, so feel free to ignore it if this doesn't make much sense).

Martin

It's actually not all that hard. I just need to make some tweaks to my Extractor in the 2k7 Utility Suite to make sure it works on regular roster players, and that the "step through every team" code still works for 2k7, and you can get a monster spreadsheet of every player in the game, including attributes.

The complicating factor is that each position has a variable number of attributes, so you need a way to extract the endurance columns based on position from the resulting CSV data.

It'll be a while before I get back to Extractor, though. I'm working on an Interrogator update with a bunch more stats, and I want to get a couple of Draft Analyzer tweaks in before the WOOF draft, so this is a bit down the list right now.

w00t!

This is one thing that bugs me. Have we even figured out what endurance means in FOF? Is it the ability to play for long stretches, or is it the ability to resist injury?

There is a seperate, hidden rating that represents the players injury propensity. Endurance may play a role, but there is an actual rating for it.