[Breeze]

Thanks for the input guys. I was afraid that things were a bit too abstract.

I must admit, I’ve been very pleased with the way the game is playing. The 4 tournaments have gone well, as we’ve had some rounds as low as 66 and as high as 78 with most hanging around par. I haven’t checked the last course yet but the other 3 were played slightly below par for all golfers, which is a pretty good spot. Training is going pretty well too, I’m not having any unusual outcomes, which is a relief. However, I obviously need to fill you guys in some more on how this game works.

To begin, it is important to understand your skills and attributes are BY FAR the most important thing in determining how you are going to score. The higher you are in your skills/attributes the better your chance to do well. Almost every birdie opportunity and par save references a skill or skills, attribute or attributes, or combination of the two. SOP and pin difficulty are about equal in their impact on the outcomes on a round. However, each course is different, and the impact of SOP, PIN, SKILLS and ATTRIBUTES is different each time, in fact, it is different hole to hole (and I do expect you’ll start to see more of an impact for SOP moving forward).

In the write ups of the courses, there are clues in the course descriptions that can be interpreted to determine what skills might be checked or what SOP might seem appropriate. For instance:

From the course we just finished:

Hole 1 : Par 4, 471 Yards
This par 4 has a big fairway allowing players to take a rip early. Players can get in trouble off the tee if they leave the ball right and find the scrub palm areas, but a long drive sets up an open approach. The green is large with subtle breaks but most players will be thinking about an early birdie to start the round.

Here the Big Fairway comment indicates DA probably isn’t all that important and DL is going to be looked at instead. Trouble leaving the ball right – probably CM – knowing how to avoid the trouble. Getting into the scrub palms probably requires scrambling. Subtle breaks mean PA is likely. Moreover, the take a rip piece might be a good indication this hole is one that an aggressive SOP on the tee is a good plan.

Let’s take a second to look at the first hole at the Augusta National Major for our next tournament…
It’s a pretty straightforward hole. It’s a driver, some of the longer guys may hit a 3-wood. Ideally, you want to aim something down that left-center (DA or CM or both?) and hit a nice little power fade and try to keep it out of that bunker on the right-hand side. You can get away with it from that bunker sometimes, but it is a pretty big lip and can be a tough spot (SP). Depending on the conditions, you can have anything from 4-iron (LI) to an 8- or 9-iron (SI). The green slopes pretty much back-to-front, there’s a little tier in the middle-right section. It’s one of the more underrated, difficult greens (PA & PS) out there. You can have putts with 7 to 8 feet of break. It’s such a tough green, especially the front 1/3 of it. If you’re hitting something shorter and you have any spin, and you land it on the front third, it’s coming off quite a bit, to a spot that’s not the easiest up-and-down (SG). If you miss it left to a back-left pin, you’re completely dead and happy to make a bogey.

This should give you an idea of how to determine what is being checked on a given hole.

Now, what to do once you have a feeling on how that hole will play.

SOP is the only aspect you can adjust while you are in a tournament, and it does play a role. In fact, I recall it impacting 1 round for a player by 3 shots – so far from insignificant. As you probably already expect Aggressive will get you more birdies but also potentially lead to more bogeys (I believe there were several aggressive bogeys in the last round of the FOFC Bay Harbor Memorial you can use as a reference). Normal plays the hole straight up, and conservative may cost you some birdie opportunities, but it can also keep you from bogey or worse. The biggest key is probably - you really shouldn’t be aggressive with something you aren’t good at. For example, if your SG is poor, aggressive SOP for short game is probably going to get you in more trouble than it will help. Also, some holes that have a lot of trouble on them can be played more conservatively, basically surrendering the birdie early but by playing shorter off the tee and to the middle of the green you also pretty much eliminate bogey. The inverse of that is also true, holes with very little trouble listed or ones that say something to the effect of “aggressive players can be rewarded”, “inviting players to take a rip”, or “the fairway is wide open”, can be read as invitations to increase to a more aggressive SOP. The trick here is knowing when to be aggressive and when to back off. With this knowledge I expect we will start to see SOP become more of a factor moving forward.

Also keep in mind – you can absolutely set your SOP perfectly on every hole and still perform poorly, as the outcome is so heavily determined by which of your skills/attributes are checked. Let me take a second to explain how the holes work. Each hole is broken down for difficulty (and that is determined based on the actual scoring average of the hole on tour). The tougher the hole the fewer the opportunities for birdie and/or the tougher the skill/attribute check. Let’s say an average hole has about 1/3 chance of birdie and bogey and 2/3 chance of par with birdie and bogey for the most part equally balanced, and the odds of birdie going down on tougher holes and up on easier ones.

Training is a little more complex which will make explaining it more difficult, but we’ll give it a try. Everything your character does in training and while playing has an impact on your skills/attributes, and the most important aspect of training is maximizing your hours. By doing so you will have more time to spread around which potentially increase your improvement results more rapidly. Also, if you think about the training hours you provide me…Driving, Ball Striking, Short Game, Putting, and specific hours for each of the skills – all of these are geared toward the skill side of you character, that means that the attributes are trained through the other aspects – in other words – rounds of play. So playing practice rounds, gambling, and tournament rounds are what improve your attributes, but not every round is created equally, obviously playing on the weekend is more stressful than the opening round so some skills are more impacted by the appearance on a Saturday and Sunday. Also, if you miss the cut, you need to make sure to get rounds in training that week to offset the lack of play from the 2 rounds you were cut from participating in.

As for your skill/attribute scores – the numbers you provided me were the base scores. From there training occurs each week and you get a post training score, which takes your training score for that week and adds it to your base. However, the total added can vary from week to week even if the hours trained does not. For instance, you may train 4 hours total in DA every week…and one week get 4 points added to your total and the next week get 0 points. That is simply an indication of how well you practiced, not that you have your hours allocated incorrectly. Training or lack of training depending on the hours allotted can adjust your skills -10 to +10. At the conclusion of the week, your trained totals are added to a skills/attribute pool and then they impact the overall score which becomes your new base moving forward. So with training you can disperse your hours across all of your skills evenly, which will typically prevent any drops in base score but the climb will be slower, or you can identify a skill you want to increase, disperse enough to prevent your skills from declining too much and focus hard on a skill or two that you want to improve. As far as the total number of hours you should train, keep in mind in this game golf is your occupation not a weekend hobby, you should be training like it is your job. Also, as far as burnout goes – there are 3 different areas where burnout can get you. However, if you get burnout – the course write ups should make it very obvious (and your skill/attribute scores inexplicably dropping should clue you in too). That leads me to:

I believe that by simply posting the scores from the first two rounds rather than the results is causing a huge disconnect. As you’ve noticed the results write ups will provide some clues as to the skills/attributes, PIN, and or SOP that might come into play on that hole. Therefore, moving forward I will post hole by hole results for all of the FOFC players (I won’t do the NPCs in the interest of time and effort). This should allow you to make assumptions on changes in SOP that could be beneficial in the upcoming rounds.

I hope this helped some. I’m pretty sure it probably also prompted some additional questions, so please feel free to ask away. At this point I’ve outlined what I can think is important, but I have the game in front of me so it’s possible I’m overlooking something that from your perspective would be beneficial to know. Don’t hesitate to ask, I want you guys to enjoy this.