Player Ratings: Ping Quiksand et al

[Bonegavel]

Quik,

How would you like the Player's Ratings handled? I'm still creating my football-sim requirements doc and I'm not sure how I want to handle this aspect.

In real life, the scouts watch college game film, attend games, look at combine scores (if available), and talk with coaches/other scouts, and some other factors.

I am going to perform an analysis on draft positions and career results of actual players, with the thought that the higher a player is drafted, the better a team feels a player will be. I'm sure this has already been done, but it will be a good excercise.

It seems to me that real-life drafting is more art/luck than science. Throw in injuries and the balance falls further into the former.

In a sim, I think if the scouting/draft sections of the game were more interactive, I think there would be more forgiveness for a more random outcome. As it is in FOF4, you have ZERO interaction with draftees. You basically get a list of players and a rating that you had nothing to do with, other than your static scouting ratings. I would love this section to be interactive, almost like scouting in TCY. In another thread many moons ago, I went into my thoughts on this, but was curious about how you (and others) think this should be handled in a sim.

[albionmoonlight]

In my perfect sim, there would be a way to measure athletic ability as distinct from football ability. On the one hand, you have the athletic measureables--speed, height, strength, vertical, etc. On the other hand, you have the more intangible aspects--can he anticipate where the football is going to be, can he tackle, does he always seem to find the soft spot in the zone, etc.

The athletic ability is easy to determine and would give you a sense of what a player's upside potential would be.

The football ability is harder to determine and would give you a sense of the likelyhood of that player reaching his upside potential.

Perhaps for the intangible part, you could have your staff only have a certian amount of time to watch game film, talk to college coaches, etc.. The more you focus on one player, the less time you have for others.

Your big problem in this sense is that it is impossible to recreate the draft like we want it in a computer game. Real Life teams have scouting staffs that work full time to determine who the best players are and still get it wrong a lot of the time.

If you make it too random (to provide the player with a challenge), you will get a complaint that the game is too random.

If you make it possible to find the breakouts/busts/solid players, players will figure it out and will complain that it is too easy--especially if it is not multiplayer.

[QuikSand]

I agree with most of albionmoonlight's comments, really.

Candidly, I think a perfect approach would be a combination of things, both quantitative (numeric or other gradiated ratings) and qualitative (which would be at least more difficult to place into scales or numeric data).

Look at baseball mogul, for instance (if you haven't) - or even Football mogul by the same people. You see young players in those games, and in addition to their numeric ratings, you get a few sentences from your scout. Now, in FM, that is so poorly executed as to be laughable - but in concept, it's a great idea. I'd love to see a mix of data (college stats, perhaps, but certainly things like quantitative measures of speed, strength, and so forth-- along with intangibles like "he's the last one left in the film room" or "workout warrior" or "might need proper incentives to stay focused" and so on. If that kind of thins is meaningful in the game, I think it could add a huge element to the elusive immersion factor that we all covet.

[QuikSand]

Just to clarify one thing.

As much as I love the FOF series, I really differ with Jim's "vision" in one major way - and it's right in the middle of this conversation.

I think having ratings that are themselves the end product of several components gives too much away. When I scout a linebacker, I want to assess his physical skills (size, speed, agility, etc) along with his other complementary skills (reading plays, eluding blockers, making tackles, etc) to come up with my own opinion of how well he will perform against the run, or how well he will rush the passer. I think that kind of subtlety would be a very good thing. (Plus, it would allow a much greater sense of "sculpting" a team in a particular way than is possible with the FOF ratign system)

In FOF, we see numeric ratings for things like "run defense." What does that leave to the imagination? I don't have to look at his size, his speed, or try to put several things together - if the numbers say he's good against the run, all that work has already been done for me. I think that the FOF rating system simply gives too much away in that sense.

While the nature of numeric ratings itself leaves much to be desired (it tends to lead us to trust them far more than we trust on-field performance, I think) I think the bigger fault in FOF is the nature of the things portrayed by th "numbers." Id settle for a system of numbers that still needed to be assembled together in some elusive fashion to get the end results we wanted - allowing us to make our own interpretation in what to value as we seek players.

[Bee]

I agree with Quiksand with the approach. The issue becomes the difficulty of programming it. That type of game seems to me to be the most difficult to get right. First, the generation of new players becomes a much more difficult task. You not only have to generate accurate ratings, but also college statistics and data that reflect information that is not otherwise available. You can't make things too accurate or too random, they basically have to be "perfect" or you have a serious design flaw. Another issue becomes the "football engine" itself. Once again, you need an engine that will efficiently use ratings (both known and hidden) to generate accurate enough statistics so the gamer can figure out a player's strengths and weaknesses without the results being so dead-on that there are no surprises, etc.

I guess basically when some of the information is hidden and the gamer has to figure it out, you increase the challege a great deal but you also increase the need for the game to be accurate and balanced so the "hidden" information is still communicated to the gamer in other ways without it being too obvious. I think it's by far the best way to approach a game, but it's also the most difficult.