Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Hey man what's the name of your channel? I can't get any of your YouTube videos to load in Tapatalk.

My Youtube name is cyberzjx, you can find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvgY4MPQSyYJpOH2AUbACZw

[Rocket32]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Hey trekfan, what MyLeague sliders are you currently using? If you don't mind I'd appreciate it if you could post them in here.

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Hey trekfan, what MyLeague sliders are you currently using? If you don't mind I'd appreciate it if you could post them in here.

At the moment I'm trying to test out some new ones. Though my initial sliders did fine for my purposes, MyLeague's progression really skews the open 3pt rating the further into the future you go. I was sim testing a new set last night and found that, by 2021, there were 76 players in the NBA who had an open 3pt rating of 90 or more.

As such, that skewed the 3pt FG% and there were multiple teams that had had a 40+% shooter from deep -- the Suns had 7 of them on the same roster.

There's a group of us with a thread here:

http://www.operationsports.com/forum...-myleague.html

We're trying to find some combination of sliders to prevent this from occurring that

A) Don't crush Rookie progression to the point it's nonexistent and
B) Don't boost the open 3pt rating sky high years down the line

There are a number of conclusions in there we've reached (it's got good info in it, so read through it to get a better understanding), but what it looks like, at this point, is that the user will have to use the global edit function at the beginning of each season to force down the open 3pt rating, limiting the league to between 28-34 really good open 3pt shooters (90 or above rating).

So, at the moment, my slider-set works, but it also produces too many open 3pt shooters. Rookie progression also seems a little slow to me as well, so I'm still in the midst of testing. I'm running with these:

Player Progression: 53
Player Regression:52
In-Season Training: 50

I'm operating under the assumption at the moment that there's no slider fix for the open 3pt issue and that it'll have to be tuned by the devs on the back end. As such, the next issue is player development. I feel like progression should be set to 60 and regression set to 70 (or 65 progression, 80 regression) to help the next crop of stars in the league ascend faster. Peak starts/ends and roster balance are also big factors to consider, but I don't have enough data to draw a decent conclusion at this point as the CPU, in sim mode, tends to covet similar players and that costs development time for some of the younger rookies.

[Teleo]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

At the moment I'm trying to test out some new ones. Though my initial sliders did fine for my purposes, MyLeague's progression really skews the open 3pt rating the further into the future you go. I was sim testing a new set last night and found that, by 2021, there were 76 players in the NBA who had an open 3pt rating of 90 or more.

As such, that skewed the 3pt FG% and there were multiple teams that had had a 40+% shooter from deep -- the Suns had 7 of them on the same roster.

There's a group of us with a thread here:

http://www.operationsports.com/forum...-myleague.html

We're trying to find some combination of sliders to prevent this from occurring that

A) Don't crush Rookie progression to the point it's nonexistent and
B) Don't boost the open 3pt rating sky high years down the line

There are a number of conclusions in there we've reached (it's got good info in it, so read through it to get a better understanding), but what it looks like, at this point, is that the user will have to use the global edit function at the beginning of each season to force down the open 3pt rating, limiting the league to between 28-34 really good open 3pt shooters (90 or above rating).

So, at the moment, my slider-set works, but it also produces too many open 3pt shooters. Rookie progression also seems a little slow to me as well, so I'm still in the midst of testing. I'm running with these:

Player Progression: 53
Player Regression:52
In-Season Training: 50

I'm operating under the assumption at the moment that there's no slider fix for the open 3pt issue and that it'll have to be tuned by the devs on the back end. As such, the next issue is player development. I feel like progression should be set to 60 and regression set to 70 (or 65 progression, 80 regression) to help the next crop of stars in the league ascend faster. Peak starts/ends and roster balance are also big factors to consider, but I don't have enough data to draw a decent conclusion at this point as the CPU, in sim mode, tends to covet similar players and that costs development time for some of the younger rookies.

Trekfan, you have always been so helpful in providing information to my questions when i have asked. Do you have My League settings created for yourself and that you could share? I don't want to begin a dynasty until I know a proper set up. Thank you in advance!

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story



Ch. 23


That offseason also saw us change our uniforms — yet again. The Hawks were pissed that we had co-opted their colors and had used some of their designs to inform ours. All’s fair in love, war, and basketball, but they continued to *itch and moan to the league office all throughout the season. By the time we hit the offseason and the league meetings, the league office told us we needed to “rethink” our current uniform design. They tossed some focus group feedback our way, saying that our brand wasn’t selling as well as other teams, etc.

It was a load of bull *hit, but we got the message; they wanted new uniforms for us. I stuck Garrett on the task and my brother took to it with reckless abandon. He first insisted we go back to a white home uniform — the red just was too much in his eyes.

I hated that, but seeing as how I had the league office breathing down my neck, I said fine; if we gave that up, that would at least get the Lakers off our backs, who weren’t too pleased we had taken their special little idea. So, we junked the home reds, much to my chagrin, and went to whites.

But Garrett wasn’t one to let another team tell him how to be creative. He went through multiple design ideas, redesigned the NBA’s *hitty St. Louis logo they had originally offered us (the one with the arch) into something that was good. He wanted to use it as a primary, but frankly we couldn’t figure out how to make it work that way.



So, we used it as a home court only logo; it was the only place it appeared, as a special nod to our home fans. We altered the home court a little, not too much, but we changed up our primary logo from the ball with wings — which wasn’t exactly intimidating so much as confusing — to, basically, a big wing.

Except said wing had a small beak.



When Garrett showed me the new logo, I laughed. The Hawks got really pissed now, but we kindly reminded them that their team had once played in St. Louis and, as the St. Louis area was home to the Cardinals, our logo was meant to symbolize flight, not a particular animal. It was a bunch of technical BS, but the league office gave us the go ahead to use the logo, so long as our uniforms didn’t resemble the Hawks.

Garrett obliged and designed uniforms that represented the best of his favorite 90s duds, the ‘93 Suns. The streaking sun across the chest was a sight to behold and Garrett loved that color scheme. He pushed for us to incorporate something a bit lighter in our scheme (other than white), but I held firm that we needed to maintain the red and gold, as they were important colors to St. Louis and looked really good together.

Garrett dropped the color scheme change idea and went to work on the uniforms. They weren’t exact copies of the Suns, but the were clearly heavily influenced by them.

Phoenix came calling next to the league office, perturbed that we’d try to infringe on such a unique uniform. They weren’t pleased but they themselves weren’t using the uniform currently and their current ones were updates on the design anyway.

The Suns were easy to deal with, though, because their owner — Robert Sarver — was a greedy SOB. We slipped him some money under the table, off the books, and Sarver withdrew his complaint, satisfied that our design was an “homage” to his franchise and nothing more. With the Suns handled, the Hawks were the only one’s left and the league office ignored them, giving us the go ahead to make our redesign official.

Once we unveiled them online, we sold out in a matter of hours. We had successfully tapped into the fans with these ones and they became instant classics.

[BookWork123]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Loving the new unis, especially the away set!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Loving the new unis, especially the away set!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Oh yeah, I really like the way they turned out. SOOOOO good. The away is really nice, but the home ones have a little bit extra on them, as they have a 3d-esqe "St. Louis" on their shorts, a little something I wanted to experiment with.

Slowly but surely, my photoshop skills are coming back after being in hibernation. Definitely going to take a crack at some experimental alternates at some point in the future (next offseason perhaps) but I'm good with these and I'm glad you like them, too.

[djp73]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

LOVE THE UNIFORMS!

I know you can only have two active designs but can you save them so you can switch back without having to redesign them all over again?

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

LOVE THE UNIFORMS!

I know you can only have two active designs but can you save them so you can switch back without having to redesign them all over again?

Yes. Once you have a design you like head to "Team Designs" under the team relocation/rebranding screen in MyLeague (the one with the map of the USA) and click on "Upload/manage designs". There you'll be taken to a screen that shows your current uploaded designs and in the left upper corner will be a box that's got an upload symbol in it (arrow up or something like that). Click on that and it'll begin the process of uploading you design (including team name, team court, and team uniforms) and then it'll save it to the server as long as you don't have inappropriate text in it (the text detection filter is a bit weird sometimes, so be warned it might throw out words that seem perfectly harmless).

[djp73]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

so you could have the two main uniforms loaded up then have some alternates saved on the server?

nice

[Rocket32]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

At the moment I'm trying to test out some new ones. Though my initial sliders did fine for my purposes, MyLeague's progression really skews the open 3pt rating the further into the future you go. I was sim testing a new set last night and found that, by 2021, there were 76 players in the NBA who had an open 3pt rating of 90 or more.

As such, that skewed the 3pt FG% and there were multiple teams that had had a 40+% shooter from deep -- the Suns had 7 of them on the same roster.

There's a group of us with a thread here:

http://www.operationsports.com/forum...-myleague.html

We're trying to find some combination of sliders to prevent this from occurring that

A) Don't crush Rookie progression to the point it's nonexistent and
B) Don't boost the open 3pt rating sky high years down the line

There are a number of conclusions in there we've reached (it's got good info in it, so read through it to get a better understanding), but what it looks like, at this point, is that the user will have to use the global edit function at the beginning of each season to force down the open 3pt rating, limiting the league to between 28-34 really good open 3pt shooters (90 or above rating).

So, at the moment, my slider-set works, but it also produces too many open 3pt shooters. Rookie progression also seems a little slow to me as well, so I'm still in the midst of testing. I'm running with these:

Player Progression: 53
Player Regression:52
In-Season Training: 50

I'm operating under the assumption at the moment that there's no slider fix for the open 3pt issue and that it'll have to be tuned by the devs on the back end. As such, the next issue is player development. I feel like progression should be set to 60 and regression set to 70 (or 65 progression, 80 regression) to help the next crop of stars in the league ascend faster. Peak starts/ends and roster balance are also big factors to consider, but I don't have enough data to draw a decent conclusion at this point as the CPU, in sim mode, tends to covet similar players and that costs development time for some of the younger rookies.

Thanks for the reply. Definately a bummer if we have to worry about editing down players open 3pt shot rating at the start of every season but it's worth it to avoid that problem. One more question though, how do you decide which players on a team to edit the open 3pt shot rating down for and how do you decide how much you lower it for players?

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Thanks for the reply. Definately a bummer if we have to worry about editing down players open 3pt shot rating at the start of every season but it's worth it to avoid that problem. One more question though, how do you decide which players on a team to edit the open 3pt shot rating down for and how do you decide how much you lower it for players?

Get to your roster in MyLeague, you can toggle over past the 76ers to All Players in the NBA -- everyone on a roster or in free agency.

From there, switch to "Detailed View" and sort by open 3pt rating. At that point, just count to see how many have a rating 90 or above, then once you determine the number, it's up to you to decide which way to edit down.

Right now, I'm dropping the open 3pt rating for all players older than 30 that are 90 or above to something in the lower 80s -- usually at least 7-10 points lower. Once those are done, I then select younger players with that rating (rookies, second year pros), and decide on a case by case basis -- usually I dump them all under 90 because it's ridiculous to me to have a recent NBA player step into the league and be raining threes, especially considering the college triple is easier than the pro.

Once that's done, usually I arrive at a number between 28-34 90+ open 3pt shooters. The problem is with the progression and regression, as progression boosts that rating too much and regression doesn't impact it enough, so manually editing down both the old and young players keeps things balanced. Once the young players enter year 3, I plan to leave them alone -- there's a new crop of rookies every year which inflate the total number and veterans are always around.

30 might be too early a cutoff, but I'm not setting them back into the 60s, I just don't want them to be automatic 90s, so I feel something in the lower 80s is fair. In-Season training might bump them back up, but I haven't run enough tests yet to see if that's the case.

[Jaiveer]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Can't wait for the rest of the series this series is an insoiration for mine. Pretty much why I started. Thanks for all the work!

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Can't wait for the rest of the series this series is an insoiration for mine. Pretty much why I started. Thanks for all the work!

Thanks, man, much appreciated.

Update on the Sliders, guys, those of us working on it are zeroing on a functioning set.

The short version: In-Season Training effects have a HUGE effect on the progression system, much more than ever before in past 2K games. Setting team-training sliders for all teams (rather easy, save a good set and load them for all teams -- does not require you to ever do anything with them again) will -- it appears for the moment -- solve the issue.

I and others have been experimenting with some sliders and we're getting close. Our findings are in the thread linked above.

[trekfan]

Re: Through The Storm: A St. Louis Story

Hat tip to trekfan and others in this thread for working together too figure out how to fix the talent imbalance problems with default MyLeague Settings.

The problems basically made the league way out of whack with elite shooters and few defenders within a few short years.

To implement the fix, you will have to set up your MyLeague with 30 team control. You can set automation for 29 teams if you want, but your initial setup will require 30 team control.

MyLeague Settings: All Default
Importantly, this set makes no changes to progression, regression, training effects, or injury related settings. This set uses default draft classes at a draft class strength setting at default 50.

Changes to Team Training:

For every team, go to Team Training, go to Fundamentals, and change them to custom using the settings below. Or download the set from here:

• XB1: "Balanced MyLeague" from gamertag "Joey Ram0ne" (that's me)
• PSN: MikeLowe47, "Balanced MyLeague" from OS'er Mike Lowe
• PC: Name: "LorenzoDC's Balance" under Username "BigTicket" (thanks to joosegoose) AND also under Username "The BNESS" with File Name: "MyLeague LorenzoDC" (hat tip to de_jesus)

Additional League Management & Manual Adjustments:

• Every other year or so, go into your draft class and make an edit. Find one player with at least A- level potential and bump up his potential to A+ level.
• That's because default draft classes give you the right amount of overall A potential talent and below, but not enough A+ guys. Do it on average half the years, but you don't have to follow a strict one year on, one year off schedule. Draft classes vary. Mix it up a little.
• It's probably also a good idea to upgrade draft class guys who not only have at least A- potential, but who also have higher OVR ratings, probably 75 or higher. Otherwise they may have too far to catch up to reach their potential as 90+ level difference makers.

DO NOT BUMP DRAFT CLASS PROGRESSION! If you do, here's what will happen:

• For every extra A+ you create, you will create more A and B level guys. Your classes will become too stacked without enough misses.
• Once those extra A and B level guys start getting second contracts, your CPU managed teams will make logic mistakes and run out of cap.
• Once that happens, you will see more teams with very poorly balanced rosters through front and back court, player cuts that make no sense, and opening day free agents who should be starters somewhere.

Slider Test Results:
For you data geeks, here are some averaged results I used to develop this set. Looking at these numbers, you can see why I recommend the manual draft class edits to add an A+ every other year or so.

I ran all test simulations comparing October 28, 2016 against simulated leagues as of October 28, 2021. So, these are five year simulations.

Just so you know, I tried a few ways to vary the set with changes to player progression, player regression and in season training effects, all with the goal to get enough 90+ players in the league at once without screwing everything else up. I couldn't find any way to do it. The manual edit is so simple, it seems to me like the best approach.

Spoiler

Conclusion:
Use this slider set with these easy manual draft class edit practices and you should get a nicely balanced, tuned league that resembles the NBA over multiple years. You will see a full variety of player archetypes, realistic shooting attributes and a realistic number of players every year across the talent and potential distribution.

Feedback, comments, potential problems and such are all welcome in the comments. This is an OS community effort, and has been from the beginning.

Here we go, fellas, the sliders arrived at by Lorenzo DC. I've taken them and tested them thoroughly (with different variations on progression and regression), but the basics go like this:

1. Use the training sliders cited above (Xbox, PC, and PS4 slider shares are at the top of the quoted post).

2. Draft Class quality, player progression, and player regression are all set to 50 (default value). Any deviation from that will potential screw up the league years down line. I tested with different variations of the progression and regression sliders in the upper 50s, all the way to the mid 60s, and got increasingly screwy results. It's not worth it; rookies will hit their potential, for the most part, on the default slider but in most cases it will take the full time they have until they hit their "Peak Start."

3. Edit at least one incoming rookie with an A or A- potential to an A+ in order to keep the league's level of superstars (90 or greater overall rated players) in a good spot -- somewhere between 8-12 in my test runs.

4. Finally, bookmark THIS THREAD.

We've got all the slider information and findings there, so if something changes or a discovery is made, it'll show up there first. Check back on it periodically and if you have any questions pertaining to the sliders cited above, you very well could find the answers in the thread.

Now that all that's said, I'll be setting those sliders tomorrow for my file and we'll continue on with the story of the St. Louis Flight; Season 2 promises to be fun. As always, thanks for your continued support.