XP slider discussion

[ZekeRoberts]

The ability to manually progress players is a gamechanger for me this year. As such, there is POTENTIAL for a good set of XP sliders to be a solid addition to what is already a fantastic sports sim. If anyone wants to contribute to a productive discussion about how to adjust these sliders, I wanted to create a thread where people can share their observations on player progression. My experience can kick things off as one extreme 😅 and I welcome people who have far different takes on what to do with this system, so that once the game feels better balanced and everyone has locked in their personal gameplay sliders (hopefully including W&T), we can rock with some amazing dynasties once we get a season opening roster update 🤞


**DISCLAIMER: I have watched the video posted in the W&T/Auto-Sub thread about how XP sliders are broken. There are always spots in these forums where people 💩 on aspects of the game that don't work the way they want them to, and it's so easy to feed into that negativity. I'm not doing that and if it is your opinion that there is no way to make progress in this area, I can respect your opinion but please put it somewhere else. I don't buy anything else about this game being "broken" or "gamebreaking," trust me, it's all about perspective. Thank you for coming to my TED talk 😅

[ZekeRoberts]

I am about to get going on year 3 of my dynasty, and i have had every single position cranked up to 300. Yes you read that correctly. My reasoning was that I wanted to see exactly how much I could get and how much I could play with and mold my own players, and I did so with absolutely no regard as to what it would do to the rest of the universe. Yes you also read that correctly. 😅 and you know what? I could totally live with it.

Yes, I currently have several 95+ QBs, and if it recall there are at least 1 or 2 99s at every skill position. And there are even more 90-94, etc., although there were some spots that weren't overflowing with 90s. Honestly though, if you've ever played a dynasty several years into the future, you start to see stuff like this anyways. It's all relative folks. In CFB25, I made it to 2037 and when you're scouting your weekly opponent in a power conference, youre going to see 90+ at the majority of positions anyways.

So, that's why I'm saying this kind of stuff isn't broken or game-breaking. They give us sliders for a reason; if it turns out the WRs are just out of control COMPARED TO the other positions as you journey through the years, maybe we all agree on that and cut them back a bit. I also have a preference for a game where in-season progression can be almost as valuable as what you get in the off-season, but I recognize not everyone will ascribe to that philosophy.

If anyone wants breakdowns of what happens in a 30i-XP-slider world, let me know and i can try to provide that. But, I also have one week of summer vacation remaining so I'm trying to play the game too and not just work on it 😅 cheers 🍻

[delspf]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfa9rS9l488

He put in work to figure out the sliders for xp and yes some of them are just broken and dont work

[ZekeRoberts]

I don't entirely buy the take presented in this video. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't hear any mention of high OVR players getting drafted and thus giving the appearance of "not enough" 90+ or 95+ players in the universe after a few years (compared to default or lowered sliders). I hope that makes sense. It was mentioned in a thread about XP in last year's game (MassChaos maybe?) and helped me think about it differently. So many things affect so many things in this game so I don't think any one set of numbers can be taken as gospel

[joestrong]

I'm currently running a second sim for sliders, hoping to get a competent working version out in the next couple of weeks whilst I finish tweaking stuff. The way I have done it is slightly different in philosophy to most, with 2 main points.

Mainly, I don't believe you can have a singular slider-set, especially in CFB games. The characteristic profiles of NIL and Generated Recruits are whilst similar not the exact same, whether that is to do with how their caps are made or different under the hood characteristics I don't know but they deal with XP differently. The only time I think you can have a single set of sliders is post Year 8/9 maybe, when firstly the NIL players are gone but also those first 1-3 sets of generated recruits are mainly gone, as their experiences are impacted by the NIL players.

Because of that, I run 10-year sims to test and track players year-in, year-out, to help provide a transition with my sliders.

The other weird philosophy is that instead of tracking ratings, I'll track drafted players by position. Using the past 5 years of NFL drafts, seeing how many players on average are drafted in each position and reducing the amount of anomalies overall. It probably sounds stupid but to me, it just helps to balance out the dispersion between positions but also allows me to pay attention to undergraduate draft entries. Another part is, it helps to make sure you're minimizing the amount of scenarios where someone is getting drafted without playing any meaningful snaps (especially important with QBs with the new portal).

Hopefully can finish up sim 2 in a couple of days and see some real progress.

[ZekeRoberts]

I think you are absolutely on point with the way that sliders need to adjust over time, due to the differences in the NIL players and the generated recruits. I think this applies to gameplay sliders as well as XP sliders, and I don't know that there is a good way to find a one-size-fits-all because of how the first few generated classes are impacted by the remaining NIL players. Also appreciate that your considered drafted players and not just the number of ##-overall-rated, although I get that most people will judge things based on that criterion. My opinion is that we all tend to overvalue the OVR for both players and teams, but that's just my opinion.