Tonight, I have relaunched my World League series that I had on the old CCSLC Sports Fan Fiction forum.

As tempting as it is to just recycle the identities of the real life World League, I'm thinking of changing things up a little bit as I go.

I'm not sure how to simulate seasons though.

I used Out Of The Park Baseball 18 for my simulations, but I updated my computer a while back and now that app is outdated and won't run, sadly. So I've kind of been taking a break but I want to get back into it soon. I documented on the NAAB thread that the California Golden Suns were named after my favorite game of all time, Golden Sun, and that the Houston Storm take inspiration from the album Eye of the Storm by my favorite band ONE OK ROCK, but I'll share a bit of inspiration for two other teams: Los Angeles and Cleveland. The Los Angeles Olympians were a holdover from an old, old league of mine, back when I was Paint to make logos. The Nashville Olympians were named for Nashville's nickname of "Athens of the South" and the replica Parthenon in the city with a sword as their logo and a gray, black, and dark blue color scheme. They moved to LA and kept the name, where it fit just as well given LA's Olympic history. The Cleveland Astronauts' logo is actually a modified version of a logo I made for my dad, who also likes to do simulations and asked me to do logos for him for fun. His Cleveland team was the Nightstalkers, so I made a logo that emphasized the moon and Cleveland's skyline. When I was setting up my league, I decided I could to repurpose that logo with some recoloring and a renaming, and thus the Astronauts were born, tying into Ohio's aeronautical history.

n00bthtpwnz wrote:

I'm throwing this question out there for anybody to answer, but how do some of you guys go about rosters and player ratings as well as the changes for both from season to season? I've been working on my own fictional sport/league (although I don't know if I'll post it anytime soon because I'm an absolutely terrible artist, but one problem at a time), but the way I made the progression for players from season to season is way too complicated and I'm looking for advice on how to make it better.

I believe your question is right up my alley, I have been doing leagues for a long time and I developed a pretty fluent rating and development system now. 
I will make up a bit of an info sheet to show give a basic idea for how I do things and I'll post it here soon.

The basic note is I use Google Sheets to keep all the information. Then mostly dice/random pickers alongside also letting my story dictate how players advance or degrade. Then the offseason I just have to manage all the teams myself, but also use dice at times to simulate a player agreeing to a contract or trades between teams. I just step into each team's shoes and where they are trying to go whether to rebuild or win now.

Hey!
I whipped up this basic concept sheet just showcasing the very basic system I have developed for the NAAF.
I put notes on certain cells to explain what things mean. For now, I just have the basic information I use, a sheet showing how development works and then another that shows how I determine the team's overall rating during the season. 
The good news is I can edit it as I go, so if you want to see examples of something else or have questions let me know.
Hope this helps!

NAAF SIM SYSTEM

I use Xkoranate to simulate my seasons. It's super simple software with severe limitations but it's easy to use and produces decent enough results. The only real stats are total goals scored for/against though, which is what I use to determine which players qualify for awards and All-Star teams/etc. In the THL, my players are rated on a 1-10 system. The teams with the most points scored will typically see their highest rated Forward qualify for Best Forward or All-Star, the team with the fewest points given up typically sees their highest rated Goalie win Best Goalie, etc. Storyline comes into play so if for instance the team with the fewest points given up doesn't have a good goalie or a standout defenseman, then I'll decide what happened with the team. I use reduced rosters of 2 goalies, 6 forwards and 4 defensemen to keep things more simple but each team also has an Indy League affiliate where players are stashed.

Here's an example from the new Kurohara Killers of the UHA. 



The roster sheet is fairly similar to what Veras used for his football series. Adding the year in the top right row updates the player's ages automatically based on their YOB which is helpful. For the THL, I also use an averaged overall rating for each goalies, forwards and defensemen which is summed into a "Lineup" rating which is added to the overall roster talent rating plus the overall from the coaches to determine a team's final overall score for the year. It helps provide just a little bit of extra flavor. I have a separate sheet just for tracking team overall by season. My system is pretty simple and lacks any kind of real progression minus whatever I decide to do with players but it works to drive the storyline for the league for now.

Wallflower wrote:

Hey!
I whipped up this basic concept sheet just showcasing the very basic system I have developed for the NAAF.
I put notes on certain cells to explain what things mean. For now, I just have the basic information I use, a sheet showing how development works and then another that shows how I determine the team's overall rating during the season. 
The good news is I can edit it as I go, so if you want to see examples of something else or have questions let me know.
Hope this helps!

NAAF SIM SYSTEM

I've got to dive more fully into your system but how do you manage all of the player progression? I see how it works for one player but how do you organize more than 100 players? My main issue has always been managing it once the league grows. So now I typically just keep a static "pro" rating for each player through his career. I like your usage of a weighted average for the roster overall score though. 

3pointtally wrote:

I had a whole google sheets system worked out where I would randomize results for an entire season and give the home team an advantage. The sheets would tally everything up every season and sim the playoffs and everything for me. All I had to do was copy and paste the simulated scores from my "Simulator" sheet and I could sim an entire season in about 30 seconds. 

I loved this method, but then I got way, way, way too into figuring out stats and players and trades that it became too much and I ran out of time. That's what happened with my Major League Hockey series that I started.

The BHI series I started, I switched to Franchise Hockey Manager to sim the seasons and they gave me all the stats for players and did the trades for me too. The problem with that being it ended up being more work to sim the seasons and then go through everything and get it onto a google sheet where I could organize it the way I wanted. 

Then the pandemic hit, and work at the fire department where I work has gone off the rails that by the time I get home I don't have it in me to sit down and dig through Franchise Hockey Manager to get the stats and results out of it and onto a spreadsheet that I can sort how I want.

Ideally, if I can use my original simulator google sheet and figure out a way to code it so that it automatically generates stats for me then it would be the perfect scenario, I just haven't had enough time to sit down and work out all the coding. I did enjoy how quickly I could simulate a season and then sort the sheet and get all the stats I wanted out of it for teams. Before I did my Major League Hockey one, I was doing another "test" league so to speak just for myself and I simulated almost 70 seasons in about 2 weeks. That led to me creating a farm system and an entire junior system and started simming those out too. I find it completely addicting but I'm a huge coding nerd.

My goal has always been to have a complete "universe" with pro teams, farm teams, junior teams, international leagues etc. 

I'd love to see your simulator sheet if you're willing to share it.

But this brings me to something I've been think about for awhile now. It seems like the biggest issue for all of us who run series is player progression management. There are a variety of ways to simulate a season results but no options outside of actual games like OOTP or FHM to do any kind of progression.

Scratch and I have talked about this a lot, and I actually briefly attempted to hire a coder on Upwork to start work on actual software but it would take a bit of money. I actually found a couple of interested coders but they both had little knowledge of hockey.

I've been thinking about opening up a project thread where we can all put our heads together and see if we can brainstorm a system that would be open source for everyone here. Player management is essentially the same across all sports so it could be paired with whatever simulation method is preferred.

Would anyone be interested in collaborating on something like that?