AltPlayer Project

I thought it might be useful to start a separate thread for the player progression project. I've loosely termed it "AltPlayer" for now. Many of us series creators use a variety of ways to simulate our projects and organize our player and roster management but it seems the common denominator is lack of a good player progression model outside of special games such as OOTP, Franchise Hockey Manager or other simulators.

I am envisioning a community-built template that will be made available to the community to use for their own series.

I have a roster management system that I use for my hockey series. It is scaled down and easy enough to manage but lacks any progression. Wallflower has posted examples of their system in the NAAF series. 3pttally has posted about some of his efforts with league simulators. I'm sure there are others. I think between all of us we could come up with something that works well for all sports and easy enough for the community to use once its completed and tested.

It looks like 3pttally has already made serious strides. I will copy over his post from the previous thread.

3pttally wrote:

I've been playing around with formulas today and have had some success.

Using a 1-10 player rating, I took the current year, subtracted the players birth year and if that number was 35 or lower, I divided their skill rating by 2 to determine their "expected contract length" ... This gives you the flexibility to still award contracts to anybody regardless of their age but gives you a decent idea of what somebody's "value" is based on their skill. Example, a 28 year old player who is rated an 8 would be expecting a 4 year contract in the off-season, whereas a 39 year old player who is rated a 10 would be expecting a 1 year contract because of his age. Since the contracts have to be manually entered into the team and player list however, the 39 year old can be given a 3 year contract if that's what you chose to give them.

In terms of player progression, I randomized a row of numbers from -1 to +3 ... Then I would add the previous years skill rating and the new "progression rating" to get the players new skill stat. Anything over 10 is maxed out at 10. The randomness works well because it can allow a player to slowly get better or suddenly have a great season, where the next season they may stay the same or regress back to where they were which often happens in pro sports. This new rating also plays into the previous expected contract rating. If a players skill set improves from a 5 to an 8, they will now expect a 4 year deal, where-as if a player went from a 7 to a 6, their slight decline in skill would lead to them expecting a 3 year deal. Players who had a skill set reach 0 would automatically retire. Example, a player who had a skill set rating of 6 in 2020 gets a +2 rating in 2021, therefore making them a player with an 8 rating for 2021.

The -1 max negative skill point works well IMO too, because a player that is a 10 wont just fall off the map, but can slowly decline season over season. They could also decline one season and then come back as a 10 the following year to be a consistent hall of fame type player.

THEN, I added up the skill points of all the players on the team to determine a players point percentage. Example, if there were 10 players on the team and their total skill rating was 75, a perfect 10 skill set would score 13% of that teams goals. So if that team scored 112 goals, this player would have scored 15 goals for his team. It worked perfect through every simulation I ran and thus generated scoring stats for all players on the team.

That's as far as I got today. I haven't toyed around with goalie stats and there was still some manual things that had to be done, but 90% of the data was automatically generating through the excel codes so it was a promising start. The real challenge will be making it user friendly because right now there are numbers everywhere. Once I figure out the best way to lay out the sheet and can start hiding columns it should clean up quickly.

Not sure if any of this makes sense reading it or not.