Some questions and observations/suggestions

[dannyrond]

1. What effect does endurance have on a player? How much worse does a Michael Jordan play at 25% endurance as opposed to 100%?

2. Potential question: in the historical roster, rookie Dirk Nowitzski and Kevin Garnett are rated at 3 to 3.5 star potential. Obviously, they turned into superstars albeit not right away. Can this happen or are these guys pretty much locked to becoming average players?

3. While I think the majority of the ratings are relatively accurate, there's a few that leave me scratching my head. Mostly defense ratings. Like Bruce Bowen and Scottie Pippen. Why are they not automatic 10's? I understand this is something I can correct myself in the editor, so it's not a big deal. Just odd.

4. Does double-teaming work in zone defense?

I watch/coach all my games, so I've noticed some odd things, a) 100% zone sometimes my players still play man to man, b) a player will sometimes warp off the screen onto the sidelines on the other side of the court, c) double-teaming sometimes turns back on when you turn it off d) running very slow paced, post focus offense has my centers shooting three-pointers seemingly at random (tends to happen more off an inbound pass).

Suggestions:

1) I'd like to see a lot more variety in the commentary. Olajuwon scoring with his sky hook or Magic Johnson doing a no look pass as he drives to the basket are just a few examples.
2) Would be cool if we got last names under/above the players on the court, rather than trying to distinguish them by jersey number alone. Scaling font size or limited characters may be needed to prevent the court filling up with names.

All in all, I'm having a blast playing the game and it looks really great on my 4K TV. Great job Gary!

[Tim Moungey]

1. Significant decrease in effectiveness in all areas. I don't know the exact formula, but there's definitely considerable impacts.

2. Development depends on a variety of factors. 3-3.5* are very good players by the way - All-Star level, even. An average player would be 2-2.5* and even then it's an approximate overall grade that doesn't fully predict a player's production or impact. Too much goes into that.

3. This also applies to #2, but scouting error is going to be a thing. And the 1-10 rating system is finicky anyway.

4. I play on GM Only mode, so don't know.

[Gary Gorski]

Here's the thing with the historical ratings - all the game knows is numbers and it can only work with the numbers it has and defense is a nightmare and Bruce Bowen is the PERFECT example. For his career he averaged .8 spg and .4 bpg - those aren't very impressive numbers in the least. There weren't stats that measured other defensive metrics - we just knew he was a good defender because we would see it happen in games but there was no stat that backed it up.

The game does a pretty good job with the defensive ratings when creating the current day league because there are some additional stats I can use to help with the defensive rating but without those all the game knows is that this guy had ok STOCKS stats but nothing that would say he's an outstanding defender unlike someone like Gary Payton who for his prime was a 2+ SPG player.

As for Dirk/KG it could be scouting error - it also may be that the code is looking at too long of a time window on those guys since they both played so long and their numbers really wound down towards the end of their careers. I will take a look at the code and see what its doing. When creating the historical players I try to take a look at a number of things so that nobody is recreated based on one good or bad season.

[dannyrond]

Thanks for the replies Tim and Gary. I sort of figured that was the case and I can definitely understand the reason why. I also noticed players can fluctuate HEAVILY from season to season (based on their historical stats). Which coincidentally makes each year very different to play out a career in.

Gary, you bring up an interesting point. Is there any system in place to simulate late bloomers like Dirk Nowitzski or Steve Nash? I assume not, but would be cool to look at one day.

[Gary Gorski]

I guess I should have asked you to clarify on the Dirk/KG thing...are you talking about if you start in a year where they are already in the league or are you starting before they were in the league and they are entering the league as a rookie in the draft.

There's two different systems at work - when a particular season is generated it is trying to place the player as close to that current season as possible so if you started at the beginning or end of Dirk's career you're not going to have an MVP player there. His starting point as a rookie is generated differently if he comes in via the draft. There is also an element of randomness to the potential for all players in the historical replay - its not ever meant to take Jordan and make him a nobody but I also want player's careers to play out with some surprise so that you don't have an unfair advantage in snapping up all the guys who would have been undervalued before they became stars because the AI doesn't know names - only numbers.

Just to see I just fired up a league starting in 1999 - Dirk is rated 3.0/4.5 and KG is 5.0/5.0 but Nash is a 2.0/2.5 - and I bet if you go back to 1999 people wouldn't have thought Nash was more than just an average player and given his stats up to that point and even during that season (8.6 ppg, 4.9 apg) you couldn't really think he was anything more.

I think the most satisfying way to play historical is pick a time frame right before you're really interested in the particular players and then have them come in via the draft as opposed to maybe starting a season when a player had a down year (or was injured or something) and therefore his ratings might not be as good as they should have been.

[dannyrond]

That all sounds reasonable, Gary. I was just curious as to how those kinds of players were implemented. Thank you!

[markprior22]

I was wondering the same as the OP concerning double teaming in zone defense (in this game or CBB19)