Regression and Progression of Ratings

[zac]

I wanted to bring up one noted issue with First Access and that is the lack of regression present in the game in my opinion. To test, I started a default roster league with default settings. I set teams to use 22 training points (mostly 7/5/5/5). The sim was from pre-season 2021 through post-season 2024. In the below numbers, I filtered out players that retired or were drafted after 2021 so I only looked at players in the league the entire time of the sim. I also only looked at players that were on active rosters both at the start of the league (2021) and at end of the sim (2024). Here are the results for average attribute changes by age. I picked a few positions to shorten the amount of text.

Players 33 in age or older (means they started sim at 29 years or older):
QB: +0.9 in OVR, +7.6 in POS Skill, -3.1 in Arm Str, -1.3 in Arm Accuracy
RB: -2.0 in OVR, +3.0 in POS Skill, +1 in Str, -3 in Agility, -6 in speed
WR: +1.0 in OVR, -1.0 in Agi, -1.0 in Speed, +5.0 in Hands
G: +0.5 in OVR, +8.3 in Pos skill, -1.9 in Str, -1.3 in Run blk, -3.9 in Pass Blk
DE: -0.2 in OVR, +7.4 in Pos Skill, -1.8 in Str, -0.2 in Agi, -2.2 in Speed, -1.8 in Tackle
CB: +1.0 in OVR, +0.3 in Agility, -2.0 in Speed, +1.3 in Hands

So on average, players past their prime (29+ when sim started) on average their OVR increased by 0.4 for all positions. Even athletic skills like speed on average for these 30-year-old players on average decreased by only 0.7 points per player. Speed was down 2.5 points. Essentially no players decreased by more than 5 points in OVR in THREE seasons. This is 30-year-old players in a physically demanding sport that are barely decreasing and when they do decrease, it's very predicable with no players really falling hard in ratings. There's no risk in signing guys past their prime in this game as aging in this engine is so graceful.I saw LBs like Hightower increase 3 points in speed and 10 points in overall from his 31 to 34 age season.


For comparison, here is how players ages 28 or younger did during this sim (meaning they were 25 or young when sim started):

QB: +4.8 in OVR, +6.9 in POS Skill, +2.5 in Arm Str, +2.6 in Arm Accuracy
RB: +3.2 in OVR, +4.2 in POS Skill, +1.2 in Str, +2.1 in Agility, +1.6 in speed
WR: +3.1 in OVR, +2.1 in Agi, +1.3 in Speed, +2.9 in Hands
G: +3.7 in OVR, +8.0 in Pos skill, -+1.5 in Str, +2.7 in Run blk, +3.2 in Pass Blk
DE: +3.3 in OVR, +8.4 in Pos Skill, +1.3 in Str, +1.9 in Agi, +1.3 in Speed, +3.1 in Tackle
CB: +3.9 in OVR, +2.2 in Agility, +2.4 in Speed, +3.6 in Hands

You can see the progression looks okay here for the most part.

There are still two main issues I see related to progression. One being that progression while okay by itself still seems to outpace regression to keep things balanced. For example, when the league started there were about 100 RBs that were 65 OVR or better. By the end of the three-year sim, the number of RBs 65 OVR or better was 150 RBs.

Second is that progression (& regression) is much too predictable and consistent for all players in my opinion. You can nearly perfectly predict players growth and fall in ratings. Their growth tends to be slow with hardly any real situations of ‘boom’ progression where you might see a young player increase 10+ points in a single season. While it should be very rare, there should be cases of sudden improvement in young players. On the flip side, the regression is not only very slow, but players also don’t ever really fall off hard in skill or athleticism. In real life, players can go from good starter to out of the league in two seasons. That doesn’t happen in this game. The thing that makes GM games so fun is to try to weigh risk with reward just like GMs do in real sports. Do I sign this aging veteran to see if he has a little bit in the tank or go with a young late round pick. Do I give a big 4-year contract to this star 30 year old LB in hopes he doesn’t have aging hit him hard or do I pass on signing him. Right now, signing 30+ year old free agents comes with literally zero risk. I can with almost exact precision predict that he will slightly decrease just a tad each year but still essentially be the same player at age 34 that he was at 30. It'd be a great addition to not only increase regression, but make progression and regression have more outliers and not so easy to predict future changes.

[zac]

To add to the above post, just wanted to clarify that I understand each league/user has different preferences on progression and regression. My main concerns from testing was imbalance from current talent changes and lack of unpredictability and risk to signing older players in giving GMs a challenge in team building. I think the optimal solution is to have a slider setting modifier for both regression and progression with multiple different tuning settings to give the user tools to customize how they feel. Right now the only tool is a modifier to progression which doesn't seem to help much if you can't tune regression with it. And Low, normal, high settings can be a bit limiting with something like progression/regression.

[AKH]

Have added a gamesetting to control regression.

[zac]

Appreciate it. That should help a lot.