SUMMER LEAGUE/FRANCHISE/TICKET PRICES SIM COMPLETE-NEXT SIM THURSDAY

[aholbert]

I'm curious as to how it works, actually. Is it manually changing names around? or were their "attributes" and abilities somehow imported in as well?

I see Cannon, Funk...Christopher Peters out of Iowa? rings a bell. Anyone else?

Just name changes. The game only permits me to change the name so because there was a QB from Miami in the game, that person became Cannon.

We looked into ways to use the draft pool from NCFA in FOF but none of them work very well and most are buggy.

[aholbert]

I would quit immediately if this became the norm. The BBCF-->FOF import setup is horribly imbalanced and would screw up the player file long-term. I'm very curious as to what was done this year. If it's anything besides just changing names, it was a *huge* mistake. The league can get past it once, but if it happens regularly, it will *really* screw things up.

We would never make a major change like that without discussing with the league. It will just be name changes unless a bug free way to import the files is created.

[Guest]

Didn't mean to sound harsh there. I tend to be rather direct. Here's the thread discussing the utility:

http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/...ad.php?t=48780

Here are the relevant comments:

Just be forewarned... using custom drafts of any sort can lead to *serious* issues (problems) with a league's long-term balance of player talents. The consensus, I think, is that while the idea of linking draft classes from another game is really exciting in concept, it has yet to be productive in practice. You might find it to eventually be functional, but using this sort of file can have some pretty nasty long term consequences and can really undermine league integrity.

I have no personal stake in whether you do this for your league, or whether these various developers do or do not gain business. I'm just hoping you take this into consideration when making a major decision for your MP league.

I think the issue is not so much that you'll see one oddity in a particular season, but rather that there could be a game-wide imbalance, as st. cronin intimates above For example, I think that using draft classes generated from TCY tends to yield way too much high quality talent. If you use that for ten drafts, you could end up with a league where there are so many quality veterans to go around at every position, there's not much value to, say, a guy rated 60/60. But all his in-game programming is telling him that 60/60 is a solid starter, and that he ought to be demanding big money for his services. Multiply this times 20 or 50 or 250 players across a league and you can end up with a game that starts to become one about things that aren't very interesting, rather than the cap challenges and young/old trade offs that make contemporary football roster management enjoyable.

In any event... surely do your own testing, and make your own call. Just putting it out there so you can do so wit your eyes open, as best I can. Best of luck.

This is a significant issue, and all signs point to it being not just superstar QBs, but G/VG one as well, which can really change the entire strategy, as Quik pointed out. I just generated a draft class with this utility. 14 QBs were adjusted-rated 6.0 or better, and there were three guys with all red combines except for 40-yard dash, and corresponding bars --three guaranteed superstars in other words. I then generated 6 consecutive classes with FOF: only one of them had as many as four QBs adjusted-rated 6.0 or better. If this sort of thing goes on for just a few seasons, the value of good QBs will go down significantly, since everyone will have access to one. This is the sort of game-changing (not in a good way) stuff that Quik is warning about.

FYI, I'd have some other major concerns about some other things as well, just at few glances:

• No QB ran faster than a 4.79. That's probably systemic as well, and will result in no QBs with mobility. I guess Buc would be happy with that. *shurg*
• Not *one* QB has a single green rating in strength, Sol, Agi, or Position drill. There will be a buttload of solid QBs running around the league.
• Every FB in the draft class was "green" in 40 time. Best time was 4.90. By comparison, in a game-generated draft class only six FBs were at 4.90 or worse, while 28 were better. I'm not 100% certain what skill the 40 times correspond to for FBs, but clearly that skill is going to be severely lacking.
• Other than FBs and QBs,every single player in the draft class had scores in the 40 and agility drills that were black, red, or blue--and the black scores were near the middle of the black range. For example, no DT had a slower agility drill than 7.80. That's on the fast side of the black range in game-generated classes.

Definitely imbalanced, and by a long shot.

And finally, probably the most damning quotes come from the guy who *wrote* the utility:

I think SkyDog's right, it's definitely imbalanced. It takes so long to generate one draft class that it was impossible for me to create a large enough data set to develop any real balance.

I started this as an attempt to give back to this community. It's a shame it looks like it's going to fall short, but if Jim has a hard time balancing incoming draft classes from TCY when he has access to the internals of both games, I think it was probably unlikely this would work from the start.

[Guest]

We would never make a major change like that without discussing with the league. It will just be name changes unless a bug free way to import the files is created.

Ahhhh.....ok. Makes sense then. Sorry for the cross-post above, but at least it will give the details in case someone else was wondering why I'm so convinced it's a bad idea. :p

[BradZ]

These daily sims are alright. A guy could get used to this.

[Matt]

Ahhhh.....ok. Makes sense then. Sorry for the cross-post above, but at least it will give the details in case someone else was wondering why I'm so convinced it's a bad idea. :p

Ya the utility is bugged so we couldn't go that route. Changing the names was the only safe way...just to add a little back story in case some of the NCFA guys get drafted.