Project: Progression overhaul

[jose21crisis]

So, we know this game's progression and regression is kind of excessive. Players suddenly go to 99 OVR in the off-season, teams become stacked, the wheels fall off of every type of player very quickly, QBs lose arm way too fast, etc.

So, I'll try to upgrade the progression/regression system of this game. Here's my plan.
Physical and Skill Traits:
First of all, what there are 2 types of ratings in this game. There's the "Physical" Traits, the inherent abilities of a player which can't be taught. These are:

Spoiler:

• Speed
• Acceleration
• Agility
• Strength
• Jumping
• Break Tackle
• Throw Power
• Kick Power
• Stamina
• Injury
• Toughness

Then there are "Skill" Traits, a combination of inherent and learned abilities. These are:

Spoiler:

• Awareness
• Kick Return
• Catching
• Throw Accuracy
• Pass Blocking
• Run Blocking
• Tackling
• Kick Accuracy

What's the difference between the 2? "Physical" traits are HARD to improve compared to "Skill" Traits. I'd say that OLinemen improve their technique, their blocking ability, over their strength. QBs usually improve their accuracy and ability to read defenses more than they do their arm strength. What's going to happen is that "Physical" Traits won't improve nearly as much as "Skill" Traits, and equally importantly "Skill" Traits can progress in season while both can progress in the offseason.
In-Season Progression and Regression:
First, let's deal with how this game handles progression. The game separates the players in 5 groups based on OVR. 0-59, 60-69, 70-79, 80-89, 90-99. During the season, they compare the performance of each player to the average performance of all player in their group and career stage (Young, Prime and Older). If their performance is well above average, they progress. If it is well below average, they regress. Simple enough, but it is here that progression can go through the roof, as players can accumulate too many progression points.

So, here's my proposed system: Young players are those that get the most progression. The max amount of progression points per skill they can get is based on their group and the skill. 0-59 OVR guys can win up to 5 AWR progression points and 3 in the other Skill Traits. 60-69 OVR guys can win up to 4 AWR progression points and 2 in the other Skill Traits. 70-79 OVR guys can win up to 3 AWR progression points and 1 in the other Skill Traits. 80-89 OVR guys can win up to 2 AWR progression points and 1 in the other Skill Traits. 90-99 OVR guys can only win 1 progression point for every skill. This makes it so that youngsters that play far higher than their OVR suggest get the deserved credit. On the other hand, youngsters are also the most prone to rapid regression, as they will lose between 1-5 AWR points and 1-3 skill points if their performance is poor. This will generate more flame out players.

Players in their Prime don't progress as much, but don't regress as much either. Their skill is mostly set at this point. 0-59 OVR guys can win up to 3 AWR progression points and 1 in the other Skill Traits. 60-69 OVR guys can win up to 2 AWR progression points and 1 in the other Skill Traits. 70-79 OVR guys can win up to 2 AWR progression points and 1 in the other Skill Traits. 80-89 and 90-99 OVR guys can only win 1 progression point for every skill. The progression will be limited between 1-3 AWR points and 1-2 skill points. So the players that established themselves as solid could slowly improve even more, players that are terrible will probably remain terrible, and those in the middle might go either way.

Older Players barely progress, and they regress nearly as much as youngsters. All players have a limit of 1 progression point for every skill, but they can lose between 1-4 AWR points and 1-3 skill points if they can't keep up with the youngsters coming in. Old vets have to play at an elite level to maintain their performance, maybe even improve it a slight bit.
Off-Season Progression and Regression:
For a change, let's deal with regression first. This game's regression is weird. "Physical" traits decline FAST, but they decline way too fast to be realistic. Fast WRs become as slow as TEs by age 34 or 35, even when there ARE WRs that are super fast at that age. So, aside from lower the impact of regression on "Physical" Traits (SPD, ACC, AGI and THP, to be specific), I'll also change the regression age ... except that due to the way this game is built, I have to do it by "Years Pro". My baseline will be of a 22 Years Old rookie player, which seems to be the average. The point of decline by position will be:

Spoiler:

• QBs: 32 Years Old. Elite QBs decline at 33 Years Old.
• HBs: 28 Years Old. Elite HBs decline at 30 Years Old.
• FBs and TEs: 29 Years Old. Elite FBs and TEs decline at 31 Years Old.
• WRs: 30 Years Old. Elite WRs decline at 32 Years Old.
• OLs: 30 Years Old. Elite OLs decline at 32 Years Old.
• DLs: 30 Years Old. Elite DLs decline at 33 Years Old.
• LBs: 30 Years Old. Elite LBs decline at 32 Years Old.
• DBs: 29 Years Old. Elite DBs decline at 32 Years Old.
• K and P: 34 Years Old. Elite Ks and Ps decline at 36 Years Old.

What does "Elite" X mean? The 90-99 group, as long as they performed great last season. Players that performed amazingly at their position last season will have a reduced regression as well.
Now, let's deal with progression. Off-Season progression will be similar to In-Season progression, in that Young players get more and better progression than players in their Prime or Older Players. I'll have to evaluate the general off-season progression and note the changes I'll execute later. There's one issue I also need to take care of, and that is Roles giving an amazing boost to AWR of the position groups and Team Distraction also sinking AWR and MOR. My plan is not to remove these boosts, but limit them. Limiting Team Leader and Team Mentor's boosts from 5 points per role to 1 per role, and totally removing the AWR penalty to Team Distraction should be good enough. I won't remove the reduction of MOR of Team Distraction so that you can have your TOs, Ramseys and ABs in the teams ... and so that players are less likely to resign (MOR alters the likehood of holdouts and resignments) In theory, doing this I can also fix the AWR Glitch (Players getting 20+ or 30+ AWR points, making a lot of players 99 AWR in the blink of an eye).
I'll post this here and see the response, and I'll get to work tomo ... 1:19 AM ... later today.

[RevanFan]

Every single detail in this post has me incredibly excited. If you're able to get a working system built, I'd love to include it in the FF/FI Mod to make it our official progression system. Seems much more realistic based on the ideas presented in your post.

[jose21crisis]

Blackouts are no fun.

All right. First let's look at how the different progression periods work in this game.
Weekly progression has a total of 5 rounds, which by default are set to Preseason Week 4, Regular Season Week 5, Regular Season Week 11, Regular Season Week 17, Conference Championship and Super Bowl. This is somewhat unbalanced due to only 4 teams progressing (Or regressing) during the Conference Championships and 2 teams progressing (or Regressing) during the SB, which is why most limit this to 4 progression points, all in the regular season (FYI I prefer monthly progression, once every 4 weeks). Players are divided in groups based on their OVR and Career Phase, then are evaluated based on their performance. There are 5 levels of performance:

• Elite
• Good
• Above Average
• Average
• Below Average

Please note that Madden doesn't refer to those levels by those names, I had to give them a name so there you go. Only players that performed at an Elite, Good or Above Average level progress. Players that performed at a Below Average level regress, and players in the middle or those that didn't get enough "Downs Played" (Snaps from now on) to be accounted go to the "Average" performance level and don't progress or regress. In season, players can only progress the next Traits: Carrying, Kick Accuracy, Stamina, Throw Accuracy, Pass Blocking, Run Blocking, Tackling, Kick Return (Fact: No player can actually win KRT, because this column is all zero'ed out. Good job EA. for not allowing returners to get better), Break Tackle, Catching and Awareness. All pretty much Skill Traits, other than Break Tackle and Stamina. Let's use a generic Player A, a young 22 year old rookie HB that has performed at an Elite level during the Regular Season Week 5 PP and is a 60 OVR. Our guy would get (With the default progression): +2 AWR, +1 BTK, +2 CAR and +1 STA, regardless of his other ratings (This last part will be important). My progression system would boost this guy more than Madden does because he's a 60 OVR guy. Now, let's look at Player B, a young 22 year old rookie WR that has performed at a below average level during the Regular Season Week 5 PP and is a 70 OVR. Our guy would get: -1 AWR and -1 CTH, regardless of his other ratings. My system would be harsher with him regarding STA and AWR. Anyway, this is how Weekly adjustments look.

Now let's look at Yearly adjustments. First, my idea of making "Elite players that performed good regress later" is ditched for simply "Elite players regress later". Yearly regression bunches all guys together based on OVR and Years Pro (Not Age!) and alters their ratings. Let's use Player A, Player B and a new Player C, a 33 year old, 11 years pro, Older QB that is a 93 OVR. Let's say Player A keeps playing at an Elite level and makes it to 82 OVR (Wow, what a jump in ratings. Just bear with me here). During the off-season, his STA would get increased by 3% and his INJ rating by 2%. Yeah, there are no fixed ratings here, here we have changes by percentage. So if A had 70 STA and 90 INJ, they would get boosted to 72 STA (70 + (70*3%)=70+2.1=72.1 rounded to 72) and 92 INJ (90 + (90*2%)=90+1.8=91.8 rounded to 92). Similarly, let's say Player B actually shook off that bad season and manage to make it to 74 OVR. He would get a grand total of ... 0 progression on none of his skills. See, WRs only progress their skill when they reach 5 years pro in the league, don't ask why. I'd argue this should be earlier, but ... yeah EA. Anyway, WRs that have reached 5 years pro progress ACC, AGI, STA, SPD and JMP by 1%. Now, let's look at Player C, our veteran QB. Interestingly enough, he would start losing his throw power when he has 16 years in the league, but not earlier. As for the traits he would lose, AGI and ACC would go down by 3%, INJ by 1% and SPD by 3%. I'll definitely introduce Throwing Power regression earlier than that, at least for the not as good QBs. Elite QBs get to keep their cannons longer. And everyone will keep their legs for longer as well.

Please note that I haven't mentioned AWR once in the Yearly adjustments description. That's because, for all I know, AWR is handled somewhere else. Probably the same place where Roles are handled. Thing is, I still don't know where is that exactly. I've been swimming through the StreamedData.db file for a while, and haven't come up with any clue of where the AWR boost comes from, or the Roles assignement for that matter.

[jose21crisis]

Here we go. Part 1 of the overhaul project is complete. Import this into your StreamedData.db and start a franchise. Note, I'm NOT sure this affects already in progress franchises. If a franchise file has a PWRA table, then you would need to import this table there as well. The progression has been adjusted based on the OP, with a few adjustments, such as Stamina Progression/Regression and Kick Return Rating Progression/Regression for HBs, WRs and DBs.

Give it a test for 1-2 seasons and see what you get with the weekly progressions.

[RevanFan]

Give it a test for 1-2 seasons and see what you get with the weekly progressions.

So... with the normal setup? Preseason 4, regular 5, 11, 17, championship, and Super Bowl?

I actually do it a bit differently, adding a progression spot after week 2 of the preseason, but I'm thinking of removing the two playoff ones entirely and moving to a monthly setup like you mentioned before.

[jose21crisis]

Give it a test for 1-2 seasons and see what you get with the weekly progressions.

So... with the normal setup? Preseason 4, regular 5, 11, 17, championship, and Super Bowl?

I actually do it a bit differently, adding a progression spot after week 2 of the preseason, but I'm thinking of removing the two playoff ones entirely and moving to a monthly setup like you mentioned before.

Any setup works, but I recommend ticking off all post-season progression so that every team progress equally.

[jose21crisis]

Here's the part 2 if this project: The Yearly Progression adjustments, based on what I wrote in the OP. The decline time is initially marked by a drop in Stamina, then year by year stats will drop. Similar to the PWRA, import it to the StreamedData.db and import it to the franchise file if it does have this table.

Next up, dealing with the roles ... let's see what I can do ...

[RevanFan]

You make quick work, my friend. Puts me to shame haha. I may install these this season, because I am kind of fed up with the normal regression and progression.

[RevanFan]

NOTE: Franchise files do NOT have these two tables, so they rely fully on StreamedData.db.

[jose21crisis]

Hmm ... I'm trying to find the table that adjusts AWR in the offseason, but I still can't find it. Young players and Players in their Prime lose 2 AWR points on the 1st season ... maybe it is a result of being the first offseason and doesn't happen in others? There are other teams that aren't losing AWR, and teams that are losing more AWR, up to 5. Maybe this is due to stats-based regression (If a player perform good in a season then bad in the next, he regresses), but not sure. For now I'll recommend using NZA's "Revert AWR changes" at least for the 1st season.