State of the Game:
The biggest difference between elite and average teams is the inherent mixing of Player Builds with proper OC/DC play calling. Since this is inherently a PVP-type game, when an elite team plays an average team it's usually a blowout.
I'm going to deal with Play Calling first.
On the OC side of the ball, there are not enough plays that work. What we know is that 70-80% of the plays have substandard results, 10-20% have average NFL results and then 10% have ridiculous results. Agents new to OCing don't know this because it's not intuitive and thus get steam rolled until they get access to GLB2Scout/follow the herd in calling the best plays.
On the DC side of the ball, well I've posted EXTENSIVELY on the problem: There are not enough Distance tags on the plays in the Defensive playbook. The Tactics Matrix works at 90% of what I think is ideal. The Defensive playbook is at best 30% of ideal. Having the same plays with multiple distance tags would cause an explosion in Defensive play calling (variety).
Now I want to make this clear, really clear: I'm the CEO of a Software company. My suggestion of simply copying the current Defensive plays and then tagging those copies with multiple distance tags is by far the easiest implementation to changing how Defense is called in this game. Writing code is a bitch. You introduce new bugs with every line of code. Peer review of code by those on the agile/scrum team, QA of code, Regression testing of the code -- it all sucks. I'm involved with it every single day all day long. This is why my suggestion works. It requires no code. The only "downside" is that the Defensive Playbook expands in size dramatically with what seems like duplicate plays. To Bort/Cdog: You're losing customers already so why not implement the above change and at least try it for a season???
Now to Player Building:
The first thing that Bort/Cdog should be doing is looking at customer metrics to see where they can enhance "value" to the customer AND improve their bottom line as a business. Have you ever heard anything like this from them?
I recently posted in a thread that the cost of Career Boosts is hurting Vet. Vet is the most important tier. It's the only tier that players are fully built out. How many Career Boosts get purchased versus the number of Career Boosts that were available to be purchased? That metric should be tracked by Bort/Cdog and I can guarantee everyone that it's not. We, the customers, buy a digital product. All we are buying is pixels on a screen. While there are costs to deliver those pixels, the incremental costs are virtually nil. So if only 10% of potential Career Boosts are being purchased at the current cost, shouldn't the goal of WG be to find the sweet spot where the most Career Boosts are bought at a price that maximizes revenue to WG? Of course it should. Yet, in two plus years they have never changed the price nor run specials, etc. Running a generic FLEX special doesn't tell you which items that the Agents (customers) spend FLEX on are "worth it" versus not. WG should have been experimenting with different costs on everything we buy individually. I can't think of one such experiment. Instead we get stupid shit like DD making one post buried in the middle of a thread that the Kicker Roster limit is going to be changed from 2 to 1.
Career Boosts should be an easy "reward" to the customers that have been purchasing SP boosts all along. Yes buying all the SP boosts gives you a second Vet season but lowering the cost of Career Boosts so that you increase the purchase rate will cause two things: 1. WG will make more money because I can't believe that setting the Career Boost price in BETA was done so presciently that after two plus years of actual customer data it's spot on with maximizing revenue to WG and 2. It will lengthen the time that players are at Vet causing less turnover at Vet which means more teams can field competitive rosters.
For a long time, MMOs had the thought that Agents/customers liked leveling their toons versus just sitting at Max level doing nothing. And then in EQ, WOW, etc. Raiding became a thing. And that's when Agents/customers began to realize "that the game begins at Max level". There are a lot of MMO players that like leveling players. But there are also a lot that like competing at Max level. Vet is "raiding" in GLB2. And we aren't there long enough for the "raiding" type customer.
Other Player Building issues are that there is no testing of what's OP versus UP (over-powered versus under-powered) based on SP cost. My S* WR Belgarion is the all-time leading yardage WR and as Rob. even stated in the Career Stats thread - no one else is close. Now a lot of that was due to spamming OP plays. But other teams spammed OP plays too. What's amazing to me is that Bort/Cdog has never looked at his build. It's 9 seasons of data at about 2500 plays per season. That's 20,000+ experiments in a Monte Carlo simulation. And yet during that entire time, Belgarion's Route Elusiveness was .... 14. He has 5 skills at 80 and above and yet a primary receiving skill is 14. Now Bort/Cdog's position on a lot of things is for the Agents to figure out the "secrets" of Player Building. What that really means is: Bort/Cdog have no idea what builds work or don't work because they aren't going to run millions of tests and get the data and then figure out the SP cost of each item. They are letting us, the Agents/customers, build the data set for them. Ok, that's fine. But once they have the data, why aren't things getting fixed earlier? Stobie's GLB2Scout is an analytic GOLD MINE of data. LZ Boys spammed the same 5 plays (basically) for 9 seasons because the combination of those plays with those builds performed at a very high level. Yet, when I tried to run "other" plays the results dropped off dramatically. Isn't this a major issue? That some plays generated a 45% First Down success ratio yet a massive amount of other plays couldn't achieve even 20%? Is the problem: the plays, the builds or the combination? Why were the differences in results so dramatic?
Bort/Cdog need to spend some time figuring out WHY things work or don't work in this game. And if they aren't going to put the time in, then let us users be able to do it by opening up some of the tools they have internally. Of course, then they'd have to listen to our suggestions too.
The biggest difference between elite and average teams is the inherent mixing of Player Builds with proper OC/DC play calling. Since this is inherently a PVP-type game, when an elite team plays an average team it's usually a blowout.
I'm going to deal with Play Calling first.
On the OC side of the ball, there are not enough plays that work. What we know is that 70-80% of the plays have substandard results, 10-20% have average NFL results and then 10% have ridiculous results. Agents new to OCing don't know this because it's not intuitive and thus get steam rolled until they get access to GLB2Scout/follow the herd in calling the best plays.
On the DC side of the ball, well I've posted EXTENSIVELY on the problem: There are not enough Distance tags on the plays in the Defensive playbook. The Tactics Matrix works at 90% of what I think is ideal. The Defensive playbook is at best 30% of ideal. Having the same plays with multiple distance tags would cause an explosion in Defensive play calling (variety).
Now I want to make this clear, really clear: I'm the CEO of a Software company. My suggestion of simply copying the current Defensive plays and then tagging those copies with multiple distance tags is by far the easiest implementation to changing how Defense is called in this game. Writing code is a bitch. You introduce new bugs with every line of code. Peer review of code by those on the agile/scrum team, QA of code, Regression testing of the code -- it all sucks. I'm involved with it every single day all day long. This is why my suggestion works. It requires no code. The only "downside" is that the Defensive Playbook expands in size dramatically with what seems like duplicate plays. To Bort/Cdog: You're losing customers already so why not implement the above change and at least try it for a season???
Now to Player Building:
The first thing that Bort/Cdog should be doing is looking at customer metrics to see where they can enhance "value" to the customer AND improve their bottom line as a business. Have you ever heard anything like this from them?
I recently posted in a thread that the cost of Career Boosts is hurting Vet. Vet is the most important tier. It's the only tier that players are fully built out. How many Career Boosts get purchased versus the number of Career Boosts that were available to be purchased? That metric should be tracked by Bort/Cdog and I can guarantee everyone that it's not. We, the customers, buy a digital product. All we are buying is pixels on a screen. While there are costs to deliver those pixels, the incremental costs are virtually nil. So if only 10% of potential Career Boosts are being purchased at the current cost, shouldn't the goal of WG be to find the sweet spot where the most Career Boosts are bought at a price that maximizes revenue to WG? Of course it should. Yet, in two plus years they have never changed the price nor run specials, etc. Running a generic FLEX special doesn't tell you which items that the Agents (customers) spend FLEX on are "worth it" versus not. WG should have been experimenting with different costs on everything we buy individually. I can't think of one such experiment. Instead we get stupid shit like DD making one post buried in the middle of a thread that the Kicker Roster limit is going to be changed from 2 to 1.
Career Boosts should be an easy "reward" to the customers that have been purchasing SP boosts all along. Yes buying all the SP boosts gives you a second Vet season but lowering the cost of Career Boosts so that you increase the purchase rate will cause two things: 1. WG will make more money because I can't believe that setting the Career Boost price in BETA was done so presciently that after two plus years of actual customer data it's spot on with maximizing revenue to WG and 2. It will lengthen the time that players are at Vet causing less turnover at Vet which means more teams can field competitive rosters.
For a long time, MMOs had the thought that Agents/customers liked leveling their toons versus just sitting at Max level doing nothing. And then in EQ, WOW, etc. Raiding became a thing. And that's when Agents/customers began to realize "that the game begins at Max level". There are a lot of MMO players that like leveling players. But there are also a lot that like competing at Max level. Vet is "raiding" in GLB2. And we aren't there long enough for the "raiding" type customer.
Other Player Building issues are that there is no testing of what's OP versus UP (over-powered versus under-powered) based on SP cost. My S* WR Belgarion is the all-time leading yardage WR and as Rob. even stated in the Career Stats thread - no one else is close. Now a lot of that was due to spamming OP plays. But other teams spammed OP plays too. What's amazing to me is that Bort/Cdog has never looked at his build. It's 9 seasons of data at about 2500 plays per season. That's 20,000+ experiments in a Monte Carlo simulation. And yet during that entire time, Belgarion's Route Elusiveness was .... 14. He has 5 skills at 80 and above and yet a primary receiving skill is 14. Now Bort/Cdog's position on a lot of things is for the Agents to figure out the "secrets" of Player Building. What that really means is: Bort/Cdog have no idea what builds work or don't work because they aren't going to run millions of tests and get the data and then figure out the SP cost of each item. They are letting us, the Agents/customers, build the data set for them. Ok, that's fine. But once they have the data, why aren't things getting fixed earlier? Stobie's GLB2Scout is an analytic GOLD MINE of data. LZ Boys spammed the same 5 plays (basically) for 9 seasons because the combination of those plays with those builds performed at a very high level. Yet, when I tried to run "other" plays the results dropped off dramatically. Isn't this a major issue? That some plays generated a 45% First Down success ratio yet a massive amount of other plays couldn't achieve even 20%? Is the problem: the plays, the builds or the combination? Why were the differences in results so dramatic?
Bort/Cdog need to spend some time figuring out WHY things work or don't work in this game. And if they aren't going to put the time in, then let us users be able to do it by opening up some of the tools they have internally. Of course, then they'd have to listen to our suggestions too.
Edited by Xars on Mar 20, 2016 07:03:53
Edited by Xars on Mar 20, 2016 06:59:33
Edited by Xars on Mar 20, 2016 06:53:49
