Revaluation of the CA - PA system

[Cap'nRad]

6 hours ago, ham_aka_stam said:

You keep forgetting that most players never reach their PA in FM.  It is not a case that everyone's getting to 24 and never improves.  Most players still have potential that they can unlock up until the natural decline on or after 30years old!

This was never the problem. This is realistic. As has been stated before, the problem was the unrealistic upper limit preventing players from improving when they otherwise would logically.

6 hours ago, ham_aka_stam said:

Also, PA should never fluctuate.  Because it is that player's natural limit.  Your natural limit will never increase, you'll just get closer and closer to it.

As I've said before, I don't really believe in this kind of P.A, so this is a difference of opinion. When I say P.A I usually mean the player's eventual maximum C.A.

6 hours ago, ham_aka_stam said:

If a player DOES hit his PA it's because he's reached the highest attributes he can reach.  We're not talking about an intelligent person learning some more facts, we're talking about a football player's attributes reaching their sum peak.  This doesn't mean he can't get "better", you / the AI as managers can still improve the spread of those attributes through training. He can still have a stormer of a season, he could still play for a team which makes better use of his attributes and out-perform his previous performances.  But again, we're talking about the absolute minority of players here.  Everyone else still has CA points available to improve their attributes

I understand this reasoning, however in real life there's no such thing. No one has to reshuffle attributes till they get too old to perform the same way they did previously. At that point they've hit their P.A, but only at that point. there's no P.A before that point, only P.A after. 

 

6 hours ago, ham_aka_stam said:

Basically this whole thread is about people not understanding that CA doesn't equal performance, and that PA is not something that most players reach.

It's hard to follow the whole thread as topics have changed a bit, but at least I can say I understand these two statements. The latter I also have an issue with because of fm's development model which I've said before.

6 hours ago, ham_aka_stam said:

CA development can be improved, PA could be increased if less players got near theirs, but ditching it without adding other limits (thus defeating the point of ditching it) would be fruitless.

Hence why this thread is about the proposal of another more organic or natural limit or development model to replace the more artificial and static P.A limit.

[ham_aka_stam]

10 minutes ago, Cap'nRad said:

As I've said before, this is a difference of opinion and I don't think my mind will change despite how many people bring it up. Aside from genetic differences, I don't think anyone was born with a better ability than someone else in such areas. I believe such differences arise as a result of aforementioned genetics as well as other external factors. I don't believe messi/ ronaldo had a special gene which allows them to play football, I just think messi and ronaldo were talented physically and mentally, had the best frame of mind, and were put in the right conditions to succeed to that level. The reason we haven't seen a cr7 or messi ever since is because of archaic training methods and playstyles, and as you can see youngsters with more modern training techniques have already started outperforming older professionals. I believe the next generation of players will be more skilled, intelligent and two-footed than the previous one. 

So in my view, players are held back by their genetic ability only to a limited degree, so though many might try to explain a game limit as logical to me, I probably won't change my mind on this issue.

Exactly. I don't believe other players come close to the hard work and professionalism needed to get to the level of cr7 and messi and the other elite, and even if they do, they don't do it with the same mentality. And even if they do currently portray a similar attitude, I believe they haven't done so to such a consistent level as those two. We all hear how Quaresma was actually the talented one in the Sporting academy, and how Messi's mates never dreamed he'd be the best till it actually started happening. And let's not forget how Ronaldo changed his game at the advice of Meulensteen in order to cement himself at the top. These sort of snippets show that Messi and Ronaldo have been on another level in terms of dedication and professionalism (as well as having the right guidance of course), and I don't think any of the older players in this generation come close. I don't think max professionalism and ambition players should be running all over the world. These types are rare, and you see it in their success. 

These bold bits are almost contradictory.

You say differences arise as a result of genetics.  Then that you don't believe Messi or Ronaldo have a special gene.  You're right in both.  There's obviously not a football gene, but there's many many genes that impact sporting performance, and these work in combination to produce variations in:

• Height
• Length of limb
• Bone Density
• Lung Capacity
• Peak Ventilation Rate
• Heart Size
• Heart Stroke Rate
• Circulatory Capacity
• Muscle blood supply
• Intelligence
• Spatial awareness
• Peripheral Vision
• Working Spacial Memory
• Communication abilities
• Muscle fibre composition
• Ability to put on muscle
• Connective Tissue Flexibility
• Coordination
• Eye-sight
• Agility
• Reaction Speeds

And many more.  Like players in FM, these will all have a base value that they'd sit at if that person sat on their arse all their life.  Then they'll have a physical peak that they will not get better than even if they trained from birth to be a footballer.  It's been shown how Wayne Rooney, for all his flaws, has absolutely incredible spacial awareness and peripheral vision.  So even if he'd never learned how to pass a football, he'd have a better awareness than others about where the players are on the football pitch.  Yes some of this is learned, but many kids have the same football upbringing as Rooney, but don't show the same ability.

No matter how much I train, I will never be a top marathon runner, I'm too stocky, I'm more suited to sprinting, but I'd never be a top sprinter either, because I don't have the limb length to reach the correct top speed.  I could reach my PA in sprinting and still be no-where near national standard, let alone Olympic standard.

This is the same in football, it's just far more multifaceted and why I mentioned earlier a PA for individual stats would be the ideal way to go, and a PA for physicals, technicals and mentals would be a decent compromise.  But PA still exists, it's just weighted differently for every person.

You mention "other players don't come close to the hard work and professionalism needed to get to the level of cr7 and messi", which is hugely factually inaccurate.  There are tonnes of examples of model professionals who will never be as physically imposing as Ronaldo, as stable and nimble on the ball as Messi (to stick to the physicals), let alone have Ronaldo's technique when striking the ball, or Messi's at controlling, passing and curling the ball.  Beckham is touted as one of the most hardworking professional players, and all he got was the passing ability.  He was always quite slow, rather lacking in agility, and not known for his dribbling.  That's ignoring the professional dedicated players who never make it out of the lower leagues because they're too slow etc.

[ham_aka_stam]

19 minutes ago, Cap'nRad said:

As I've said before, I don't really believe in this kind of P.A, so this is a difference of opinion. When I say P.A I usually mean the player's eventual maximum C.A.

I understand this reasoning, however in real life there's no such thing. No one has to reshuffle attributes till they get too old to perform the same way they did previously. At that point they've hit their P.A, but only at that point. there's no P.A before that point, only P.A after. 

It's hard to follow the whole thread as topics have changed a bit, but at least I can say I understand these two statements. The latter I also have an issue with because of fm's development model which I've said before.

Hence why this thread is about the proposal of another more organic or natural limit or development model to replace the more artificial and static P.A limit.

You can not believe in it or redefine it, but it exists.  Try as I might I'll never be a poet laureate, or a nuclear physicist, I simply don't have the potential ability. I could get so far, but eventually I'd reach my mental limits and get no better no matter how hard I try.

That PA always exists, they just haven't reached it yet. The reshuffling is a bit naff, but it's slow enough that it pretty closely matches what happens when a player reaches their peak, they can't increase their attributes any more, get any faster, or shoot any better.  But they might be able to work at their running off the ball, at the expense of working on their heading, or their set-pieces.

You say you understand the statements, but you've already said you have a different PA than SI  

Unless you're going to PA each individual attribute a global PA models the real world just fine.  The limit IRL is just as hard as PA is, albeit less reach it than in FM because FM is about (mostly) professional footballers who're more likely to reach theirs than the average man on the street.

[Raptor Longe]

All of you realize that I can not answer 8/9/10 questions asked, right? 
I tried to answer you with examples. But apparently you want specific answers, that is, I do not know how the current gaming parameters of a young player in the video game work, can set fixed parameters.

Currently the game works like this:
A player who is 17 years old has 50 CAs, in the best possible conditions, with Professionalism at 20, always playing, and never injuring. With 200 of PA (so without any growth limit), it can reach 160/170 CA (at least that I understand through my 20 year gamer experience). So let's say that at the moment in the best possible conditions you can get to +120 CA.

We obviously want to avoid it because we can not afford that there are 1000 players in the game that starting from 80/90/100 of CAs at 17 years, they can hypothetically reach between 180 and 200 of CAs (if there are 1000 players with 20 in professionalism, with 1 in Injury Prome, playing in the best facilities in the world). Ok, let's say these 1000 players exist.

We at the current calculation, we remove 50% growth from Professionalism if there is "Natural Talent" or we take off 66% if there is also the "Natural Athlete".
So we have:
Professionalism: 50%
Natural Talent: 50%

If the player's growth at the most is 120 points with 20 professionalism.
If this has 20 in professionalism and 10 Natural Talent, its maximum growth will be no more than 120 points, but will be for him as if he currently has only 15 in professionalism and therefore hypothetically (since I do not know how much it will affect professionalism) of 95 points. And it will also be if this player has 10 in professionalism and 20 in Natural Talent.

Instead, we put the third parameter of growth.
Professionalism: 33%
Natural Talent: 33%
Natural Athlete: 33%

If the player's growth at the most is 120 points with 20 professionalism.
If this has 20 in professionalism, 10 Natural Talent and 10 in Natural Athlete, its maximum growth will be no more than 120 points, but it will be for him as if he currently has only 12 in professionalism and hence hypothetically will be 70 points.

 The only parameter to grow is Professionalism, with more professional tutors, and with the maturity of a player (eg 26/27 years of age) you can have a +2.
The Natural Talent and the Natural Athlete can not be improved because they represent the genetics of a player.

The only way to have a 120 point increase is that the player has all parameter values at 20.

 

Then we can also think of other things, such that physical parameters can improve faster and worsen more slowly if one has high values in "Natural Athlete", for example.

 

What is the difference between these values and the PA?

The difference is that, a researcher assumes a maximum growth considering primarily what he currently sees in a player. Often, a researcher sees a unprofessional player, and speculates that despite being talented, this player is unlikely to reach high levels and assigns him a PA of -6 / -7.
Or as I personally did for the player "Di Chiara", he did not have a great talent, no great skill, he was only discreetly athletic and I assigned him a PA of -5 even though I had given him a CA of 66. This player played for 3 years in Serie C, last year he played in Serie B, and this year he plays in Serie A, with a CA of 120, because he has become professional and therefore has improved more than one of my prediction I had made when he was 18 years old.

 

Now, if I missed something in your questions. Write it in the next answers. And I would recommend, the questions should only concern my proposal.

[Cap'nRad]

56 minutes ago, ham_aka_stam said:

These bold bits are almost contradictory.

You say differences arise as a result of genetics.  Then that you don't believe Messi or Ronaldo have a special gene.  You're right in both.  There's obviously not a football gene, but there's many many genes that impact sporting performance, and these work in combination to produce variations...

I had initially expounded on my meaning of 'aforementioned genetics' before reconsidering and deleting it. Some of what you list was included, but then again a lot of them are not what pushes footballers to the next level. I was thinking more of things like mental health and predispositions which influence your way of thinking. Most of the examples are physical limitations which, as a few admitted above, are only a limited part of what makes a footballer.

 

56 minutes ago, ham_aka_stam said:

You mention "other players don't come close to the hard work and professionalism needed to get to the level of cr7 and messi", which is hugely factually inaccurate.  There are tonnes of examples of model professionals who will never be as physically imposing as Ronaldo, as stable and nimble on the ball as Messi (to stick to the physicals), let alone have Ronaldo's technique when striking the ball, or Messi's at controlling, passing and curling the ball.  Beckham is touted as one of the most hardworking professional players, and all he got was the passing ability.  He was always quite slow, rather lacking in agility, and not known for his dribbling.  That's ignoring the professional dedicated players who never make it out of the lower leagues because they're too slow etc

And in your David Beckham example, as you can see he is a household name despite his limitations. This is due to his hardworking professionalism which took him far enough that he did not need the same physique as others to be imposing. However, not everyone's a david beckham or ronaldo or messi, and as I said before, for those uber professionals, you can clearly see it in their game. And the same way there isn't a david beckham on every roster or in every u18, there shouldn't be those uber professional players running around when they don't show all the proof of being such. And you remember my distinction about age? Some players develop their attitude at an age where its basically too late, some have a stellar attitude initially then fall off, and I believe these shouldn't have extremely high ratings for that initial snippet in time. Consistency in professionalism is more important imo, and that is what these world class players have.

50 minutes ago, ham_aka_stam said:

You can not believe in it or redefine it, but it exists.  Try as I might I'll never be a poet laureate, or a nuclear physicist, I simply don't have the potential ability. I could get so far, but eventually I'd reach my mental limits and get no better no matter how hard I try.

As I've said earlier, this is a difference of beliefs and trying to explain it further won't work for either of us. Unless some scientific conclusive proof is shown I doubt either of us will change on this stance so there's no point dwelling on it.

 

50 minutes ago, ham_aka_stam said:

That PA always exists, they just haven't reached it yet. The reshuffling is a bit naff, but it's slow enough that it pretty closely matches what happens when a player reaches their peak, they can't increase their attributes any more, get any faster, or shoot any better.  But they might be able to work at their running off the ball, at the expense of working on their heading, or their set-pieces.

You'd say that until they improve further irl and then say that P.A is actually their final P.A, ad infinitum. The most extreme and clear example being Jamie Vardy, but others exist. You see my point? They don't reach their P.A until they do, never before then.

50 minutes ago, ham_aka_stam said:

You say you understand the statements, but you've already said you have a different PA than SI  

Well, it's always been my stance that the P.A should be changed in some way.  The P.A I described is P.A the way I view it irl before they start reshuffling.

 

50 minutes ago, ham_aka_stam said:

Unless you're going to PA each individual attribute a global PA models the real world just fine.  The limit IRL is just as hard as PA is, albeit less reach it than in FM because FM is about (mostly) professional footballers who're more likely to reach theirs than the average man on the street.

Well this thread is about discussing alternatives to P.A, where the merits of each is analyzed and compared with the current system. If you believe the current system is the best one then I doubt there'll be any convincing you, the same way I think alternatives can be found and fine-tuned to be better than the current system. Funny thing is you suggested a better (imo) alternative a while ago. Either way what I'm asking is is your purpose to convince me that the current system is the best possible or scrutinize the alternatives? Cause that purpose significantly influences the discussion.

[enigmatic]

36 minutes ago, Raptor Longe said:

All of you realize that I can not answer 8/9/10 questions asked, right? 
I tried to answer you with examples. But apparently you want specific answers, that is, I do not know how the current gaming parameters of a young player in the video game work, can set fixed parameters.

Currently the game works like this:
A player who is 17 years old has 50 CAs, in the best possible conditions, with Professionalism at 20, always playing, and never injuring. With 200 of PA (so without any growth limit), it can reach 160/170 CA (at least that I understand through my 20 year gamer experience). So let's say that at the moment in the best possible conditions you can get to +120 CA.

We obviously want to avoid it because we can not afford that there are 1000 players in the game that starting from 80/90/100 of CAs at 17 years, they can hypothetically reach between 180 and 200 of CAs (if there are 1000 players with 20 in professionalism, with 1 in Injury Prome, playing in the best facilities in the world). Ok, let's say these 1000 players exist.

We at the current calculation, we remove 50% growth from Professionalism if there is "Natural Talent" or we take off 66% if there is also the "Natural Athlete".
So we have:
Professionalism: 50%
Natural Talent: 50%

If the player's growth at the most is 120 points with 20 professionalism.
If this has 20 in professionalism and 10 Natural Talent, its maximum growth will be no more than 120 points, but will be for him as if he currently has only 15 in professionalism and therefore hypothetically (since I do not know how much it will affect professionalism) of 95 points. And it will also be if this player has 10 in professionalism and 20 in Natural Talent.

Instead, we put the third parameter of growth.
Professionalism: 33%
Natural Talent: 33%
Natural Athlete: 33%

If the player's growth at the most is 120 points with 20 professionalism.
If this has 20 in professionalism, 10 Natural Talent and 10 in Natural Athlete, its maximum growth will be no more than 120 points, but it will be for him as if he currently has only 12 in professionalism and hence hypothetically will be 70 points.

 The only parameter to grow is Professionalism, with more professional tutors, and with the maturity of a player (eg 26/27 years of age) you can have a +2.
The Natural Talent and the Natural Athlete can not be improved because they represent the genetics of a player.

The only way to have a 120 point increase is that the player has all parameter values at 20.

 

Then we can also think of other things, such that physical parameters can improve faster and worsen more slowly if one has high values in "Natural Athlete", for example.

 

What is the difference between these values and the PA?

The difference is that, a researcher assumes a maximum growth considering primarily what he currently sees in a player. Often, a researcher sees a unprofessional player, and speculates that despite being talented, this player is unlikely to reach high levels and assigns him a PA of -6 / -7.
Or as I personally did for the player "Di Chiara", he did not have a great talent, no great skill, he was only discreetly athletic and I assigned him a PA of -5 even though I had given him a CA of 66. This player played for 3 years in Serie C, last year he played in Serie B, and this year he plays in Serie A, with a CA of 120, because he has become professional and therefore has improved more than one of my prediction I had made when he was 18 years old.

 

Now, if I missed something in your questions. Write it in the next answers. And I would recommend, the questions should only concern my proposal.

I'm glad we are now acknowledging the new system will restrict player's ability to improve just like PA

The main problem is this seems more restrictive and less flexible than the current system, and much more confusing.

So imagine a 23 year old player who has an apparently very professional approach to the game, has been playing first team football for four years and has a CA of 134. Imagine this player hasn't improved very much over the last two years of playing top division football, so the researcher assumes he's quite near his peak and sets a PA of 143.

Now with this proposed new system it's almost inevitable that a professional player will keep improving over the next 4-6 years to a much higher level than the researcher thinks they actually will reach, and they should end up playing for Italy, even though many 23 year olds who are good enough to play in Serie A are never good enough to play for Italy despite having OK attitude. The only way of stopping this is to set him with a low professionalism (which means he has behavioural problems he doesn't have in real life) and very low values for "natural talent" and "natural athlete", which will appear to be nonsense if the player actually has enough talent and athleticism to play in Serie A, and there are lots of young players in Serie C with higher values.

[perpetua]

1 hour ago, Raptor Longe said:

The difference is that, a researcher assumes a maximum growth considering primarily what he currently sees in a player. Often, a researcher sees a unprofessional player, and speculates that despite being talented, this player is unlikely to reach high levels and assigns him a PA of -6 / -7.
Or as I personally did for the player "Di Chiara", he did not have a great talent, no great skill, he was only discreetly athletic and I assigned him a PA of -5 even though I had given him a CA of 66. This player played for 3 years in Serie C, last year he played in Serie B, and this year he plays in Serie A, with a CA of 120, because he has become professional and therefore has improved more than one of my prediction I had made when he was 18 years old.

Once again.  You are basically saying that you want the game to bail you out of a choice you made which you later realized wasn't a good choice? 

If you thought the player had the talent to play in Serie A, you should have given him a PA that matched with that.  You don't have to reduce a player's potential because he's a poor professional and probably won't develop.  You're ruining the player twice (once with low PA, second time with poor mental traits) by doing this.

If you didn't think the player had the talent to play in Serie A and made an error in rating the player's potential, the game already makes up for researcher underrating of potential by creating newgens when, necessary, in order to keep the game balanced and close to the starting database.  So if it's not player X that makes it, then it's newgen Y.

As for the game adjusting the PA of a player upwards, I certainly wouldn't want the game to make a player that I am quite sure to not have much potential get bumped up.  If I thought he had the potential, I would have given it to him.

I also really think you should forget about your experiences in the past 20 years and see what happens in FM 2018 first.  Especially with respect to players with potential that you think won't develop due to their mental traits.  The player progression gets tweaked every year.

[legend_killer82]

Is it so difficult to understand that @Raptor simply doesn't like to have a fixed, invariable, hard PA? To have a limit which can't  be ever be overcome in any way as a CA, no matter of any possible condition or situation? To, after a first save game, know already who to buy and who to avoid because they will surely become a top player, good player, average player or poor player? To have a little variety in game(which doesn't mean that any player could become Messi, but just that a 19 years old player with 90 CA won't be limited to improve his CA by 5 or 10 cause his PA would be maybe 95 or 100, but a number between 5 and 60+ depending on variables which would be different at any game)?

And like him there are a lot of people, but really a lot. Me included.

 

The fact of proposing this "natural talent" is secondary, it's just a thought on how it could work once that limit(PA) would have been gone.

That's it.

[Raptor Longe]

37 minutes ago, enigmatic said:

I'm glad we are now acknowledging the new system will restrict player's ability to improve just like PA

The main problem is this seems more restrictive and less flexible than the current system, and much more confusing.

So imagine a 23 year old player who has an apparently very professional approach to the game, has been playing first team football for four years and has a CA of 134. Imagine this player hasn't improved very much over the last two years of playing top division football, so the researcher assumes he's quite near his peak and sets a PA of 143.

Now with this proposed new system it's almost inevitable that a professional player will keep improving over the next 4-6 years to a much higher level than the researcher thinks they actually will reach, and they should end up playing for Italy, even though many 23 year olds who are good enough to play in Serie A are never good enough to play for Italy despite having OK attitude. The only way of stopping this is to set him with a low professionalism (which means he has behavioural problems he doesn't have in real life) and very low values for "natural talent" and "natural athlete", which will appear to be nonsense if the player actually has enough talent and athleticism to play in Serie A, and there are lots of young players in Serie C with higher values.

Have not you understood yet?
Meanwhile, for the age of this player the growth will be slower, because the age of maturation is near, compared to a 17-year-old. But in any case, if a player who is 23 years old, you think he will never exceed a value of 143, there will be a reason, right? Will he physically have limits? Will he not be an incredible professional? Will his talent not be so high? You will adjust the parameters according to what you believe, and its growth will be slow (although everyone is possible).

 

2 minutes ago, perpetua said:

Once again.  You are basically saying that you want the game to bail you out of a choice you made which you later realized wasn't a good choice? 

If you thought the player had the talent to play in Serie A, you should have given him a PA that matched with that.  You don't have to reduce a player's potential because he's a poor professional and probably won't develop.  You're ruining the player twice (once with low PA, second time with poor mental traits) by doing this.

If you didn't think the player had the talent to play in Serie A and made an error in rating the player's potential, the game already makes up for researcher underrating of potential by creating newgens when, necessary, in order to keep the game balanced and close to the starting database.  So if it's not player X that makes it, then it's newgen Y.

I also really think you should forget about your experiences in the past 20 years and see what happens in FM 2018 first.  Especially with respect to players with potential that you think won't develop due to their mental traits.  The player progression gets tweaked every year.

One makes an example, and of course that is the center of the speech, is not it? Not the same, but the example.

The player I set as an example was a player who had a low talent, a decent physical ability, and a lack of professionalism. So the PA I had given was given for a series of ratings on what the player seemed to be able to express. He grew up because he changed his professionalism, value already present in mental parameters.
No one could have predicted this change, in fact the team gave it free to a team of Serie C.
If one were to express potential value, the absolute potency of a player without considering the possible limits, we would do so many players on -6 / -65 / -7 / -75, some would argue that it is not possible for everyone to have that potential.

[perpetua]

1 minute ago, Raptor Longe said:

The player I set as an example was a player who had a low talent, a decent physical ability, and a lack of professionalism. So the PA I had given was given for a series of ratings on what the player seemed to be able to express. He grew up because he changed his professionalism, value already present in mental parameters.
No one could have predicted this change, in fact the team gave it free to a team of Serie C.
If one were to express potential value, the absolute potency of a player without considering the possible limits, we would do so many players on -6 / -65 / -7 / -75, some would argue that it is not possible for everyone to have that potential.

Of course you consider limits.  But these are technical, mental and physical limits.  Not the player's dedication.

And if no one could have predicted this player's development, then so be it. 

The database is a snapshot at a moment in time to reflect the researchers' opinions on players.  I would much rather have a newgen created to make up for a high potential player that I missed than the game randomly making a real player have potential when he shouldn't.

[Raptor Longe]

Register your Newgen preference for real players in the list of reasons you have against this proposal.

Thanks for the opinion.

Now you can go along with other opinions regarding the proposal.

[legend_killer82]

But also not. Millions times better any real player than a regen. Always and forever

[Cougar2010]

27 minutes ago, legend_killer82 said:

Is it so difficult to understand that @Raptor simply doesn't like to have a fixed, invariable, hard PA? To have a limit which can't  be ever be overcome in any way as a CA, no matter of any possible condition or situation? To, after a first save game, know already who to buy and who to avoid because they will surely become a top player, good player, average player or poor player? To have a little variety in game(which doesn't mean that any player could become Messi, but just that a 19 years old player with 90 CA won't be limited to improve his CA by 5 or 10 cause his PA would be maybe 95 or 100, but a number between 5 and 60+ depending on variables which would be different at any game)?

And like him there are a lot of people, but really a lot. Me included.

 

The fact of proposing this "natural talent" is secondary, it's just a thought on how it could work once that limit(PA) would have been gone.

That's it.

I'm all for more variety from save to save and you don't have to remove PA or introduce a new attribute to have it.

As I stated earlier in the thread the easiest way to do this would simply to make the PA of all players random each time a save is created.

SI could even take a step in that direction by giving us a tick box when setting up a save so people had an option of researcher set PA or random PA.

 

[santy001]

@Raptor Longe & @legend_killer82 what's your furthest distance save game on FM18? This everyone having the same game with PA isn't the case in my experience. 

Look up Thibaud Verlinden, Julien Ngoy, Harry Souttar, Oliver Shenton and Tyrese Campbell. 

Infact, anyone interested in this thread, and whatever your thoughts are either way, put a brief summary of where they're at.

To start in 2024 in my own game:
Verlinden - Hearts (Scottish Premier League)
Ngoy - FC Nantes (Ligue 1)
Souttar - Huddersfield (Championship)
Shenton - Doncaster (League One)
Campbell - Ipswich (Championship)

5 players with the PA to be top half Premier League players. Clearly they haven't reached that level, or a comparative level elsewhere (perhaps arguably Ngoy has maybe) but I would hope, even with a very limited sample size there could be a decent array in possible outcomes for these players.

[Cougar2010]

@santy001

I'm still on FM17, have their PAs changed much from 17 to 18?

I can show their careers if not.

[santy001]

Just now, Cougar2010 said:

@santy001

I'm still on FM17, have their PAs changed much from 17 to 18?

I can show their careers if not.

I'd omit Tyrese Campbell for FM17, but for the other 4 their PA's have remained the same.

[Cougar2010]

Just now, santy001 said:

I'd omit Tyrese Campbell for FM17, but for the other 4 their PA's have remained the same.

Ok I'm in December 2033, all leagues were loaded and running from the start.

Verlinden (34yo)

26 U21 caps, no senior caps.  Several loan spells at lower league clubs then rotation player with Middlesbrough (Championship) & Sunderland (Prem).  Two years as a 1st teamer at Rotherham (Championship),  four years as a rotation player in the Eredivisie (Heerenveen then PSV) before settling at Celtic where he has been first team/rotation for the last four years.

 

Ngoy (36yo)

Loan spells in Scottish Prem & English Championship before being released.  Picked up by Charleroi (Belgium Pro League) where he spent 11 years before retiring.

 

Souttar (35yo)

Usual loan spells before being sold to Bury (League One) for £65k.  Spent the rest of his career in League One, League Two & Vanarama with Bury/Cheltenham/Swindon.

 

Shenton

Has left my save but I can see a £675k move to Middlesbrough in 2017, £160k move to Sheff Utd (Championship) in 2019 & a £130k move to Oxford (Championship) in 2025.  Therefore Championship prior to 2026 when Oxford were relegated to League One, he stayed until he retired in 2032.

[ham_aka_stam]

1 hour ago, santy001 said:

I'd omit Tyrese Campbell for FM17, but for the other 4 their PA's have remained the same.

But I thought researchers had to change PAs every year!?

[itay.bing]

what some players here are complaining about is not that they don't see a vardy in other clubs,but rather that the 22 year old they had in the eighth division,the one who is playing in the senior squad since 17 and is yet to improve enough to get to higher levels of play,does not improve when they are repeatedly promoted.the researchers,and frankly probably you too, thought that he will never be good enough to play in league 2,so he will not be in the game,and most of the time also not in real life.you have artificially put him in that position,by overachieving on the one hand and not releasing players as you get higher up the league on the other hand,like real clubs do.if you didn't need to,because he was good enough,you have no reason to complain.this is true to almost every case here,unless of course you bought vardy in FM13,believed he will become premier league material,and was completely disappointed to find out he didn't do as well as you expected.if this is your case,my sincere apologies. of course it sucks to look back at FM13 and find a version of vardy that has inferior potential to the one he had real life,but unless you can tell (or better,bet your house on) which one of a thousand sunday league footballers will become something in 6 years you have no real reason to complain about their pa or lack of development."natural ability" will not change this.  

[legend_killer82]

1 minute ago, ham_aka_stam said:

But I thought researchers had to change PAs every year!?

That's what **** me off...people don't even know how it works, yet they take a position and tell others they don't know what is a PA...

[santy001]

Whoosh.

[Amarante]

On ‎11‎/‎15‎/‎2017 at 11:32, Raptor Longe said:

 

What a coincidence, I was an athlete in the category of hundred meters, after an injury suffered as a kid that did not allow me to become a football player (I had been already bought by the Turin), and I was also a youth football coach for about 3 years (I have some trainee license FIGC). And I would also be one who at the University has studied motor science... 

 

It is true that there are human PHYSICAL limits. Science tells us that a man in a hundred meters will never go beyond 9.48 seconds. And there are people who have a better physical predisposition than others (not everyone can do 10 seconds in one hundred meters). But it is also true that a man can improve his performance if he has had bad coaches. When I became an athlete I started 12.5 seconds with a footballer training, at 12 seconds, at 11.7 seconds, reaching a time of 11.18 seconds. Do you know why? Because I ran badly, because I had an excess of fat in my body (from 97 to 88 kg), because I trained my muscles differently.
I made the example of Petagna, who weighed 95 kg, and before returning to Atalanta on the loan, he lost 10 KG, improving his speed (less weight, but identical physical strength), increasing his resistance. Certain physical improvements are rare for those who have already reached full physical maturity.

 

 

 

As a Jamaican and sprinter just wanted to let you know that the limit of 9.48 is possible to be reached and even go further. The thing with body limits is that as we advance further in the terms of sport science we learn new ways to unlock more of the body capabilities.  As such in the 70s no ever expected persons to be running 9 seconds. 

 

To add to the conversation now is that while PA acts as a set amount it has a pro and a con.

 

The con is that a player can highly surpass his PA that is listed in game but the Pro is that it keeps a lid on things. In programming something has to be finite. 

 

Lets look at player development IRL 

 

Player A I touted as the next big thing.

Player B is average but a hard work

Player C has talent and is a hard worker.

Player D deemed not good enough to make it.

 

Player A believed is hype and didn't put in the work and thought that his talent alone was enough he failed to make it at the highest level.

 

Player B doesn't have the talent and after spending years in the lowers league finally establish himself as a good player

Player C went on to become a worldclass player.

Player D after being deemed to have no talent he became a worldclass player. 

 

In FM we have determination, professionalism and other factors can that give you all of these scenarios except  player D. In FM when the PA is coded in to be at 98 no matter the other attributes you can never be world class. 

 

So lets say you set every player PA to be at 200 and then you add  a next attribute to measure the growth of the player and this attribute along with the others act as a deduction which over time a players PA might just be 200 but a next player who didn't posses all of the necessary skills and stuff could only reach 150. 

 

Even tho a system like that would have its fault a do think how we gauge players potential needs to be reworked even if PA stays as a static value. 

[enigmatic]

3 hours ago, Raptor Longe said:

Have not you understood yet?
Meanwhile, for the age of this player the growth will be slower, because the age of maturation is near, compared to a 17-year-old. But in any case, if a player who is 23 years old, you think he will never exceed a value of 143, there will be a reason, right? Will he physically have limits? Will he not be an incredible professional? Will his talent not be so high? You will adjust the parameters according to what you believe, and its growth will be slow (although everyone is possible).

Sure, the maturation of the player will be slower. But I want it to be near zero because I have watched a player not improve very much in two years of playing regular top division football, and I know from watching football that very few people improve to become CA150+ top class international footballers, and it's particularly unlikely that somebody who has spent two years at the top level without getting better is going to be one of them. As @perpetua pointed out, most senior players only get a few CA points better in their mid twenties, unless they have world class talent or have only just started playing top level football. And the ones who improve the most are not necessarily the most professional or talented; usually it's the opposite and they had big problems earlier in their career...

It makes no sense to set my top division first team player "natural talent" to a very low value because he has far more footballing talent than most people in the database will ever have. It makes no sense to set his natural talent to a very low value because he has more speed and strength than most people in the database. It is even worse to set his professionalism to a low value because it will make him complain to his manager all the time (even though he never does that IRL). 

But if I don't set most of these values very low, he apparently keeps improving until he is a top class international player. 

What makes a lot more sense to me is to say "OK, he can improve a little bit, but he is very unlikely to become better than Player Y, who is the best midfielder in the squad and has a CA of 149". So I'll set his PA a little lower, maybe 143 

(Maybe I underestimate his potential by five points. Maybe I overestimate by five points. C'est la vie. Or if I really think I have no idea how good he may become, I can leave PA blank. )

What is unrealistic is for my player to (normally) continue slowly getting better for six years until he usually reaching CA 155+, and becoming an important player for Italy, because below average Serie A players at 23 do not normally become important Italy players by 27. And instead of just imposing a limit, I have to put lots of different mental and age and position values into a calculator to discover I must give him no natural talent and no natural physique and professionalism to stop the continuous rate of improvement. The first two attributes look stupid, because he is not weaker or more untalented than average, and the last attribute makes him complain all the time.

[perpetua]

9 hours ago, enigmatic said:

As @perpetua pointed out, most senior players only get a few CA points better in their mid twenties, unless they have world class talent or have only just started playing top level football. And the ones who improve the most are not necessarily the most professional or talented; usually it's the opposite and they had big problems earlier in their career...

Just to clarify.  I don't believe there is a correlation between developing relatively later (developing after mid 20s) and potential.  In my experience late bloomers are those that didn't stand out in their early 20s because they did not have any discernible quality like speed which has immediate value to the senior club.  Relatively late bloomers tend to be players who require a strong knowledge of the game to be effective.  They know how to position themselves well or they can anticipate situations better or they can make quick and correct decisions.  

One good example I can think of right now is Jason Denayer.  His main asset at this point is his great speed and well above average ability with the ball as a centre back.  These qualities make him valuable despite his many shortcomings in reading the game and decision making.  He needs to improve his game mentally in order to go up one notch but since his speed bails him out of many situations, his mental development in football seems quite slow.  He's making the same positioning mistakes as he did 2 years ago, albeit not as frequently.

Take another central defender who doesn't have as much speed as Denayer, naturally he has lower CA and he hasn't attracted the interest of bigger clubs.  This guy has to learn how to position himself better because he doesn't have the speed to bail him out.  If he does have the mental capacity (football intelligence) and drive to improve the mental aspect of his game, it's entirely possible for him to catch up or get past Jason Denayer as these players get into their late 20s.

Theo Walcott is another good example in my opinion.  He burst into the scene at a very young age with his blistering speed, this made a lot of people think he had loads of potential because he was so effective at such a young age but Walcott never really reached the levels expected of him.

Henrik Mkhitaryan is the same age as Walcott.  He was playing for Pyunik Erevan when Walcott first came into the scene at Arsenal.  While Walcott's game continued to rely on pace as he aged, Mkhitaryan never had blistering pace like Walcott so he had to develop his reading of the game.  Eventually Mkhitaryan overtook Walcott who had peaked by the time he was in his early 20s.

As researchers, we need to do a better job of identifying players like Mkhitaryan.  Players like Theo Walcott are in our face at a very early age so there is no mistaking them.  But players like Mkhitaryan can be missed because they start out with a relatively lower CA than players like Walcott but may still have the potential to overtake.

[7omer]

Edited away by myself

[Com_BEPFA]

I'm gonna jump in on this thread and try to explain my opinion on why I agree with the criticism of the PA system FM is using. 

 

First off, it's clear that many replies here seem to over-simplify what CA and PA are. Even what skill values are (I've had a guy with hardly any skills >10 perform exceptionally in top flight football. I also never actually check those values (as they're obviously inaccessible in-game) but it's still clear that the highest rated player is not always necessarily the best, especially in different systems and roles). CA is a general measurement of the ability of a player, how it's distributed is a different story and can make all the difference. Hence, as stated multiple times in here, a CA 130 player can be a top player in the PL and a CA 160 guy can rot on the bench. 

And the system is not flawed as of itself. Players progress in millions of different ways, both with player and AI management and the same player can go many completely opposite directions in different saves and along with it end at vastly different peaks CAs and skill distributions (and thus "actual ability"). That's all cool and realistic. Nobody (hopefully) expects the saves to always go along as much as possible with real life and therefore only enjoy themselves if FM2013 Vardy ends up in the PL by 2017. 

The issue I see and how I understood Raptor's initial proposition is with undervalued PAs. Yes, a player can become competent even with a low PA and all that, but it limits the ways in which a game goes, the realism aspect of "there's so many possibilities." Let me try to explain with a few charts.

Please excuse the crappy charts, didn't want to spend an hour making them. As you can see, there's only a sliver of the enormous variety of ways a career can go for player A. Might stagnate despite his potential, might be a late bloomer, might just develop continuously (I exaggerated that continuous growth, obviously) yet never reach anything close to full potential, might almost reach it and stay at world class level, or might start well and then get stunted for whatever reason. 

Then there's player B, rated by a researcher to even in the best case scenario not get beyond 100 CA. He also has a variety of ways to develop and play his career, but everything beyond 100 CA is immediately suddenly stopped. In no way or constellation could he ever possibly get beyond that. Sure enough, there's plenty of players out there that fit into that category so they have to exist in FM as well, but there's two issues. 

1) FM's way of development. Young players grow faster, so, granted both A and B are young players, B is going to likely reach his potential throughout his career, oftentimes pretty fast, and then go nowhere. In real life that's the exception, most people and players develop up to a limit, which is mid to end 20's, not right after maturity. 

2) There is those Jamie Vardys out there. Nobody can spot them realistically, nobody expects people to, but there should be a way in the game to have that happen. Now, I'm not saying it should be a regular occurrence or anything like that, there just should be a possibility that one player overcomes the odds and turns out greater than anyone would have ever expected. I admit that there's still no solid explanation as to how that could be realized within the game without having dozens if not hundreds or thousands of those cases every single save, but it should be possible. 

As it has been mentioned before, the algorithms of the game already make it possible for players to stop growing despite fantastic PA (see @herne79's post pretty high on page 7) or to bloom pretty late in their career. So go back to Raptor's initial post. His main idea was that PA is redundant. No necessity of another variable like Natural Talent to effectively replace it, that was just an idea as how to realize this task: Make players develop their CA fluidly, realistically, without the unnatural PA border. Read: Most players still behave exactly as they do with this PA limit but there is the option for some players to grow beyond this set limit if other factors allow it. 

One of my issues with the game is that whenever your "Average Joe" plays the game starting in a lower league, the immediate turn of action is buying players. The game makes it possible to greatly enhance a team without overspending (technically, that's also a flaw of the game, making it necessary for people to add special rules of "realistic transfers" for a realistic save). And if you go up one league, the whole team (maybe except for one or a few overachievers, mostly talents you took from top tier teams anyway) is exchanged for a better one. This doesn't happen in reality. Sure, it also doesn't happen that a team goes up league after league each year, that's a choice that everyone can make on their own as to how to approach the game, but the PA limit actively discourages players from going the way real teams go and keeping a team together for the most part, only adding some improvements here and there. Most teams are capped at a PA that is adequate for their lower league and if you want to keep players you have to buy others to compensate their weaknesses. CA already does most of that. CA is below that of the new league, players will have to outperform and excel to keep up, there's no need for a limit. Most players will not make it more than one or two flights up, just like in real life. I know that @santy001 has brought up an example that it could work, but it still does so artificially with players that have certain skillsets or PAs that allow them to do it. I'd like a fluent game where I can take the same team and one save Player A leads me to the title and without an issue incorporates as the leader of a higher league team, while the next one player B stands out and A stagnates. 

Again, yes, this is possible already, but in the limits of PA. Yes, PA tries to mimic the players who are likely to perform well in the future in real life, but usually CA already conveys that. I'd feel the game a lot more realistic if anyone could be the player that improves impressively, rather than one certain guy.

Just to make it clear, this is all best case scenarios. I'm not saying one guy of every team in every save should become a superhero for the team beyond the confines of their league, but the chance of that happening, however slim it may be, would be awesome.

 

Now, as I struggle to keep my thoughts linear and explain every single aspect of how I see things coherently, I'll try to address the issue I see being raised with the proposal in this thread. There's no particular order (sorry), I just made some notes while going through the 8 pages of this and will try to explain my thoughts to each one.

 

 

1 - Players automatically getting better with promotion/going to a better team is stupid

I completely agree and don't think this is in any way, shape or form what Raptor meant. He was simply uttering how any player given better competition, training, experience, etc. has greater potential to improve. Again, already all in the game, except for anything beyond PA. It's really hard to prove, but even a Conference player would get better when given the chance to train with ManUnited. Mostly marginally, of course, due to limits in his genetics and (football) intelligence, but he would improve. Better nutrition, better workout, better training regimes, better players to directly interact with and learn from, better more knowledgeable coaches, etc. So even Chris Clubfoot of 28 years with CA 55 and PA 55 in the game, would in real life benefit from this. He wouldn't magically jump to being a better player, nobody says so, but he'd improve over time. Slightly.

 

2 - Less realism if anybody can develop into a top player or even everybody with the right presets will

Also not what anyone wants. Again, the game already regulates those things itself. It uses the PA as a point of reference, I'm pretty sure, so as to stunt growth the closer one gets to their potential, so there's clearly some things to figure out on how and when to reduce a player's growth (even under ideal circumstances) rate to avoid loss of uniqueness in individual players' careers. It certainly sounds like some work in programming as opposed to simply keeping the PA limit, but if SI is to be believed a lot of it should already be in place underneath the roof that is PA. 

 

3 - PA is the natural/genetic limitation of players

This is a point that has been addressed on the last few pages. Genetics is a tough topic. On the one hand, it's clear that some people just have it easier to compete at a sport than others, on the other hand it's striking how many of those that excel do so because from a very (very) young age they have been brought up relatively professionally in terms of sports and specific fields of it. So while it's clear the human body has physical limitations, it's doubtful they're even reached (just look at how most athletic records keep being broken. A mix of better training, nutrition, and equipment. It's possibly also better scouting (lack of "loss of talent," i.e. never being discovered) but it's hard to argue that athletes 10 years back weren't also insane physical examples of mankind). As for mental limitations, those are almost impossible to judge for anyone in the first place - how do you know someone is doing their best or not training/being trained right? - and technical limitations would first have to be proven. Those that put in the most work under the best circumstances are usually the ones that excel technically, it's really hard to just impose a limit in that area on a person. 

With all that said, as much as many here like to argue against it, the limit is not what PA effectively expresses. Every single player that has ever had his PA corrected to a higher value from one iteration of the game to the next has disproved this claim. Yes, every researcher is doing their best in assessing players and molding them as close to reality as possible, and every mistake can be corrected within just one year. But you have to understand that each FM is its own little universe. Just like this actual one we live in. With infinite possibilities. So even if there is a set limit any given person could ever reach under any circumstances in their life, PA can't be expressing that because it is commonly corrected to a higher value. As @ham_aka_stam mentioned, if you want it to be that, it has to be a lot higher generally than what it is now. Given how players develop in game it seems to be more of a "realistic estimation of a player in their prime if everything goes well." That's relatively close to absolute limit, but not yet there. And the lower in leagues you go, the more inhibiting the PA limits get to players. Does researcher A really consider that when assessing the PA of John Doe from Podunk united? Does he really think "If Joe goes to university, meets a personal trainer buddy, works on his body like crazy, scores heaps for Podunk, leads them to promotion, gets picked up from yet another higher league team with better coaches and institutions, gets taught what actual football really is, plays for them, scores eventually, makes it to the first team after a year," and so on? Is that the value of PA he gives him? Or is it "I can see him playing first team for Podunk if he wasn't such a chum. He's also young, so let's give him 5 points more than that."? This is not criticizing any researcher, don't get me wrong, this is a big difference between what PA is made out to be and what it actually expresses. And in game, it is a border that can not be crossed. So if it isn't generally raised to a limit that seems unachievable to make room for those extreme cases (again, extremely unlikely, something that needs to be limited in game, a case of one in 10,000 or more. It just should be possible), PA itself is a bad limiting factor in the game.

The general population in a Football Manager should never exceed the limits of their league, we can all agree on that, all that is asked here is for some to overcome it, and as much as it is argued, I don't want 1 out of player base x with the right CA distribution and PA limit to be that guy, I want even really unlikely players to possibly turn out to be that one guy. Much less likely still than players from player base x, obviously, but possible. That's exactly what Vardy is. Sure, he had the potential for it, but with nobody able to say who is the guy with that potential, why not make (almost) anybody able to be it? Just as realistic as anything else in the confines of one single FM save.

 

4 - People will abuse this system and game it/anybody can pick any player and make them great

So what? They already do! Training plans, tactics, player lists, it all exists. So even if there is a way to tell better developing players apart without PA, it makes no difference. The argument that it's easier because it can't be just one of the wonderkids but anyone if you start with a big team is not seeing how this is meant to work. A player, even 15 years old, from a low league with low CA needs absolutely everything to go in their favor to turn out as a first league player. Not as in "best team, check, best training grounds and training, check, best youth academy, check, playtime in high leagues, check." As in "comes over at 15, develops really quickly (highly unlikely, even with perfect Professionalism etc.), goes to U18 at 16 and is playing a defining role, breaks into second team at 17 and has occasional first team appearances, makes an impact, continues (almost) injury-free and with excellent training results, turns out to be working exceptionally well with his mentor, used in important CL games at 18 and fitting into the team without weakening it" unlikely. Something like that, not exactly, obviously. Just a turn of events that is ridiculously unlikely to happen. It just might happen. And then it's amazing. And, sure, people will be able to game even that, by replaying games ad infinitum until that one player plays well and whatnot, but this leads to my second point:

Who cares anyway? If they wanna play their game like that, let them. What does it matter to us? We play it properly and we get that little bit more thrill out of it because there is this sliver of a chance something amazing like that might happen. And because we know with our lower league team there might just be players that go up with us unexpectedly and still play well. All of that may happen. The youth player thing most likely won't. There will probably be one or a few in all the database each save that make such a journey, most likely over small steps and not being grabbed by ManUnited at CA 40, and the game's all the better for it, because we don't have to wait for newgens for that to happen. 

 

5 - A Natural Talent value would be harder to guess than PA

Arguable, of course, but as said before, it might actually be a little easier to just make a general guess as to how likely a player is able to pick up on higher level play compared to his teammates as opposed to judging at which exact point his career would stagnate in a perfect universe for that exact player. That is, if there's any need for a new value to be introduced in the first place. It could even be, as - I think - mentioned early on, directly related to PA, if you want (PA/10). Just that it doesn't limit a player at a certain point, it just expresses their likelihood to progress (quickly). And even a 20 would not mean 100%, so there would be no guarantees anywhere, just like there isn't with a 200 PA.

 

6 - It's all the same, there's still a limit/maximum achievable CA

Technically, sure. Most likely there would be a vastly theoretical maximum value possibly achievable under any circumstances for every player in the game. Basically what PA is claimed to be but isn't. It's just that this roof wouldn't matter because it's almost literally impossible to achieve. As stated in 4, the events needed for someone to achieve the maximum possible would be literally impossible to have happen in a game. Basically nobody would reach that. A Messi would start with insanely high CA (even talking about a 24yo one with room for development) and therefore need less things to go perfectly right to come close to 200 CA, the less CA a player has, the less likely a CA 200 is, and, depending on how it all works out in the end, surely most players would not reach 200 even under ideal circumstances. 

So, yes, there would be a theoretical upper limit, but it would be fluid in the game and far higher for most players than their current PA is. 

Just to reiterate: Normal progression of a save without PA would go exactly as that of one with PA. 99.9% (this is a guess, just to imagine how much it would impact the game, as that seems to be a big concern) of players would develop exactly the same as they do with their PA limit. Only a random 0.1%, triggered by whichever unlikely events, will exceed what "normal FM" deems possible with the PA limit. And of those 0.1% probably 90% or more would be lower league players that reach CAs slightly higher than their PAs (<10), of the other 10% the majority would be exceptional higher league players ever so slightly above their PA (remember, at one point in their career, over the whole span of the career of every single player in FM) and maybe 1% would reach slightly more than 10 CA more than their initial PA. And then, lastly, there would be the odd few, spanning over all game world, possibly turning out as 0, that actually go above and beyond any expectation. Most likely never to be seen by the player, because it was a Conference guy with 40 CA and normally 55 PA that turned into a 95 solid third league player, or something the likes of that. Then, if you play for decades, there would (possibly) be noticeable ones, just like Vardy irl, only that you don't even know with a newgen, as they could have been spawned by the game with 160PA in the first place, even in the "old" system. 

That's how this is supposed to work, not with an infinite amount of low league players flooding any given league and FM players just randomly grabbing crap young players and leading them to stardom on a regular.

 

7 - People don't understand what PA is

I think I've addressed that issue in the first part of this post.

 

8 - Too many players become better than realistically possible

I've touched on it in 6, but to add to that: If someone has the muse to go through every single version of Football Manager and pick out PAs and then check how many went up by how much, that would be numbers that could very well be called realistic, as people have had those expectations and the players have exceeded them, in part drastically. It's only (I'm using only very lightly here, of course I acknowledge this would require a lot of work programming) a tweaking game to recreate number of roughly that proportion in game. As always, the human player would have an advantage with his save of creating such outstanding players but this has been and always will be an issue in Football Manager, success of human players exceeds any realistic success of whichever team they coach. Not in every single case, but in a considerable portion of saves. 

 

9 - It's a human issue to buy players upon promotion, not the game's

Also a point I touched in the beginning, and I think it's both. Yes, I can just keep the majority of my team together, even as first team, and might even be successful, but I feel the game could be tweaked in a direction that makes it closer to real life as to the proportion of players that successfully make a promotion with the team without being a burden (also a very subjective point, I have no hard evidence as to how many players in rl make the transition with their team and play well and how many do so in game. Just a feeling that almost any given player of a team is not capable of doing so).

 

 

10 - Potential doesn't change in rl, why have it fluid in game?

See 3. Nobody knows how much of a hard-coded potential there is in humans and the yearly re-evaluation of them shows that a completely static one can't be the be-all, end-all way of mimicking the real life.

 

11 - Actually less late bloomers or less varied development than with PA

This is clearly something to be avoided. As mentioned, the game supposedly has most requirements for that in place, regardless of PA. Progression should go naturally, also be stopped naturally, not artificially with a hard set limit. Late bloomers are most likely older players with CA far lower than PA, which limits the occurrence again. A natural way of this happening would be preferable.

 

One thing to add here, now that I think of it: There has to be some sort of random triggers for progression, as there is not always something related to training or play-time that causes unexpected spurs in development. Yes, I said random (somewhat, can obviously be influenced by a vast amount of things, along with being less likely with less professional players, etc.pp). Yes, that means it will most likely vary from save to save. And yes, that means it will most likely not be exactly the same person that will break out in real life. Nobody should expect that, that's simply impossible to predict without actual knowledge of the future. The mere occurrence in itself is what we're after.

 

I'll leave this monster of a post here. My apologies, there is a lot to this thread and a lot of things in my mind regarding different comments in here. More likely than not I have forgotten to add several of them. And I'm aware that this seems to be a big change for a minor detail. I'm no developer, if they feel this is too much work for the outcome, then they're free to disregard anything anybody in this thread said. This will most likely not happen anyway. It's a thought experiment on how the game we all (hopefully) love could be just that bit better, and if we're honest, that's always tiny little steps at this point. So maybe it leads to nothing. Maybe someone responsible for the game picks it up. Or Maybe they see it and get their own, better (especially considering I have no solid realization idea myself, only a dream world final result) idea on how to lead the game in that direction. 

 

[legend_killer82]

6 minutes ago, Com_BEPFA said:

I'm gonna jump in on this thread and try to explain my opinion on why I agree with the criticism of the PA system FM is using. 

 

First off, it's clear that many replies here seem to over-simplify what CA and PA are. Even what skill values are (I've had a guy with hardly any skills >10 perform exceptionally in top flight football. I also never actually check those values (as they're obviously inaccessible in-game) but it's still clear that the highest rated player is not always necessarily the best, especially in different systems and roles). CA is a general measurement of the ability of a player, how it's distributed is a different story and can make all the difference. Hence, as stated multiple times in here, a CA 130 player can be a top player in the PL and a CA 160 guy can rot on the bench. 

And the system is not flawed as of itself. Players progress in millions of different ways, both with player and AI management and the same player can go many completely opposite directions in different saves and along with it end at vastly different peaks CAs and skill distributions (and thus "actual ability"). That's all cool and realistic. Nobody (hopefully) expects the saves to always go along as much as possible with real life and therefore only enjoy themselves if FM2013 Vardy ends up in the PL by 2017. 

The issue I see and how I understood Raptor's initial proposition is with undervalued PAs. Yes, a player can become competent even with a low PA and all that, but it limits the ways in which a game goes, the realism aspect of "there's so many possibilities." Let me try to explain with a few charts.

Please excuse the crappy charts, didn't want to spend an hour making them. As you can see, there's only a sliver of the enormous variety of ways a career can go for player A. Might stagnate despite his potential, might be a late bloomer, might just develop continuously (I exaggerated that continuous growth, obviously) yet never reach anything close to full potential, might almost reach it and stay at world class level, or might start well and then get stunted for whatever reason. 

Then there's player B, rated by a researcher to even in the best case scenario not get beyond 100 CA. He also has a variety of ways to develop and play his career, but everything beyond 100 CA is immediately suddenly stopped. In no way or constellation could he ever possibly get beyond that. Sure enough, there's plenty of players out there that fit into that category so they have to exist in FM as well, but there's two issues. 

1) FM's way of development. Young players grow faster, so, granted both A and B are young players, B is going to likely reach his potential throughout his career, oftentimes pretty fast, and then go nowhere. In real life that's the exception, most people and players develop up to a limit, which is mid to end 20's, not right after maturity. 

2) There is those Jamie Vardys out there. Nobody can spot them realistically, nobody expects people to, but there should be a way in the game to have that happen. Now, I'm not saying it should be a regular occurrence or anything like that, there just should be a possibility that one player overcomes the odds and turns out greater than anyone would have ever expected. I admit that there's still no solid explanation as to how that could be realized within the game without having dozens if not hundreds or thousands of those cases every single save, but it should be possible. 

As it has been mentioned before, the algorithms of the game already make it possible for players to stop growing despite fantastic PA (see @herne79's post pretty high on page 7) or to bloom pretty late in their career. So go back to Raptor's initial post. His main idea was that PA is redundant. No necessity of another variable like Natural Talent to effectively replace it, that was just an idea as how to realize this task: Make players develop their CA fluidly, realistically, without the unnatural PA border. Read: Most players still behave exactly as they do with this PA limit but there is the option for some players to grow beyond this set limit if other factors allow it. 

One of my issues with the game is that whenever your "Average Joe" plays the game starting in a lower league, the immediate turn of action is buying players. The game makes it possible to greatly enhance a team without overspending (technically, that's also a flaw of the game, making it necessary for people to add special rules of "realistic transfers" for a realistic save). And if you go up one league, the whole team (maybe except for one or a few overachievers, mostly talents you took from top tier teams anyway) is exchanged for a better one. This doesn't happen in reality. Sure, it also doesn't happen that a team goes up league after league each year, that's a choice that everyone can make on their own as to how to approach the game, but the PA limit actively discourages players from going the way real teams go and keeping a team together for the most part, only adding some improvements here and there. Most teams are capped at a PA that is adequate for their lower league and if you want to keep players you have to buy others to compensate their weaknesses. CA already does most of that. CA is below that of the new league, players will have to outperform and excel to keep up, there's no need for a limit. Most players will not make it more than one or two flights up, just like in real life. I know that @santy001 has brought up an example that it could work, but it still does so artificially with players that have certain skillsets or PAs that allow them to do it. I'd like a fluent game where I can take the same team and one save Player A leads me to the title and without an issue incorporates as the leader of a higher league team, while the next one player B stands out and A stagnates. 

Again, yes, this is possible already, but in the limits of PA. Yes, PA tries to mimic the players who are likely to perform well in the future in real life, but usually CA already conveys that. I'd feel the game a lot more realistic if anyone could be the player that improves impressively, rather than one certain guy.

Just to make it clear, this is all best case scenarios. I'm not saying one guy of every team in every save should become a superhero for the team beyond the confines of their league, but the chance of that happening, however slim it may be, would be awesome.

 

Now, as I struggle to keep my thoughts linear and explain every single aspect of how I see things coherently, I'll try to address the issue I see being raised with the proposal in this thread. There's no particular order (sorry), I just made some notes while going through the 8 pages of this and will try to explain my thoughts to each one.

 

 

1 - Players automatically getting better with promotion/going to a better team is stupid

I completely agree and don't think this is in any way, shape or form what Raptor meant. He was simply uttering how any player given better competition, training, experience, etc. has greater potential to improve. Again, already all in the game, except for anything beyond PA. It's really hard to prove, but even a Conference player would get better when given the chance to train with ManUnited. Mostly marginally, of course, due to limits in his genetics and (football) intelligence, but he would improve. Better nutrition, better workout, better training regimes, better players to directly interact with and learn from, better more knowledgeable coaches, etc. So even Chris Clubfoot of 28 years with CA 55 and PA 55 in the game, would in real life benefit from this. He wouldn't magically jump to being a better player, nobody says so, but he'd improve over time. Slightly.

 

2 - Less realism if anybody can develop into a top player or even everybody with the right presets will

Also not what anyone wants. Again, the game already regulates those things itself. It uses the PA as a point of reference, I'm pretty sure, so as to stunt growth the closer one gets to their potential, so there's clearly some things to figure out on how and when to reduce a player's growth (even under ideal circumstances) rate to avoid loss of uniqueness in individual players' careers. It certainly sounds like some work in programming as opposed to simply keeping the PA limit, but if SI is to be believed a lot of it should already be in place underneath the roof that is PA. 

 

3 - PA is the natural/genetic limitation of players

This is a point that has been addressed on the last few pages. Genetics is a tough topic. On the one hand, it's clear that some people just have it easier to compete at a sport than others, on the other hand it's striking how many of those that excel do so because from a very (very) young age they have been brought up relatively professionally in terms of sports and specific fields of it. So while it's clear the human body has physical limitations, it's doubtful they're even reached (just look at how most athletic records keep being broken. A mix of better training, nutrition, and equipment. It's possibly also better scouting (lack of "loss of talent," i.e. never being discovered) but it's hard to argue that athletes 10 years back weren't also insane physical examples of mankind). As for mental limitations, those are almost impossible to judge for anyone in the first place - how do you know someone is doing their best or not training/being trained right? - and technical limitations would first have to be proven. Those that put in the most work under the best circumstances are usually the ones that excel technically, it's really hard to just impose a limit in that area on a person. 

With all that said, as much as many here like to argue against it, the limit is not what PA effectively expresses. Every single player that has ever had his PA corrected to a higher value from one iteration of the game to the next has disproved this claim. Yes, every researcher is doing their best in assessing players and molding them as close to reality as possible, and every mistake can be corrected within just one year. But you have to understand that each FM is its own little universe. Just like this actual one we live in. With infinite possibilities. So even if there is a set limit any given person could ever reach under any circumstances in their life, PA can't be expressing that because it is commonly corrected to a higher value. As @ham_aka_stam mentioned, if you want it to be that, it has to be a lot higher generally than what it is now. Given how players develop in game it seems to be more of a "realistic estimation of a player in their prime if everything goes well." That's relatively close to absolute limit, but not yet there. And the lower in leagues you go, the more inhibiting the PA limits get to players. Does researcher A really consider that when assessing the PA of John Doe from Podunk united? Does he really think "If Joe goes to university, meets a personal trainer buddy, works on his body like crazy, scores heaps for Podunk, leads them to promotion, gets picked up from yet another higher league team with better coaches and institutions, gets taught what actual football really is, plays for them, scores eventually, makes it to the first team after a year," and so on? Is that the value of PA he gives him? Or is it "I can see him playing first team for Podunk if he wasn't such a chum. He's also young, so let's give him 5 points more than that."? This is not criticizing any researcher, don't get me wrong, this is a big difference between what PA is made out to be and what it actually expresses. And in game, it is a border that can not be crossed. So if it isn't generally raised to a limit that seems unachievable to make room for those extreme cases (again, extremely unlikely, something that needs to be limited in game, a case of one in 10,000 or more. It just should be possible), PA itself is a bad limiting factor in the game.

The general population in a Football Manager should never exceed the limits of their league, we can all agree on that, all that is asked here is for some to overcome it, and as much as it is argued, I don't want 1 out of player base x with the right CA distribution and PA limit to be that guy, I want even really unlikely players to possibly turn out to be that one guy. Much less likely still than players from player base x, obviously, but possible. That's exactly what Vardy is. Sure, he had the potential for it, but with nobody able to say who is the guy with that potential, why not make (almost) anybody able to be it? Just as realistic as anything else in the confines of one single FM save.

 

4 - People will abuse this system and game it/anybody can pick any player and make them great

So what? They already do! Training plans, tactics, player lists, it all exists. So even if there is a way to tell better developing players apart without PA, it makes no difference. The argument that it's easier because it can't be just one of the wonderkids but anyone if you start with a big team is not seeing how this is meant to work. A player, even 15 years old, from a low league with low CA needs absolutely everything to go in their favor to turn out as a first league player. Not as in "best team, check, best training grounds and training, check, best youth academy, check, playtime in high leagues, check." As in "comes over at 15, develops really quickly (highly unlikely, even with perfect Professionalism etc.), goes to U18 at 16 and is playing a defining role, breaks into second team at 17 and has occasional first team appearances, makes an impact, continues (almost) injury-free and with excellent training results, turns out to be working exceptionally well with his mentor, used in important CL games at 18 and fitting into the team without weakening it" unlikely. Something like that, not exactly, obviously. Just a turn of events that is ridiculously unlikely to happen. It just might happen. And then it's amazing. And, sure, people will be able to game even that, by replaying games ad infinitum until that one player plays well and whatnot, but this leads to my second point:

Who cares anyway? If they wanna play their game like that, let them. What does it matter to us? We play it properly and we get that little bit more thrill out of it because there is this sliver of a chance something amazing like that might happen. And because we know with our lower league team there might just be players that go up with us unexpectedly and still play well. All of that may happen. The youth player thing most likely won't. There will probably be one or a few in all the database each save that make such a journey, most likely over small steps and not being grabbed by ManUnited at CA 40, and the game's all the better for it, because we don't have to wait for newgens for that to happen. 

 

5 - A Natural Talent value would be harder to guess than PA

Arguable, of course, but as said before, it might actually be a little easier to just make a general guess as to how likely a player is able to pick up on higher level play compared to his teammates as opposed to judging at which exact point his career would stagnate in a perfect universe for that exact player. That is, if there's any need for a new value to be introduced in the first place. It could even be, as - I think - mentioned early on, directly related to PA, if you want (PA/10). Just that it doesn't limit a player at a certain point, it just expresses their likelihood to progress (quickly). And even a 20 would not mean 100%, so there would be no guarantees anywhere, just like there isn't with a 200 PA.

 

6 - It's all the same, there's still a limit/maximum achievable CA

Technically, sure. Most likely there would be a vastly theoretical maximum value possibly achievable under any circumstances for every player in the game. Basically what PA is claimed to be but isn't. It's just that this roof wouldn't matter because it's almost literally impossible to achieve. As stated in 4, the events needed for someone to achieve the maximum possible would be literally impossible to have happen in a game. Basically nobody would reach that. A Messi would start with insanely high CA (even talking about a 24yo one with room for development) and therefore need less things to go perfectly right to come close to 200 CA, the less CA a player has, the less likely a CA 200 is, and, depending on how it all works out in the end, surely most players would not reach 200 even under ideal circumstances. 

So, yes, there would be a theoretical upper limit, but it would be fluid in the game and far higher for most players than their current PA is. 

Just to reiterate: Normal progression of a save without PA would go exactly as that of one with PA. 99.9% (this is a guess, just to imagine how much it would impact the game, as that seems to be a big concern) of players would develop exactly the same as they do with their PA limit. Only a random 0.1%, triggered by whichever unlikely events, will exceed what "normal FM" deems possible with the PA limit. And of those 0.1% probably 90% or more would be lower league players that reach CAs slightly higher than their PAs (<10), of the other 10% the majority would be exceptional higher league players ever so slightly above their PA (remember, at one point in their career, over the whole span of the career of every single player in FM) and maybe 1% would reach slightly more than 10 CA more than their initial PA. And then, lastly, there would be the odd few, spanning over all game world, possibly turning out as 0, that actually go above and beyond any expectation. Most likely never to be seen by the player, because it was a Conference guy with 40 CA and normally 55 PA that turned into a 95 solid third league player, or something the likes of that. Then, if you play for decades, there would (possibly) be noticeable ones, just like Vardy irl, only that you don't even know with a newgen, as they could have been spawned by the game with 160PA in the first place, even in the "old" system. 

That's how this is supposed to work, not with an infinite amount of low league players flooding any given league and FM players just randomly grabbing crap young players and leading them to stardom on a regular.

 

7 - People don't understand what PA is

I think I've addressed that issue in the first part of this post.

 

8 - Too many players become better than realistically possible

I've touched on it in 6, but to add to that: If someone has the muse to go through every single version of Football Manager and pick out PAs and then check how many went up by how much, that would be numbers that could very well be called realistic, as people have had those expectations and the players have exceeded them, in part drastically. It's only (I'm using only very lightly here, of course I acknowledge this would require a lot of work programming) a tweaking game to recreate number of roughly that proportion in game. As always, the human player would have an advantage with his save of creating such outstanding players but this has been and always will be an issue in Football Manager, success of human players exceeds any realistic success of whichever team they coach. Not in every single case, but in a considerable portion of saves. 

 

9 - It's a human issue to buy players upon promotion, not the game's

Also a point I touched in the beginning, and I think it's both. Yes, I can just keep the majority of my team together, even as first team, and might even be successful, but I feel the game could be tweaked in a direction that makes it closer to real life as to the proportion of players that successfully make a promotion with the team without being a burden (also a very subjective point, I have no hard evidence as to how many players in rl make the transition with their team and play well and how many do so in game. Just a feeling that almost any given player of a team is not capable of doing so).

 

 

10 - Potential doesn't change in rl, why have it fluid in game?

See 3. Nobody knows how much of a hard-coded potential there is in humans and the yearly re-evaluation of them shows that a completely static one can't be the be-all, end-all way of mimicking the real life.

 

11 - Actually less late bloomers or less varied development than with PA

This is clearly something to be avoided. As mentioned, the game supposedly has most requirements for that in place, regardless of PA. Progression should go naturally, also be stopped naturally, not artificially with a hard set limit. Late bloomers are most likely older players with CA far lower than PA, which limits the occurrence again. A natural way of this happening would be preferable.

 

One thing to add here, now that I think of it: There has to be some sort of random triggers for progression, as there is not always something related to training or play-time that causes unexpected spurs in development. Yes, I said random (somewhat, can obviously be influenced by a vast amount of things, along with being less likely with less professional players, etc.pp). Yes, that means it will most likely vary from save to save. And yes, that means it will most likely not be exactly the same person that will break out in real life. Nobody should expect that, that's simply impossible to predict without actual knowledge of the future. The mere occurrence in itself is what we're after.

 

I'll leave this monster of a post here. My apologies, there is a lot to this thread and a lot of things in my mind regarding different comments in here. More likely than not I have forgotten to add several of them. And I'm aware that this seems to be a big change for a minor detail. I'm no developer, if they feel this is too much work for the outcome, then they're free to disregard anything anybody in this thread said. This will most likely not happen anyway. It's a thought experiment on how the game we all (hopefully) love could be just that bit better, and if we're honest, that's always tiny little steps at this point. So maybe it leads to nothing. Maybe someone responsible for the game picks it up. Or Maybe they see it and get their own, better (especially considering I have no solid realization idea myself, only a dream world final result) idea on how to lead the game in that direction. 

 

Just thank you

[Cougar2010]

@Com_BEPFA

First off, good post 

A couple of points I want to pick up on:

 

First is that PA isn't just a cap, it actually affects the rate of CA growth, something that gets forgotten about.  So in your example player A would find it easier & quicker to go from 80CA to 100CA than player B if everything else was equal.  Removing PA doesn't just remove the cap it actually removes the only variable factor in CA growth.

 

16 minutes ago, Com_BEPFA said:

4 - People will abuse this system and game it/anybody can pick any player and make them great

So what? They already do! Training plans, tactics, player lists, it all exists. So even if there is a way to tell better developing players apart without PA, it makes no difference. The argument that it's easier because it can't be just one of the wonderkids but anyone if you start with a big team is not seeing how this is meant to work. A player, even 15 years old, from a low league with low CA needs absolutely everything to go in their favor to turn out as a first league player. Not as in "best team, check, best training grounds and training, check, best youth academy, check, playtime in high leagues, check." As in "comes over at 15, develops really quickly (highly unlikely, even with perfect Professionalism etc.), goes to U18 at 16 and is playing a defining role, breaks into second team at 17 and has occasional first team appearances, makes an impact, continues (almost) injury-free and with excellent training results, turns out to be working exceptionally well with his mentor, used in important CL games at 18 and fitting into the team without weakening it" unlikely. Something like that, not exactly, obviously. Just a turn of events that is ridiculously unlikely to happen. It just might happen. And then it's amazing. And, sure, people will be able to game even that, by replaying games ad infinitum until that one player plays well and whatnot, but this leads to my second point:

Who cares anyway? If they wanna play their game like that, let them. What does it matter to us? We play it properly and we get that little bit more thrill out of it because there is this sliver of a chance something amazing like that might happen. And because we know with our lower league team there might just be players that go up with us unexpectedly and still play well. All of that may happen. The youth player thing most likely won't. There will probably be one or a few in all the database each save that make such a journey, most likely over small steps and not being grabbed by ManUnited at CA 40, and the game's all the better for it, because we don't have to wait for newgens for that to happen. 

The second point is the above - Why should we care?

We should all care because people who choose to abuse & exploit the system give a false impression to others users (especially in the social media age).  Its not always intentional but it still happens and this leads to frustration, misunderstanding, complaints etc.

You can also apply that to other situations - Why should we care that an athlete uses drugs to improve his performance?  If the answer is we should care then the same applies in FM and it shouldn't be made easier for users to exploit the system.

[legend_killer82]

But he's just SO DAMN right. People already cheat. It's full of wonderkid lists, even shortlists themselves, ready to download and then buy those players. IF people want to cheat and play this way, they just will no matter what. And anyways the actual way looks much more easy and comfortable to cheat than the proposal one. What is so difficult in looking for negative PA's with -85, -9, -95 or -10 and just buy them? What's easier than to buy a Colidio -9 PA for 50k and make him the best in the world? At least with the new method they should waste time and put effort to find a possibe way of cheating, now it's just so easy and open for everyone to do it.

[Raptor Longe]

49 minutes ago, Com_BEPFA said:

I'm gonna jump in on this thread and try to explain my opinion on why I agree with the criticism of the PA system FM is using. 

 

First off, it's clear that many replies here seem to over-simplify what CA and PA are. Even what skill values are (I've had a guy with hardly any skills >10 perform exceptionally in top flight football. I also never actually check those values (as they're obviously inaccessible in-game) but it's still clear that the highest rated player is not always necessarily the best, especially in different systems and roles). CA is a general measurement of the ability of a player, how it's distributed is a different story and can make all the difference. Hence, as stated multiple times in here, a CA 130 player can be a top player in the PL and a CA 160 guy can rot on the bench. 

And the system is not flawed as of itself. Players progress in millions of different ways, both with player and AI management and the same player can go many completely opposite directions in different saves and along with it end at vastly different peaks CAs and skill distributions (and thus "actual ability"). That's all cool and realistic. Nobody (hopefully) expects the saves to always go along as much as possible with real life and therefore only enjoy themselves if FM2013 Vardy ends up in the PL by 2017. 

The issue I see and how I understood Raptor's initial proposition is with undervalued PAs. Yes, a player can become competent even with a low PA and all that, but it limits the ways in which a game goes, the realism aspect of "there's so many possibilities." Let me try to explain with a few charts.

Please excuse the crappy charts, didn't want to spend an hour making them. As you can see, there's only a sliver of the enormous variety of ways a career can go for player A. Might stagnate despite his potential, might be a late bloomer, might just develop continuously (I exaggerated that continuous growth, obviously) yet never reach anything close to full potential, might almost reach it and stay at world class level, or might start well and then get stunted for whatever reason. 

Then there's player B, rated by a researcher to even in the best case scenario not get beyond 100 CA. He also has a variety of ways to develop and play his career, but everything beyond 100 CA is immediately suddenly stopped. In no way or constellation could he ever possibly get beyond that. Sure enough, there's plenty of players out there that fit into that category so they have to exist in FM as well, but there's two issues. 

1) FM's way of development. Young players grow faster, so, granted both A and B are young players, B is going to likely reach his potential throughout his career, oftentimes pretty fast, and then go nowhere. In real life that's the exception, most people and players develop up to a limit, which is mid to end 20's, not right after maturity. 

2) There is those Jamie Vardys out there. Nobody can spot them realistically, nobody expects people to, but there should be a way in the game to have that happen. Now, I'm not saying it should be a regular occurrence or anything like that, there just should be a possibility that one player overcomes the odds and turns out greater than anyone would have ever expected. I admit that there's still no solid explanation as to how that could be realized within the game without having dozens if not hundreds or thousands of those cases every single save, but it should be possible. 

As it has been mentioned before, the algorithms of the game already make it possible for players to stop growing despite fantastic PA (see @herne79's post pretty high on page 7) or to bloom pretty late in their career. So go back to Raptor's initial post. His main idea was that PA is redundant. No necessity of another variable like Natural Talent to effectively replace it, that was just an idea as how to realize this task: Make players develop their CA fluidly, realistically, without the unnatural PA border. Read: Most players still behave exactly as they do with this PA limit but there is the option for some players to grow beyond this set limit if other factors allow it. 

One of my issues with the game is that whenever your "Average Joe" plays the game starting in a lower league, the immediate turn of action is buying players. The game makes it possible to greatly enhance a team without overspending (technically, that's also a flaw of the game, making it necessary for people to add special rules of "realistic transfers" for a realistic save). And if you go up one league, the whole team (maybe except for one or a few overachievers, mostly talents you took from top tier teams anyway) is exchanged for a better one. This doesn't happen in reality. Sure, it also doesn't happen that a team goes up league after league each year, that's a choice that everyone can make on their own as to how to approach the game, but the PA limit actively discourages players from going the way real teams go and keeping a team together for the most part, only adding some improvements here and there. Most teams are capped at a PA that is adequate for their lower league and if you want to keep players you have to buy others to compensate their weaknesses. CA already does most of that. CA is below that of the new league, players will have to outperform and excel to keep up, there's no need for a limit. Most players will not make it more than one or two flights up, just like in real life. I know that @santy001 has brought up an example that it could work, but it still does so artificially with players that have certain skillsets or PAs that allow them to do it. I'd like a fluent game where I can take the same team and one save Player A leads me to the title and without an issue incorporates as the leader of a higher league team, while the next one player B stands out and A stagnates. 

Again, yes, this is possible already, but in the limits of PA. Yes, PA tries to mimic the players who are likely to perform well in the future in real life, but usually CA already conveys that. I'd feel the game a lot more realistic if anyone could be the player that improves impressively, rather than one certain guy.

Just to make it clear, this is all best case scenarios. I'm not saying one guy of every team in every save should become a superhero for the team beyond the confines of their league, but the chance of that happening, however slim it may be, would be awesome.

 

Now, as I struggle to keep my thoughts linear and explain every single aspect of how I see things coherently, I'll try to address the issue I see being raised with the proposal in this thread. There's no particular order (sorry), I just made some notes while going through the 8 pages of this and will try to explain my thoughts to each one.

 

 

1 - Players automatically getting better with promotion/going to a better team is stupid

I completely agree and don't think this is in any way, shape or form what Raptor meant. He was simply uttering how any player given better competition, training, experience, etc. has greater potential to improve. Again, already all in the game, except for anything beyond PA. It's really hard to prove, but even a Conference player would get better when given the chance to train with ManUnited. Mostly marginally, of course, due to limits in his genetics and (football) intelligence, but he would improve. Better nutrition, better workout, better training regimes, better players to directly interact with and learn from, better more knowledgeable coaches, etc. So even Chris Clubfoot of 28 years with CA 55 and PA 55 in the game, would in real life benefit from this. He wouldn't magically jump to being a better player, nobody says so, but he'd improve over time. Slightly.

 

2 - Less realism if anybody can develop into a top player or even everybody with the right presets will

Also not what anyone wants. Again, the game already regulates those things itself. It uses the PA as a point of reference, I'm pretty sure, so as to stunt growth the closer one gets to their potential, so there's clearly some things to figure out on how and when to reduce a player's growth (even under ideal circumstances) rate to avoid loss of uniqueness in individual players' careers. It certainly sounds like some work in programming as opposed to simply keeping the PA limit, but if SI is to be believed a lot of it should already be in place underneath the roof that is PA. 

 

3 - PA is the natural/genetic limitation of players

This is a point that has been addressed on the last few pages. Genetics is a tough topic. On the one hand, it's clear that some people just have it easier to compete at a sport than others, on the other hand it's striking how many of those that excel do so because from a very (very) young age they have been brought up relatively professionally in terms of sports and specific fields of it. So while it's clear the human body has physical limitations, it's doubtful they're even reached (just look at how most athletic records keep being broken. A mix of better training, nutrition, and equipment. It's possibly also better scouting (lack of "loss of talent," i.e. never being discovered) but it's hard to argue that athletes 10 years back weren't also insane physical examples of mankind). As for mental limitations, those are almost impossible to judge for anyone in the first place - how do you know someone is doing their best or not training/being trained right? - and technical limitations would first have to be proven. Those that put in the most work under the best circumstances are usually the ones that excel technically, it's really hard to just impose a limit in that area on a person. 

With all that said, as much as many here like to argue against it, the limit is not what PA effectively expresses. Every single player that has ever had his PA corrected to a higher value from one iteration of the game to the next has disproved this claim. Yes, every researcher is doing their best in assessing players and molding them as close to reality as possible, and every mistake can be corrected within just one year. But you have to understand that each FM is its own little universe. Just like this actual one we live in. With infinite possibilities. So even if there is a set limit any given person could ever reach under any circumstances in their life, PA can't be expressing that because it is commonly corrected to a higher value. As @ham_aka_stam mentioned, if you want it to be that, it has to be a lot higher generally than what it is now. Given how players develop in game it seems to be more of a "realistic estimation of a player in their prime if everything goes well." That's relatively close to absolute limit, but not yet there. And the lower in leagues you go, the more inhibiting the PA limits get to players. Does researcher A really consider that when assessing the PA of John Doe from Podunk united? Does he really think "If Joe goes to university, meets a personal trainer buddy, works on his body like crazy, scores heaps for Podunk, leads them to promotion, gets picked up from yet another higher league team with better coaches and institutions, gets taught what actual football really is, plays for them, scores eventually, makes it to the first team after a year," and so on? Is that the value of PA he gives him? Or is it "I can see him playing first team for Podunk if he wasn't such a chum. He's also young, so let's give him 5 points more than that."? This is not criticizing any researcher, don't get me wrong, this is a big difference between what PA is made out to be and what it actually expresses. And in game, it is a border that can not be crossed. So if it isn't generally raised to a limit that seems unachievable to make room for those extreme cases (again, extremely unlikely, something that needs to be limited in game, a case of one in 10,000 or more. It just should be possible), PA itself is a bad limiting factor in the game.

The general population in a Football Manager should never exceed the limits of their league, we can all agree on that, all that is asked here is for some to overcome it, and as much as it is argued, I don't want 1 out of player base x with the right CA distribution and PA limit to be that guy, I want even really unlikely players to possibly turn out to be that one guy. Much less likely still than players from player base x, obviously, but possible. That's exactly what Vardy is. Sure, he had the potential for it, but with nobody able to say who is the guy with that potential, why not make (almost) anybody able to be it? Just as realistic as anything else in the confines of one single FM save.

 

4 - People will abuse this system and game it/anybody can pick any player and make them great

So what? They already do! Training plans, tactics, player lists, it all exists. So even if there is a way to tell better developing players apart without PA, it makes no difference. The argument that it's easier because it can't be just one of the wonderkids but anyone if you start with a big team is not seeing how this is meant to work. A player, even 15 years old, from a low league with low CA needs absolutely everything to go in their favor to turn out as a first league player. Not as in "best team, check, best training grounds and training, check, best youth academy, check, playtime in high leagues, check." As in "comes over at 15, develops really quickly (highly unlikely, even with perfect Professionalism etc.), goes to U18 at 16 and is playing a defining role, breaks into second team at 17 and has occasional first team appearances, makes an impact, continues (almost) injury-free and with excellent training results, turns out to be working exceptionally well with his mentor, used in important CL games at 18 and fitting into the team without weakening it" unlikely. Something like that, not exactly, obviously. Just a turn of events that is ridiculously unlikely to happen. It just might happen. And then it's amazing. And, sure, people will be able to game even that, by replaying games ad infinitum until that one player plays well and whatnot, but this leads to my second point:

Who cares anyway? If they wanna play their game like that, let them. What does it matter to us? We play it properly and we get that little bit more thrill out of it because there is this sliver of a chance something amazing like that might happen. And because we know with our lower league team there might just be players that go up with us unexpectedly and still play well. All of that may happen. The youth player thing most likely won't. There will probably be one or a few in all the database each save that make such a journey, most likely over small steps and not being grabbed by ManUnited at CA 40, and the game's all the better for it, because we don't have to wait for newgens for that to happen. 

 

5 - A Natural Talent value would be harder to guess than PA

Arguable, of course, but as said before, it might actually be a little easier to just make a general guess as to how likely a player is able to pick up on higher level play compared to his teammates as opposed to judging at which exact point his career would stagnate in a perfect universe for that exact player. That is, if there's any need for a new value to be introduced in the first place. It could even be, as - I think - mentioned early on, directly related to PA, if you want (PA/10). Just that it doesn't limit a player at a certain point, it just expresses their likelihood to progress (quickly). And even a 20 would not mean 100%, so there would be no guarantees anywhere, just like there isn't with a 200 PA.

 

6 - It's all the same, there's still a limit/maximum achievable CA

Technically, sure. Most likely there would be a vastly theoretical maximum value possibly achievable under any circumstances for every player in the game. Basically what PA is claimed to be but isn't. It's just that this roof wouldn't matter because it's almost literally impossible to achieve. As stated in 4, the events needed for someone to achieve the maximum possible would be literally impossible to have happen in a game. Basically nobody would reach that. A Messi would start with insanely high CA (even talking about a 24yo one with room for development) and therefore need less things to go perfectly right to come close to 200 CA, the less CA a player has, the less likely a CA 200 is, and, depending on how it all works out in the end, surely most players would not reach 200 even under ideal circumstances. 

So, yes, there would be a theoretical upper limit, but it would be fluid in the game and far higher for most players than their current PA is. 

Just to reiterate: Normal progression of a save without PA would go exactly as that of one with PA. 99.9% (this is a guess, just to imagine how much it would impact the game, as that seems to be a big concern) of players would develop exactly the same as they do with their PA limit. Only a random 0.1%, triggered by whichever unlikely events, will exceed what "normal FM" deems possible with the PA limit. And of those 0.1% probably 90% or more would be lower league players that reach CAs slightly higher than their PAs (<10), of the other 10% the majority would be exceptional higher league players ever so slightly above their PA (remember, at one point in their career, over the whole span of the career of every single player in FM) and maybe 1% would reach slightly more than 10 CA more than their initial PA. And then, lastly, there would be the odd few, spanning over all game world, possibly turning out as 0, that actually go above and beyond any expectation. Most likely never to be seen by the player, because it was a Conference guy with 40 CA and normally 55 PA that turned into a 95 solid third league player, or something the likes of that. Then, if you play for decades, there would (possibly) be noticeable ones, just like Vardy irl, only that you don't even know with a newgen, as they could have been spawned by the game with 160PA in the first place, even in the "old" system. 

That's how this is supposed to work, not with an infinite amount of low league players flooding any given league and FM players just randomly grabbing crap young players and leading them to stardom on a regular.

 

7 - People don't understand what PA is

I think I've addressed that issue in the first part of this post.

 

8 - Too many players become better than realistically possible

I've touched on it in 6, but to add to that: If someone has the muse to go through every single version of Football Manager and pick out PAs and then check how many went up by how much, that would be numbers that could very well be called realistic, as people have had those expectations and the players have exceeded them, in part drastically. It's only (I'm using only very lightly here, of course I acknowledge this would require a lot of work programming) a tweaking game to recreate number of roughly that proportion in game. As always, the human player would have an advantage with his save of creating such outstanding players but this has been and always will be an issue in Football Manager, success of human players exceeds any realistic success of whichever team they coach. Not in every single case, but in a considerable portion of saves. 

 

9 - It's a human issue to buy players upon promotion, not the game's

Also a point I touched in the beginning, and I think it's both. Yes, I can just keep the majority of my team together, even as first team, and might even be successful, but I feel the game could be tweaked in a direction that makes it closer to real life as to the proportion of players that successfully make a promotion with the team without being a burden (also a very subjective point, I have no hard evidence as to how many players in rl make the transition with their team and play well and how many do so in game. Just a feeling that almost any given player of a team is not capable of doing so).

 

 

10 - Potential doesn't change in rl, why have it fluid in game?

See 3. Nobody knows how much of a hard-coded potential there is in humans and the yearly re-evaluation of them shows that a completely static one can't be the be-all, end-all way of mimicking the real life.

 

11 - Actually less late bloomers or less varied development than with PA

This is clearly something to be avoided. As mentioned, the game supposedly has most requirements for that in place, regardless of PA. Progression should go naturally, also be stopped naturally, not artificially with a hard set limit. Late bloomers are most likely older players with CA far lower than PA, which limits the occurrence again. A natural way of this happening would be preferable.

 

One thing to add here, now that I think of it: There has to be some sort of random triggers for progression, as there is not always something related to training or play-time that causes unexpected spurs in development. Yes, I said random (somewhat, can obviously be influenced by a vast amount of things, along with being less likely with less professional players, etc.pp). Yes, that means it will most likely vary from save to save. And yes, that means it will most likely not be exactly the same person that will break out in real life. Nobody should expect that, that's simply impossible to predict without actual knowledge of the future. The mere occurrence in itself is what we're after.

 

I'll leave this monster of a post here. My apologies, there is a lot to this thread and a lot of things in my mind regarding different comments in here. More likely than not I have forgotten to add several of them. And I'm aware that this seems to be a big change for a minor detail. I'm no developer, if they feel this is too much work for the outcome, then they're free to disregard anything anybody in this thread said. This will most likely not happen anyway. It's a thought experiment on how the game we all (hopefully) love could be just that bit better, and if we're honest, that's always tiny little steps at this point. So maybe it leads to nothing. Maybe someone responsible for the game picks it up. Or Maybe they see it and get their own, better (especially considering I have no solid realization idea myself, only a dream world final result) idea on how to lead the game in that direction. 

 

I do not know you. But I love you.
You understand exactly, perfectly, what I meant.
You answered better than I could do.

I pointed to alternative methods to slow down, adjust growth, I did not want to replace PA at all. Thank you.

[enigmatic]

7 hours ago, Com_BEPFA said:

 It uses the PA as a point of reference, I'm pretty sure, so as to stunt growth the closer one gets to their potential, so there's clearly some things to figure out on how and when to reduce a player's growth (even under ideal circumstances) rate to avoid loss of uniqueness in individual players' careers. It certainly sounds like some work in programming as opposed to simply keeping the PA limit, but if SI is to be believed a lot of it should already be in place underneath the roof that is PA. 

 

6 hours ago, Cougar2010 said:

First is that PA isn't just a cap, it actually affects the rate of CA growth, something that gets forgotten about. 

I think you both agree with each other there...

But this is the important point. Something is needed to stunt a player's growth, or allow it to accelerate for some players but not for others as circumstances improve. Currently one of these factors is PA.

PA is  a very effective method of doing this. It has a very clear and obvious primary effect, does not need to change every time a player gets a year older or improves their CA or has mental variables added or changes. It does not need a calculator for people to know the limit it imposes on a player's development. It is not profoundly illogical, like assuming young, professional players already playing top division football must have a very low level of "natural talent" (or similar) if they are not to become world class.  It can allow people to become late bloomers if they get few games early in their career and to plateau if they get lots, like happens IRL. It broadly parallels what managers are actually trying to estimate in game and IRL when they spend millions on teenagers.

Nothing that has been proposed so far is not significantly worse than PA in this respect. There is no reason to believe that random player development triggers will produce more realistic outcomes in the absence of any limiting factor, and plenty to suggest it wouldn't. There is no reason to believe player growth rate is more realistically influenced by a fixed two digit "natural talent" or other starting value than a varying-in-game delta between CA and PA

Until you can prescribe something which is not more confusing, more deterministic and/or less usable than PA for basic research tasks like "I would like to ensure this player who is already close to his peak does not become too good" or "l think this player might be able to play at a much higher level despite his attitude and this one won't even though he doesn't have any major issues" you are unlikely to persuade anybody to eliminate PA...

7 hours ago, Com_BEPFA said:

Normal progression of a save without PA would go exactly as that of one with PA. 99.9% (this is a guess, just to imagine how much it would impact the game, as that seems to be a big concern) of players would develop exactly the same as they do with their PA limit. Only a random 0.1%, triggered by whichever unlikely events, will exceed what "normal FM" deems possible with the PA limit. And of those 0.1% probably 90% or more would be lower league players that reach CAs slightly higher than their PAs (<10), of the other 10% the majority would be exceptional higher league players ever so slightly above their PA (remember, at one point in their career, over the whole span of the career of every single player in FM) and maybe 1% would reach slightly more than 10 CA more than their initial PA. And then, lastly, there would be the odd few, spanning over all game world, possibly turning out as 0, that actually go above and beyond any expectation. Most likely never to be seen by the player, because it was a Conference guy with 40 CA and normally 55 PA that turned into a 95 solid third league player, or something the likes of that. Then, if you play for decades, there would (possibly) be noticeable ones, just like Vardy irl, only that you don't even know with a newgen, as they could have been spawned by the game with 160PA in the first place, even in the "old" system. 

And if you intend for SI to devote thousands of hours of programmers and volunteer researchers' time thinking up and implementing alternative data and development models to eliminate a variable which is invisible in-game to produce effects which the player almost certainly won't notice, you have to ask yourself whether there's actually any point to this other than trying to win an argument on a message board

[ham_aka_stam]

There's a like button, you can tag people, you don't need to quote a massive post just to agree with it.

[santy001]

I think @enigmatic has pretty much reiterated the point in 2 lines. 

To further compound it then you also have to deal with
- The invariable implementation period in which its active, but still needs a lot of bug testing so curveballs are more likely. 
- The process of re-educating researchers
- Researchers learning how this works to create their desired outcome/belief about players (this one could take quite a few years)
- The newly enhanced argument about something even more subjective that people will feel a lot easier to argue about - a "natural talent" type attribute. 

While its a very well written post by @Com_BEPFA it's mostly just a summarising post that doesn't add an awful lot to reinforce the idea that this is any way really beneficial. The intention would be for it to be beneficial of course, but the reality in an environment like a game, and where an enormous amount of programming would have to take place including a seismic change to the research infrastructure of the game means it really doesn't look like it would be that way. 

[Dorin]

On 11/25/2017 at 23:54, enigmatic said:

And if you intend for SI to devote thousands of hours of programmers and volunteer researchers' time thinking up and implementing alternative data and development models to eliminate a variable which is invisible in-game to produce effects which the player almost certainly won't notice, you have to ask yourself whether there's actually any point to this other than trying to win an argument on a message board

Wow, this thread is still going strong since I was last here. About asking yourself whether there's actually a point to this..
I'm giving an example from my game: I am in the 5th season of a new game with Lillestrøm after starting unemployed, a team that came second in the league, qualified for CL and is one of the best teams in Norway consistently (in game, pretty crap in real life). The youth setup and youth coaching is adequate. Youth intake day comes, I checked the PA of the youth trialists (with an external scouting tool) and to confirm here, all their PAs were in the range of 40-55. Now, my average player CA for this league should be somewhere around 100-110 I assume (didn't check), and if my young players would reach their potential they wouldn't even be good in the Norwegian third division. Now is this limit realistic? I don't mind using PAs, but this just isn't any fun knowing I can't use any of my own club youth players to develop them.

[HUNT3R]

10 minutes ago, Dorin said:

Wow, this thread is still going strong since I was last here. About asking yourself whether there's actually a point to this..
I'm giving an example from my game: I am in the 5th season of a new game with Lillestrøm after starting unemployed, a team that came second in the league, qualified for CL and is one of the best teams in Norway consistently (in game, pretty crap in real life). The youth setup and youth coaching is adequate. Youth intake day comes, I checked the PA of the youth trialists (with an external scouting tool) and to confirm here, all their PAs were in the range of 40-55. Now, my average player CA for this league should be somewhere around 100-110 I assume (didn't check), and if my young players would reach their potential they wouldn't even be good in the Norwegian third division. Now is this limit realistic? I don't mind using PAs, but this just isn't any fun knowing I can't use any of my own club youth players to develop them.

How would this be any different or better with a PA ceiling that can change (which doesn't make any sense at all) or with a youth intake full of low "natural talent"? Either way, they're not going to be magically better. If you want better youths coming through, improve the youth setup.

[Dorin]

39 minutes ago, HUNT3R said:

How would this be any different or better with a PA ceiling that can change (which doesn't make any sense at all) or with a youth intake full of low "natural talent"? Either way, they're not going to be magically better. If you want better youths coming through, improve the youth setup.

Not suggesting any of that now even, just looking for a solution other than the "just improve the youth setup" ...that takes time to do, but it doesn't mean that a lower club shouldn't produce players of at least the same quality they've been having playing for them, does it? And this was after I've already improved the youth setup compared to what it was before. Don't think I'm being unreasonable here...

[HUNT3R]

4 minutes ago, Dorin said:

Not suggesting any of that now even, just looking for a solution other than the "just improve the youth setup" ...that takes time to do, but it doesn't mean that a lower club shouldn't produce players of at least the same quality they've been having playing for them, does it? And this was after I've already improved the youth setup compared to what it was before. Don't think I'm being unreasonable here...

This is a separate issue completely.

[santy001]

4 minutes ago, Dorin said:

Not suggesting any of that now even, just looking for a solution other than the "just improve the youth setup" ...that takes time to do, but it doesn't mean that a lower club shouldn't produce players of at least the same quality they've been having playing for them, does it? And this was after I've already improved the youth setup compared to what it was before. Don't think I'm being unreasonable here...

I would argue perhaps you are being unreasonable to present 1 years intake as something definitive.

Bear in mind how long a career lasts for, from 16 you'd assume around 20 years.

You'd also assume at least 15 players. 

If you were bringing through multiple players who could make it every year you'd soon be overwhelmed with home grown talent in a completely unrealistic way.

While this isn't the thread for it, Lillestrom and Lillestrom alone are not responsible for producing Norways players. There's nothing particularly unusual for a clubs academy to have a 2, 5 or even 10 year barren spell. Even with investment, even with a focus on youth. 

[Dorin]

I've opened a separate thread for this as it's going in a different direction: 

 

[Com_BEPFA]

On 11/25/2017 at 16:50, Cougar2010 said:

@Com_BEPFA

First off, good post 

A couple of points I want to pick up on:

 

First is that PA isn't just a cap, it actually affects the rate of CA growth, something that gets forgotten about.  So in your example player A would find it easier & quicker to go from 80CA to 100CA than player B if everything else was equal.  Removing PA doesn't just remove the cap it actually removes the only variable factor in CA growth.

 

The second point is the above - Why should we care?

We should all care because people who choose to abuse & exploit the system give a false impression to others users (especially in the social media age).  Its not always intentional but it still happens and this leads to frustration, misunderstanding, complaints etc.

You can also apply that to other situations - Why should we care that an athlete uses drugs to improve his performance?  If the answer is we should care then the same applies in FM and it shouldn't be made easier for users to exploit the system.

As @enigmatic said, I agree. There needs to be something that sets some people apart from others. However, as others have mentioned, most of it is in CA, hidden stats, and skill distribution already, especially with players that stand out at any point in their career. I'm no programmer myself and certainly have no affiliation with SI, so I have no idea how much of a role PA actually plays in the development of a player at this point, besides the limit it enforces. So there might be a lot to do, or PA is more of a pseudo-value that does not carry the big role many think it does any more, besides limiting growth at one set point.

 

To be perfectly honest, and I don't know if I'm alone with this here, but I found Championship Manager on a CD collection of sports games way back when. Was already into FIFA back then and played it similarly. Bought random players, more for names than skills, and if something went wrong I simply reloaded and did that part over. Then, later on, there was the EA FM and ArtMoney (unlimited money "hack" for those who don't know) and boy, did I exploit the crap out of that ability. I was just having fun messing around, browsing online lists of cool players to make my favorite team succeed. Only with time I found enjoyment (and frustration...) in actually trying to play the game naturally, as a parallel universe where I can manage an actual small or big team in the football world and my decisions impact lives and cause the flow of millions and billions of €/$/£/whatever. And while now my favorite striker wouldn't score every single game any more, every accomplishment actually felt meaningful and the game had a whole new dimension to it. Most likely everybody here plays the game like that, but the majority of all players? Definitely debatable. FootMan is not a margin game that some borderline group of football enthusiasts and wannabe Mourinhos play, especially since EA canceled their version, arguably the only big rival in that field (albeit a very much more arcade interpretation at that), excluding mobile games at this point.

So while this game is very heavy on tactics and at least a basic understanding of the mechanisms of the sport of football, there's plenty of ways to force success, even without reload cheating: player lists, talent lists, training plans to download (even easier to access since Steam), formations to download, tactics to download, individual roles and instructions to copy, the good old "second player joins with Chelsea and buys my garbage players for millions" strategy, in-game editors, the official Editor, CA/PA revealers, and so on. And I doubt SI minds their game being sold more due to those people playing it and I doubt any of us will spiral into "cheating" after seeing others do it. Others who are interested in the idea of a proper football manager will inevitably find this game sooner or later, and, if they're old enough, realize how to play it properly. 

Yes, there is and will be those that get frustrated with lack of success after trying for half an hour with their favorite team and having lost more than anything else, but, thanks to social media age, those that make their frustration known are usually very quickly illuminated as to why this game is not a "pick the best eleven and win" kind of game. And either they leave, as that was what they were looking for, or they approach the game anew. I really don't see a big loss for the community or the developers there.

As for athletes, unpopular opinion here, but I'm pretty sure 99% of professional sports is clustered with things that fall under the category of doping, be they (still) legal or not. Not very purist for sports and adding a different level to natural ability plus training in the results but still everyone pushing the most out of themselves for the sake of achieving greater things (no, I don't like it, but I can't see how this would suddenly just completely disappear on a global scale. If you wanna mess with unknown variables for that 1 (or 10) per cent more, be my guest). 

 

On 11/25/2017 at 23:54, enigmatic said:

I think you both agree with each other there...

But this is the important point. Something is needed to stunt a player's growth, or allow it to accelerate for some players but not for others as circumstances improve. Currently one of these factors is PA.

PA is  a very effective method of doing this. It has a very clear and obvious primary effect, does not need to change every time a player gets a year older or improves their CA or has mental variables added or changes. It does not need a calculator for people to know the limit it imposes on a player's development. It is not profoundly illogical, like assuming young, professional players already playing top division football must have a very low level of "natural talent" (or similar) if they are not to become world class.  It can allow people to become late bloomers if they get few games early in their career and to plateau if they get lots, like happens IRL. It broadly parallels what managers are actually trying to estimate in game and IRL when they spend millions on teenagers.

Nothing that has been proposed so far is not significantly worse than PA in this respect. There is no reason to believe that random player development triggers will produce more realistic outcomes in the absence of any limiting factor, and plenty to suggest it wouldn't. There is no reason to believe player growth rate is more realistically influenced by a fixed two digit "natural talent" or other starting value than a varying-in-game delta between CA and PA

We're all very speculative here, all this is about right now is the somewhat common belief that a hard cap, which is what PA embodies, can not be the best solution for a game emulating reality to a degree as FM is (real clubs use this database, I mean come on). The thing we don't know about stagnating players is whether they actually had no more in them or whether they just took a wrong turn somewhere. And most prominent cases started out with amazing PAs in this game. The game then made them stars 99% of the times, which was a flaw of the game back then, not of the researchers not realizing Freddy Adu was actually a chump hardly able to compete in the Scottish Premiership. The same should go for surprises, they may not have looked like much but they had it in them, whatever the hell of a combination of things "it" turned out to be. This part is pretty much impossible in the game, unless somebody randomly assigned a high PA to that exact player at some point in time.

Natural Talent and everything else here are just attempts of thinking in a direction where developers could go to achieve this massive accomplishment, a realistic game environment that allows for each and every scenario of real life to occur in game. Nobody claims they're the perfect solution or even ultimately better than PA, they're just thoughts, ideas, attempts to help improve the game. We have nothing to do with the creation of the game, so there's no harm to possibly done, only the ever so slight possibility to spark some ever so slight improvement. 

Quote

Until you can prescribe something which is not more confusing, more deterministic and/or less usable than PA for basic research tasks like "I would like to ensure this player who is already close to his peak does not become too good" or "l think this player might be able to play at a much higher level despite his attitude and this one won't even though he doesn't have any major issues" you are unlikely to persuade anybody to eliminate PA...

And if you intend for SI to devote thousands of hours of programmers and volunteer researchers' time thinking up and implementing alternative data and development models to eliminate a variable which is invisible in-game to produce effects which the player almost certainly won't notice, you have to ask yourself whether there's actually any point to this other than trying to win an argument on a message board

That's exactly one direction this could go. What if the game becomes so sophisticated that PA is not necessary any more? Researchers may feel a sting to their pride to not be able to say "dude, I spotted that Messi kid, like, 17 years ago in La Masia and told SI he was gonna be the next Maradona!" but ultimately their work would only be based on facts, on what there is, while the game then does the work of creating their career from then on, all as diverse and unique as real life, without anyone under the pressure of knowing exactly what any given player could eventually be capable of (maybe just some very general estimation "likely to be capable of much more," etc.). That's all utopian dreams, but possible. And we can't know until it happens or gets tested whether that would be more or less accurate than the way this all works right now. 

We don't know how much work goes into the game at any given point and how much work this would take, and it certainly would be noticeable and **** off everyone that liked to buy their players based on PA. Yes, this definitely sounds like a huge stone to get and keep rolling, not to mention reach the mountain top with, but we don't decide anything here, proposing can't do any harm. I'm not trying to win any arguments, either, I stumbled upon this thread when it had 2 pages and it took me until there were 8 to form a somewhat intelligible reply (no wonder, looking at it), there's no winning here. I won't be corny and say "the only one that can win here is Football Manager," I'd rather reiterate that we all just try to do our part in possibly improving the game, or preventing ideas from spreading that would make it worse. I can't say it enough, even if there were 1000 people in this thread, all identifiable as individuals and not plotting together, all supporting and promoting this idea (of which there isn't even one specified "idea," just strewn around first thoughts to possible concepts of ideas), the chance of developers seeing it may be significant, of them picking it up no better than it is right now. We are playing around with thoughts and if someone with anything to say comes across it and actually picks up on it, so be it, I'd bet my life on the outcome that nothing of this will happen anytime in the near future.

 

On 11/26/2017 at 10:06, santy001 said:

I think @enigmatic has pretty much reiterated the point in 2 lines. 

To further compound it then you also have to deal with
- The invariable implementation period in which its active, but still needs a lot of bug testing so curveballs are more likely. 
- The process of re-educating researchers
- Researchers learning how this works to create their desired outcome/belief about players (this one could take quite a few years)
- The newly enhanced argument about something even more subjective that people will feel a lot easier to argue about - a "natural talent" type attribute. 

While its a very well written post by @Com_BEPFA it's mostly just a summarising post that doesn't add an awful lot to reinforce the idea that this is any way really beneficial. The intention would be for it to be beneficial of course, but the reality in an environment like a game, and where an enormous amount of programming would have to take place including a seismic change to the research infrastructure of the game means it really doesn't look like it would be that way. 

 

It really isn't about Natural Talent. I think a majority of people would be happy even with the idea of a "fluid PA," i.e. one that predicts in what range of CA a player will most likely stay their whole careers, while a few outgrow it due to whichever circumstances, in whatever way, shape or form implemented. Or, as mentioned somewhere in my wall of text, simply better judgement of PAs by researchers, no criticism intended. If it is supposed to set a limit of what a player could be if all the stars aligned and God additionally blessed their feet mid-career, which is what the much-debated-to-be-equal limit Raptor's "Natural Talent" proposal would incorporate as a theoretical value in the game is, then unfortunately you can't deny a whole astonishing amount of players is misjudged gravely. If it is more of a "where do you think they'll realistically peak" cap, which is also what player development in the actual FM suggests (can't speak for FM18, though), then I don't know why we even argue that this limit should never be surpassed. 

 

Just to make it clear, I'm happy with the game as is, everybody has their pet peeves, and I agree it can never perfectly emulate real life but I'd much rather see it spiral away from said real life slightly more than now while allowing the possibility of FM13 Jamie Vardy becoming an England international than keeping it as is. And yes, that means that I'd be okay with saves where Aaron Lennon turns out to be the new Messi (radically exaggerating, obviously) while Lionel himself plays Championship football. It's just that I would have that one save in a billion where Messi did not turn out to be amazing, as well as that one save in a billion where Lennon turns into a football God, so a one in a quintillion save. Yes, that would be more realistic in my eyes.

[santy001]

@Com_BEPFA It would seem Miles, literally as of an interview today with the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/41966203) is opposed to the way in which you're saying you'd like to see it in that last paragraph.

Those are the kind of things that are deemed failures for the research team. We aren't supposed to provide this one in a million fantasy, we're supposed to represent the reality of how it is likely to be. To the best of our ability. 

While you may be ok with it, and while you or others may prefer it. It does seem that it's not the mindset accepted by those who steer the direction of the game. This means if a player is set with a 40CA, 55PA then that is the belief for that player to the best of a researchers ability. 

Once the shackles are off, and anything can happen no matter how slim it is, that is seemingly the moment a very highly respected aspect of the FM database is compromised. 

[Com_BEPFA]

1 minute ago, santy001 said:

@Com_BEPFA It would seem Miles, literally as of an interview today with the BBC (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/41966203) is opposed to the way in which you're saying you'd like to see it in that last paragraph.

Those are the kind of things that are deemed failures for the research team. We aren't supposed to provide this one in a million fantasy, we're supposed to represent the reality of how it is likely to be. To the best of our ability. 

While you may be ok with it, and while you or others may prefer it. It does seem that it's not the mindset accepted by those who steer the direction of the game. This means if a player is set with a 40CA, 55PA then that is the belief for that player to the best of a researchers ability. 

Once the shackles are off, and anything can happen no matter how slim it is, that is seemingly the moment a very highly respected aspect of the FM database is compromised. 

You're supposed to represent reality. Reality is that Vardy became a prolific force in the Premier League. Reality is that Adu never made it even at semi-decent teams. The first thing is completely set to a chance of 0% of happening in the game, no rounding whatsoever. The second thing used to be at about 0% chance but rounded, i.e. possible, and even today I'd assume there's a 10% chance of a player with Adu's former potential ending up like rl Adu in game. Which is fine, with all that he showed he was destined to be able to achieve greatness, nobody can know if in 100 different universes 50 Adus made it or 10, or even 0 because turns out he just lacked something. And this still does and always will happen. For the sake of realism, which is all that Miles says, both ways have to be possible. Dembele has to have a chance at failing at Barca and never getting a foot on the ground again, and whichever little known name has to have a shot at making it big. Both highly unlikely. Both in real life and in game. So I doubt the odd chance of a player turning out good at a point in a save to which the vast majority of FM players never even gets compromises a game that made a Malaysian that never played a single professional match a star and possibly ruined an American's career. Life may be a one-way train but so long as we can't predict the future nobody can pride themselves as accurate if 50% of special stories in football (rises as opposed to falls) are literally impossible. 

Even if 0.01% of players (very generous estimation) finds some super odd occurrence, for the other 99.99% everything happens exactly like it does right now (or at least to their knowledge it does as any diversion doesn't matter to them and doesn't get noticed), I don't see where the realism of the game suffers from that. Even teams that actually use the database are hardly gonna just simulate 10 years to the future, take the best players then and base their scouting for their next transfer target entirely on that. I see the point: 0.0001% of those 0.00001% or whatever of saves where somebody drastically improves from what is expected of them today will be those super ridiculously accurate ones where said surprise is one that actually develops that well in real life, while all the other scenarios will be far from reality. But if the goal is to emulate the most likely future, why can wonderkids fail in game then? Some will in real life, obviously, but many in game are bound to that won't in real life and the other way around. It's for the sake of realism, not crystal balling. It can happen in real life, it can happen in game. I know there's a limited array of super talented players that could fail but it's not only them, every single player in the database can underachieve compared to their real pendants. So it's not even a numbers' game, there's bound to be enormous amounts of inaccuracy in every single save, a little inaccuracy to the positive side of what researchers say is not too much to ask.

Also, if we want to stay with that thought, why not introduce PDA? Potential DisAbility. The lowest a researcher deems it possible for a player to fall to avoid drifting away too far from reality. (If it isn't obvious, yes, I'm joking)

It won't happen; as you said, FM is based on CA and PA, as much as they want to tell people it's all about skills and has nothing to do with EA's arcade manager of looking at a current skill level and a skill level that will be the player's skill level at the prime of their career, it still lives off of those two values, no matter how marginal the role of any of them is in the game. It's what they've come up with, it's what works, better every year, so why go 180°? It's just a fantasy to have something possible that would most likely never even be experienced in game by me even if I played it with the feature until my death. If everyone's honest to themselves, then the more the game relies on CA and PA values delivered to them, no matter how accurate they are at the time, the closer it is to an arcade game, not a representation of life. A fictional limited excerpt of what the future could possibly be, at best. Certainly not a frame of time from which on (almost) all possible future events happen independently from real life (including most likely and least likely events in similar representation of chance of happening).

[Giangy]

Il 14/11/2017 in 19:00 , Seb Wassell ha scritto:

If your issue is human error then that applies to the entirety of the research, not just PA. If the researcher gets it wrong we have to wait for an update to correct this. Essentially the game relies on good research for PA as it does for every aspect of a player's profile, from Finishing to Injury History. If you have an issue here it sounds as if it may be with the research, not the function of PA.

I agree. The main errors are relative to those who physically enters the values of PA in the research phase. Not the value itself.
Fortunately, the game provides a game editor that allows anyone who believes there's been bad values, edit them.

[Longhorn]

I don't have much of a problem with the way PA is implemented when discussing it on an individual by individual basis, within one country. However, the discussion seems to generally ignore the global nature of PA, and when thought about that way it can be more difficult to defend the current implementation, and using "genetics" as a means to explain PA becomes problematic.  Consider that the game generates players from Jamaica (for example) such that most will have a PA of around 59, while the game generates players from Germany with a PA of around 155 (with some percentage of variance).  Uruguay has a generated PA of 90, while Mexico generates with a PA around 120.  When one uses "genetics" as an explanation for the differences problems arise.  People typically defend the differences many ways, or criticize them, but the differences between countries can not be related to "genetics" either in the game or in real life.  I think there are and should be differences in potential for young players raised exclusively in one country versus another country, but I would not base those differences on "genetics".  When thinking about the global nature of the game some people, me included, think the generated PA rating should be the same for all countries with the differences in facilities, training staffs, etc. accounting for the different rates at which players will develop.  This doesn't mean that within one country all players necessarily should have the same PA, but at the least each country should have a similar distribution of PA.  When thinking about the game in the global sense the generated PA ratings for the different countries is an abstraction that attempts to capture the many country specific limitations that may well limit the growth of a young play in that country, and I can almost accept the way it has been implemented, but not quite.  In any case, discussing potential changes to PA in the game must, in my opinion, take into account the global nature of the game.

[craigd84]

@Raptor Longe Great idea! im all for this, potential needs to be dynamic.

[enigmatic]

10 hours ago, Longhorn said:

I don't have much of a problem with the way PA is implemented when discussing it on an individual by individual basis, within one country. However, the discussion seems to generally ignore the global nature of PA, and when thought about that way it can be more difficult to defend the current implementation, and using "genetics" as a means to explain PA becomes problematic.  Consider that the game generates players from Jamaica (for example) such that most will have a PA of around 59, while the game generates players from Germany with a PA of around 155 (with some percentage of variance).  Uruguay has a generated PA of 90, while Mexico generates with a PA around 120.  When one uses "genetics" as an explanation for the differences problems arise.  People typically defend the differences many ways, or criticize them, but the differences between countries can not be related to "genetics" either in the game or in real life.  I think there are and should be differences in potential for young players raised exclusively in one country versus another country, but I would not base those differences on "genetics".  When thinking about the global nature of the game some people, me included, think the generated PA rating should be the same for all countries with the differences in facilities, training staffs, etc. accounting for the different rates at which players will develop.  This doesn't mean that within one country all players necessarily should have the same PA, but at the least each country should have a similar distribution of PA.  When thinking about the game in the global sense the generated PA ratings for the different countries is an abstraction that attempts to capture the many country specific limitations that may well limit the growth of a young play in that country, and I can almost accept the way it has been implemented, but not quite.  In any case, discussing potential changes to PA in the game must, in my opinion, take into account the global nature of the game.

It's easy to defend PA range differences between countries. Germany produces consistently world class footballers for its national team. The United States and Jamaica does not. Ergo anybody attempting to create a realistic simulation of the football world is going to assume that one is significantly more likely to find potentially world class players in Germany than Jamaica, and somewhat more likely to find them in Germany than Mexico. Anything which does not is wilfully ignoring the global nature of the game.

PA is not a "genetics" attribute, it's a Potential Ability attribute. The clue is in the name. Though FWIW it's pretty obvious that outstanding genetic specimens growing up in Germany are likely to choose football as their main sport and play it intensively from the age of four up to winning a professional contract, and those growing up in the United States and Jamaica are relatively unlikely to do so. 

[Longhorn]

Mexico, with a population of about 130 million, has a PA rating of 120, while Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, has a rating of 122.  The US, for that matter, has a "registered" population of 330 million, and an unregistered population that is probably at at least as big as the population of Netherlands, yet the US has a PA rating of 110 and there are far more kids playing than in Netherlands.  China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has a PA rating of 60 and the sheer weight of numbers would argue that they have a lot of kids playing the game compared to many smaller countries with higher PA ratings.  FM models the newgen ratings of various countries on many factors, but the distribution of natural talent certainly is not the dominating factor.

[enigmatic]

2 hours ago, Longhorn said:

Mexico, with a population of about 130 million, has a PA rating of 120, while Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, has a rating of 122.  The US, for that matter, has a "registered" population of 330 million, and an unregistered population that is probably at at least as big as the population of Netherlands, yet the US has a PA rating of 110 and there are far more kids playing than in Netherlands.  China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has a PA rating of 60 and the sheer weight of numbers would argue that they have a lot of kids playing the game compared to many smaller countries with higher PA ratings.  FM models the newgen ratings of various countries on many factors, but the distribution of natural talent certainly is not the dominating factor.

Mexico with its population base of 130 million produces roughly similar numbers of top level footballers to the Netherlands' 18 million. 

The Netherlands consistently produces world class footballers. The United States and China have never produced a world class male footballer between them. 

Sorry, but your country isn't going to stop being realistically represented as very average at producing footballers because you whinge about it being "racist." 

(Also, you'd be surprised just how little influence cranking that "youth rating" value up to 200 has...)

[Longhorn]

28 minutes ago, enigmatic said:

Mexico with its population base of 130 million produces roughly similar numbers of top level footballers to the Netherlands' 18 million. 

The Netherlands consistently produces world class footballers. The United States and China have never produced a world class male footballer between them. 

Sorry, but your country isn't going to stop being realistically represented as very average at producing footballers because you whinge about it being "racist." 

(Also, you'd be surprised just how little influence cranking that "youth rating" value up to 200 has...)

Enigmatic, you continue to be studiously obstreperous, missing the point and making allegations about others.  What is your agenda?  Was it not you that  said "Though FWIW it's pretty obvious that outstanding genetic specimens growing up in Germany are likely to choose football as their main sport and play it intensively from the age of four up to winning a professional contract, and those growing up in the United States and Jamaica are relatively unlikely to do so"?  To put it euphemistically you continue to argue based on "politically incorrect" and uninformed opinions, apparently merely for the sake of arguing. 

0

 

[Maaka]

3 hours ago, Longhorn said:

Mexico, with a population of about 130 million, has a PA rating of 120, while Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, has a rating of 122.  The US, for that matter, has a "registered" population of 330 million, and an unregistered population that is probably at at least as big as the population of Netherlands, yet the US has a PA rating of 110 and there are far more kids playing than in Netherlands.  China, with a population of 1.4 billion, has a PA rating of 60 and the sheer weight of numbers would argue that they have a lot of kids playing the game compared to many smaller countries with higher PA ratings.  FM models the newgen ratings of various countries on many factors, but the distribution of natural talent certainly is not the dominating factor.

I think we need do differ between two separate issues here. The current "average PA" for any country mostly reflects what the world looks like right now. And that's the way it should be reflected in FM now.

However, should a country over a longer period of time consistenly perform at a higher level, both the clubs (mainly in continental/intercontinental competitions) and the national team, and (again, over time) one (then two, maybe three, four and so on) players of a higher calibre who excels in major leagues, then that country should (I can't stress this enough) OVER TIME see an increase of the "average PA" of newgens. But it could, and should, take at least more than a decade to make the first small steps of progress, and several decades before it should be any increase that can be considered somewhat close to "major".