[Suggestion] Player development rework idea

[Murdre Dukc]

The current development system, if I understand it correctly, goes generally like this:

1. A player is spawned with a Current Ability, Potential Ability, and a bunch of mental attributes that affect their development speed
2. At set intervals the change to the Current Ability is calculated. It depends on their playing time, league level, presumably happiness, training, training quality, mental attributes and age.
3. Points are added to Current Ability and distributed proportionally in some form across their specific attributes, presumably depending on their natural position, or just starting distribution of attributes.
4. Current Ability can never exceed Potential Ability.

I don't like two things about this:

1. The distribution of attributes is pretty much determined at youth intake, ensuring roughly the same mental and technical profile throughout the player's career, unless he starts at very low CA and has enough PA space to steer away.
2. CA is capped by PA, which leads to some players peaking very early despite having very strong personalities.

What I think would be a better direction:

1. Remove PA. Potentially introduce a new "Talent" hidden attribute that would affect development speed similarly to Determination, Professionalism and Ambition currently.
2. To balance that out, make player development less predictable, more malleable, and less limited by age. Right now I can open Genie Scout, look at a player with a decent personality and say "yep, you're going to gain 10 CA a year and you have to peak by 25, therefore you'll never reach your potential". This is just completely unrealistic and also leads to players hoarding wonderkinds and creating loan farms, since the most important thing is playing time. Some ideas here:
   1. Raise the "peak" age for technical and mental attribute progression. There are lots of examples of players changing their game after 25. In FM they can only get better by 1-5% (but significantly worse after a bad injury, with no chance at coming back). 25 might be the physical peak (there are still exceptions - see Diego Forlan) but if professionals in other fields develop way past 30, why can't footballers drastically improve their positioning sense after 25? It's just nonsense.
   2. Make individual training more impactful. Getting rid of the PA cap would help. If I have a guy doing extra finishing training for a year, I expect him to get better at it by more than 5% (perhaps affected by personality - Cristiano Ronaldo doing extra free-kick training was definitely more effective at it than Ravel Morrison doing hypothetical extra free-kick training). That's just how training works.
   3. Make player interaction affect their personality, not just happiness. Praising players after good performances and criticising them after bad ones should give their consistency a boost. Ignoring it should let it remain low. Similarly, harsh disciplinary action should affect their professionalism. This would change pretty much a third of the game from pointlessly risky to engaging and important. Currently, speaking to players is like talking to the police in the US - at best you come out even, at worst you get punished. With it affecting young players' personalities, it would be possibly very rewarding.
   4. Give better descriptions of players' personalities in their profiles to facilitate the above. How am I supposed to make decisions based on "Fairly sporting"? How do I know who to put in which mentoring group? Should I listen to my assistant (definitely not)? Use some informative human words here.
   5. Make important events affect players' personality, same as injuries temporarily limit bravery. Severely injuring another player could limit the offender's dirtiness (or not). Winning 3 CL finals in a row shouldn't keep the "big games" attribute at 7. No, I don't care if it goes from 7 to 9, this guy is a bloody world-beater now, make it 15. This sometimes happens in the current game - I've seen one or two instances of an "off-field event" changing someone's determination. I've seen it once or twice in three years. That's bad. You might not read about it in the sports press every week, but those things do happen all the time (and more often than people moaning about new contracts, which seems to be the primary form of human interaction in the game).
   6. Make player friendships with each other and the manager affect their personality.
   7. Make the base rate of personality improvement faster if they're around more experienced/stable players. It's really just how growing up works, I'm sure I have become more professional and consistent at my job than just by 4% since I was 15.
   8. Etc, etc...

I think these changes would improve the game a ton. Now player development is basically making sure they've got a good club to be loaned to for 4 years with enough play time, and bringing them back when they are guaranteed to peak even if they stay on the bench at my club. It's a waiting game, after 20 seasons I kinda want an instant result button because the journey is less interesting than the destination, and the destination is known. I think the systems to make the above happen are already in the game, they're just not pronounced enough. Would be nice to see some improvement here instead of "oh hey boss, I was thinking about making more money but the fact that you clicked on this button makes me feel like I don't want more money anymore, thanks fellow human"

Edited April 11, 2020 by Murdre Dukc

[sammayel666]

13 hours ago, Murdre Dukc said:

...

1. Remove PA. Potentially introduce a new "talent" hidden attribute.

...

Isn't this just PA by another name?

[Murdre Dukc]

10 hours ago, sammayel666 said:

Isn't this just PA by another name?

Sorry, I haven't explained that well enough, edited the original post now.

And sure, there has to be some mathematical ceiling to how good a player can be, but now it's separate from their personality and IMO unrealistic. You have youngsters with perfect personalities capping off at 140 at the age of 21 (Trent Alexander-Arnold in earlier versions, for example) because RNG says so, nothing you can do about it. Similarly you will have people with 190 PA capping off at 110 and there is nothing you can do about that either, because you can't coach their personality. On the other hand youngsters with high PA and good personalities are almost guaranteed to reach that ceiling and the only thing that can stop them is a complete lack of play time.

The whole point of what I'm proposing is to make player development less predetermined and more something that you can/should put effort into.

Edited March 31, 2020 by Murdre Dukc

[M1_Vital]

I hope SI look at this...

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.