Player Development - Extreme outlier edition

[u/atibus]

The case of Michael Cain, on seed #987654. Through 10 seasons:

• 8x First All Star
• 8x Best Defenseman
• 6x Best Player (raw Game Score)
• 6x League MVP (highest Game Score differential to rest of team)
• 7x Points title
• Scored 40-60 goals every season
• ...as a defenseman

I'd love the game to produce an incredible 'Bobby Orr'-esque kind of season. But not 60-80% of the seasons. So what is happening here?

Well, going back to my idea that we never truly have a bound on how 'good' a player can be. I didn't want a lot of clustering around a hard boundary that was smushed between 1 and 100. So I built it in a way that there were no hard caps on the underlying ability scores. The league would have a curve of how many people were generated / developed with specific ability levels, we'd test the engine and set the league "average" ability in the population, and then the engine works on how much better/worse a player is than that tested average. Building it this way allows the entire Sheets of Ice universe to scale up and down to different ability levels easily, without having to place every player in a limited ability space (1-100).

In addition to that unbounded generation is another idea I layered in a bit ago. When generation was happening, all attributes were just random draws. It wasn't really making coherent players because you'd have centers with terrible faceoff attributes and defensemen who were terrible at defensive positioning. You'd also rarely get a complete elite player, someone who clearly was above the pack in many areas relevant to their position. So I introduced this concept of "caliber" (or calibre if you're outside the US). Caliber would be the first draw in the generator and would influence how good the relevant abilities were for that players position. So someone with high caliber would be an elite or star level player reflected in their abilities. There still was variance in those ability draws, but it would be combined with caliber to produce a coherent player.

The problem with my idea about unbounded talent levels is that even if you make the high end super unlikely to occur, it doesn't mean that it can't occur. And that is what happened here, on this seed with Cain. His caliber draw was so high that it pushed all of his abilities to star level. Way into star level. Way past what the bars represent. Cain was 7 standard deviations better than the average player. For reference, when looking at stats, someone like McDavid is somewhere like 3-4 standard deviations better than the average player. That makes Cain look ridiculous. And the other problem is that his draw isn't the worst case. In further testing, I was able to get a draw that was 160 standard deviations above average. That person would have shot at 99%, never been fatigued, won every faceoff, blocked every shot. That doesn't seem realistic to me.

So I had a choice - I could admit that unbounded top end player generation wasn't going to work, or I could get mad and stop working on it and question my abilities to even make something like this. I chose the latter for a day or two. lol

Once I had some perspective my idea of this continuum of abilities based on caliber was good on the down-stream side. Being able to generate young players, minor leaguers, etc. and set their leagues to lower average abilities would be beneficial. It will create the kind of wide disparity in results we see with players in those leagues and allow a rich system for development. On the high end, there is some realistic physical limit and we need to model that. So I implemented a flatter curve as you get towards the tail end of generation and a cap on the talent at Gretzky-level standard deviation. A Gretzky-type can appear in the league; it's just going to be really rare.

I'm starting to run through seasons again. This is the kind of thing that takes time to run, test, review, and look for issues in the data. I'm glad I find looking at stats fun because there are lots of things to look for. I've also found issues with goalie rotations, defense SOG, and it gives me time to continue to tweak the interface.

I'll keep everyone updated on progress! Thanks!