Warrior General Games

As a new-ish player compared to some others I can offer my perspective. I started in Season 9 as an agent and this year got my own Pee Wee Team so I can provide a perspective of a new-ish player. I won't talk about all the things other people have already mentioned, as they have already posted great solutions, but here's my perspective on two topics. And I'm sure this fits under the TLDR category as well but hopefully someone else could summarize my random throughts.

Team #s and Available Players
Just in my copper league of 32 teams, 11 are CPU and there are 2-3 that have even rosters worse then cpu because owners never filled them. So obviously, there is an issue with the number of teams, but I'm going to look at this instead from the agent perspective. If I didn't already have a personal invite from a pee wee owner I knew from another website, I would have probably never known about Pee Wee or the special restrictions on this league. My Players were greeted with three contract offers from D-League teams upon creation, and I would have thought that was the way to go at first. Most new players will follow an experience of, sign up, create players, assign skill points, accept contract offer, and then explore the forums and other things.

Solution
Modify the new player experience with a bit more guided assistance. From New Player Creation, to rolling, to assigning first 15 SPs, to another page that includes description of leagues, the marketplace, recruitment forums, and a link to their contract offers page with the offers from the D-League teams. This would help new agents better understand the options available to them for their new players and hopefully increase the number of agents aware of pee wee when they first join the site.

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Passing
Obviously a pain in the backside in Pee Wee. 25-35% completion rates are horrible and as stated by others would be more appropriate in the 45-50% range. From what I see the biggest issue is "incomplete - bad throw" I'm fine with the level of drops and deflections, but the bad throws are where I think most issues arise. As an anecdotal reference, I seem to remember a game when our QB threw 30 times, about 18 were either completions, drops or deflections, leaving 12 as bad throws. This isn't a result from WR out running the QB's distance, but just bad way off target throws.

Solution
This would fall under the code change so probably never happen category, but I would rather see bad throws be less of a factor on short passes and the precent chance drasticaly decreased. To compensate, for the desire to have hurries impact throwing, I would rather see lineman have an increased chance to deflect passes at the line or in rushing, based on their stats or the QBs ability to avoid the deflection via vision and throwing ability with a bit of confidence and for "bad throws" to me more connected to the QB not having enough strength to get the ball to the WR based on distance. Then here in pee wee we could focus more on short routes, or we could have a high strength QB whom would have more success at longer passes then others.

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Originally posted by Robbnva
if you look around the leagues right now you will se a ton of teams that are either CPU or teams that have a roster full of CPUs


teams just can't recruit because there are more people willing to buy teams and there is not enough willing to create the players.

There are 25 leagues, each league has 32 teams (16 per conference) now if each team has a minimum of 40 man roster, we are talking about 32,000 pee wee players

now if you assume most teams want to get the max 55 man roster, we are talking about 44K players

and the demand to create that many players just isn't there.

I think we keep the Gold League, keep the 8 Silver league since we need feeders into Gold, and than have 7 copper to make it an even 16 leagues or a little over 20K players.


That sounds reasonable to me.

Originally posted by Kaerey
Modify the new player experience with a bit more guided assistance. From New Player Creation, to rolling, to assigning first 15 SPs, to another page that includes description of leagues, the marketplace, recruitment forums, and a link to their contract offers page with the offers from the D-League teams. This would help new agents better understand the options available to them for their new players and hopefully increase the number of agents aware of pee wee when they first join the site.

I agree with this one too. Most new players are unaware there is an option for PeeWee Leagues. Perhaps, in addition to the D-League offers, there could be a place where new players could "try out" for a PeeWee League team. Basically, a list of teams whose rosters are full of CPU players. Their interest would generate a PM to the owner of the team, and they could get built from there.

I sent a few random PMs to team owners that have teams but no human players, I just want to see if they will respond with why they have chosen to do this. Just trying to see if any of their reasons is something related to pee wee issues being discussed in this thread

Passing Correction,

Fixing passing is a very hard thing to do and cannot be done solely with pee-wee in mind, if we start opperating under separate sim rules from the rest of GLB we will cut off our flow of new players and pee-wee will die.

The root of the problem is that WRs have always had a steeper learning curve than the other positions and QBs just got the same treatment in this seasons sim.

The Idea of a special piece of EQ has some intelligence behind it, but would be cumbersome and wierd, and no one would go for it outside of pee-wee.


I propose this:

All WRs (all not just pw) start out with a fixed bonus to catch ball %, all QBs start with a fixed % bonus to pass quality and accuracy. Every time you level up, that bonus goes down until it is gone completely when you hit level 21. This will help all the lower levels have some form of passing game while they are getting their attributes up and by the time they hit 21 they can stand on their own two feet. The gradual nature or the dropoff would prevent any shocking declines in performance.

Example:

It would work like +% AEQ or VA.

WR starts with +30% catch ball chance, they lose 1.5% every level. The % would be set at something where a WR will still drop 30-40% of the balls, but not 60-70%. (I don't know what the exact numbers are/should be)

The QBs would have the same effect on their accuracy/throw quality. Set it at a number where he can be accurate 60-70% of the time, if 1/3 of them get dropped you have a nice realistic 40%ish completion that OCs can work with and DCs can enjoy trying to stop.


This Idea would help all lower level teams complete passes without creating any problems upstairs.


***Please discuss this Idea here:***

http://goallineblitz.com/game/forum_thread.pl?thread_id=3425038

***Rather than clogging robbs thread.***

I applaud everybodys ideas and trying to change things. good job.

Originally posted by ericb45696
I applaud everybodys ideas and trying to change things. good job.





Thanks, pass the word to any pee wee owner

i agree with thunder's ideas

so is the General consensus basically what Thunder said? if so we can wrap this up sooner

Overall I enjoy the Pee Wee ownership experience. My biggest frustration is with recruiting, to the point where the team is taking Season 13 "off" (i.e., I'm creating players for the team but we're just going to put it in automatic mode and we're not recruiting any others). Recruiting for the Pee Wee team takes time away from recruiting and gameplanning for our higher level teams, which is where we want to focus our efforts. It's also more frustrating than the higher level teams, because there are fewer players available per team than any other division that I've come across.

Anything that could be done to help that. Obviously that can be done on two fronts, the first being reducing the number of teams (1-8-8 would be a start). That may mean some agents who want teams may not get them the first year they request them - I think that's an okay thing.

The other front is marketing Pee Wee to agents better. A lot of even experienced agents don't know much about Pee Wee, you can tell by the questions you get in forums from agents that have players at Level 20+. New players should also be notified, as indicated in another post in this thread, about the Pee Wee option for their players.

However, the other issue that comes up on that front is that most new players don't join during off-season (just based on statistics, there's 14-15 off-days and 40 on-days). Most teams are not going to recruit mid-season for Pee Wee, as they'd be behind the rest of their players - if we could alleviate that somehow I think it would make sense. The only idea I have here is some type of pre-season cap, mid-season cap, and post-season cap (i.e., you can only have a maximum of 40 players before the season starts, then that increases to 55 after game 8).

Comments on other notions:

* Some kind of passing bonus for Pee Wee (I kinda prefer the +20 AEQ / +10 AEQ option best so far) is definitely required. I don't think it needs to be a lot, but just to get passing percentages in the 40% range at the start of the season, climbing to 50%-55% by the end of the season, would be acceptable.

* I'm on the fence about Day 31 players. As an owner of a Silver team (second year overall), I wouldn't have a problem going either way. If I can sign Day 31 players, I will - and those will usually be the best players (partly because they're created on Day 31, partly because it's typically the experienced agents that build those players). If I can't, then I can't. It would provide me as an owner some FP benefit, as I could retire players after Day 40 and use those FP to create players, instead of creating players on Day 31 with new FP and then retiring players after Day 40.

Another idea for Pee Wee passing is just to give QBs a multiplier to the attributes that factor into pass quality then when a pee wee roster is snap shot in the hour before game time the code could just apply the multiplier then in a subroutine and then everything else is treated exactly the same. The trick would be knowing what attributes and what multiplier to apply to get to the approproate completion percentage by seasons end. This seems pretty straight forward.

There are too many leagues, I think a 55 man roster is fine if the number of leagues were cut down, the other issue is finding players who will boost so the day 40 would help with this as it makes it possible to keep rotating your flex while losing some as a result of boosting and CE but I don't know that day 40 is a silver bullet. Understanding that GLB is a business and has to make money to survive their needs to be some sort of incentive to encourage agents to create Pee Wees to begin with. Maybe in the form of accelerated XP then more agents would come through pee wees and keep players to play after pee wee? I don't know what the full answer is but reducing number of leagues would be a good start.

I still don't understand what is the big deal on the issue of day 31 players. please explain the negatives to me . be nice . im asking an honest question.

Make peewee players that can only last until day 40 then they get auto retired. (70% flex return as normal)
You can only make new ones after day 40 and they only cost 100 flex to create regardless of position. This should solve the not enough players problem.

Now the tricky part:
No boosting.
Each player makes 100xp per day thru the entire regular season and playoffs.
Games give 500xp each regardless of play time so that by the end of post-season everyone should be around level 12.
You get two seperate sets of gear that start at +1 to a stat at level 1 like normal, but you can build with whatever stats you want, and you can boost them every 4 levels instead of 8 at no charge.

No need for cash or finance management either since they get auto-retired at the end of the season. training still costs points as normal, but not cash since peewee players wouldn't be making any.

Originally posted by gman869108
I still don't understand what is the big deal on the issue of day 31 players. please explain the negatives to me . be nice . im asking an honest question.

well planned teams will be full day 31 players, in essence making them level 2s by the 1st game. for players being amde in the offseason to fill peewee needs, this puts them pretty far behind the planned players. the spirit of the peewees is that we would all start the same and let tactics play a bigger part.

another problem for teams not finding enough human players - its week 8 and CPUs that started the season at level 1 are STILL level 1. hard enough when you cant find enough humans but there's not even an valid alternative